Exploratory Only: A Tool for Large-Scale Exploratory Analyses

This article presents Exploratory Only: an intuitive tool for conducting large-scale exploratory analyses easily and quickly. Available in three forms (as a web application, standalone program, and R Package) and launched as a point-and-click interface, Exploratory Only allows researchers to conduct all possible correlation, moderation, and mediation analyses among selected variables in their data set with minimal effort and time. Compared to a popular alternative, SPSS, Exploratory Only is shown to be orders of magnitude easier and faster at conducting exploratory analyses. The article demonstrates how to use Exploratory Only and discusses the caveat to using it. As long as researchers use Exploratory Only as intended—to discover novel hypotheses to investigate in follow-up studies, rather than to confirm nonexistent a priori hypotheses (i.e., p-hacking)—Exploratory Only can promote progress in behavioral science by encouraging more exploratory analyses and therefore more discoveries.