Why do we use the same skills everywhere?
Law of the Instrument
, explained.What is the Law of the Instrument?
According to the law of the instrument, when we acquire a new skill, we tend to see opportunities to use it everywhere. This bias is also known as “the law of the hammer”, “the golden hammer”, or “Maslow’s hammer”, in reference to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous quote: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”1.
Where this bias occurs
Say you’re a university student majoring in Biology and most of the evaluations in your core classes are multiple-choice exams. Throughout your studies, you’ve adapted to this form of assessment and have learned how to effectively study for and take multiple-choice tests. Suppose you then wind up taking a statistics class as an elective, where the examinations consist of a series of math questions. Instead of selecting a multiple-choice option, you must perform calculations to reach an answer. You know how to study for multiple-choice examinations and have always performed well on those sorts of tests, so you decide to study for your statistics midterm the same way. You read your textbook, memorizing key concepts, and recopy your class notes over and over until you can recite them from memory. Despite the hard work you put into preparing for the test, when the day of the statistics exam rolls around, you do poorly. Your tried and true method for studying for multiple-choice biology exams proved unsuccessful when studying for statistics. Perhaps doing practice problems would have been a more effective strategy. Yet, because you were confident in your strategy for studying for multiple-choice tests, you decided to try and call upon that skill in a different context - a perfect example of the law of the instrument.
