Baking suspected causes into a concept blocks later hypothesis testing.

Evidence

Think hard before hardwiring hypotheses into concepts. Often hardwiring makes it difficult to test hypotheses down the road and often will raise problems when gathering data. … Avoid in particular hypotheses that come into play when using the concept on the dependent variable side of the equation. Potential causes of the phenomenon should almost always be left out of the concept itself. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 460

Categorization

• APHORISMS: A durable methodological rule of thumb: keep causes out of definitions or you cannot test them later.
• XREF: Echoes the rational-choice and institutional-design literature on keeping definitions independent of explanatory variables (e.g., Milgrom’s reputation regimes, where institutions are defined without assuming the behavior they explain).