I suggest that this is more like a talent for tightrope walking - spectacular but seldom practical, and extremely dangerous at all times. Especially with respect to the study of human behavior, long chains of reasoning seldom produce reliable knowledge. Every step in the reasoning depends upon empirical evidence. Given that all such evidence is at least a bit shaky, the unreliability quickly mounts up. One can then reach the most amazingly wrong conclusions, unchecked by common sense.
Deduction is a method of getting knowledge, just as gathering data is a method of getting knowledge.
As someone has said, many a beautiful theory has been slain by an ugly fact. But caution is needed here. For example, to explain the alternation of periods of economic prosperity and depression, W. Stanley Jevons, the famous British nineteenth-century economist, deduced that business cycles are caused by sunspots. Business cycles, he calculated, had a duration of 10.46 years, and sunspots had a cycle of 10.45 years. The logic was sound.