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Developing multiple hypotheses in behavioral ecology

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Abstract

Researchers in behavioral ecology are increasingly turning to research methods that allow the simultaneous evaluation of hypotheses. This approach has great potential to increase our scientific understanding, but researchers interested in the approach should be aware of its long and somewhat contentious history. Also, prior to implementing multiple hypothesis evaluation, researchers should be aware of the importance of clearly specifying a priori hypotheses. This is one of the more difficult aspects of research based on multiple hypothesis evaluation, and we outline and provide examples of three approaches for doing so. Finally, multiple hypothesis evaluation has some limitations important to behavioral ecologists; we discuss two practical issues behavioral ecologists are likely to face.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Laszlo Garamszegi for his encouragement in writing this manuscript, participants of the “ABCD” statistical symposium held at the 2008 meeting of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology for vigorous and insightful discussion, and three anonymous reviewers for critical and insightful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of Nevada, Reno, USA

    Ned A. Dochtermann & Stephen H. Jenkins

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  1. Ned A. Dochtermann
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  2. Stephen H. Jenkins
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ned A. Dochtermann.

Additional information

Communicated by L. Garamszegi

This contribution is part of the Special Issue “Model selection, multimodel inference and information-theoretic approaches in behavioural ecology” (see Garamszegi 2010).

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Dochtermann, N.A., Jenkins, S.H. Developing multiple hypotheses in behavioral ecology. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 65, 37–45 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-010-1039-4

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