system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Do psychological “studies” always use inductive reasoning?

I’m just wondering. I’m reading “Thinking Fast and Slow,” and at the part where the author is describing the issues with sample size. But the underlying assumptions seem to circle around this faith in inductive reasoning.
gpt
Can you give an example?

Why "studies" in scare quotes?

There are lots of research methods.  As a general rule in psychology they usually don't take a *deductive* path to their conclusion, if that's what you mean to contrast with as inductive.  There are good reasons for that: regardless of what kind of current cognitive science or neuroscience you rely on, there is and will be for the foreseeable future a *big* gap between what can be tied to material causes, and what's observable at the level of behavior or inferred by long term introspection, subjective sensations or similar.  That also doesn't mean though that there is *no* coherent sense of what's valid, verifiable or experimentally grounded though.