  Under the framework of gravitational effective field theory, we propose a
theory agnostic strategy of searching for higher-spin particles with
gravitational waves from compact binary inspirals. Using this strategy, we
analyze gravitational wave signals from the binary black hole merger events
GW151226 and GW170608, as well as the binary neutron star merger event
GW170817. We find that the existence of higher-spin particles with mass ranged
from $10^{-12} {\rm eV}$ to $10^{-11} {\rm eV}$ is strongly disfavored by these
events unless the particles precisely combine within a supersymmetric
supermultiplet. We argue that the gravitational effective field theory also
provides a framework to search for signals beyond GR from other GW
observations, such as extreme-mass-ratio-inspirals.
