The Jangle Fallacy: Same Idea, Different Name
Education research is littered with different names for the same underlying ideas. This semantic confusion undermines both scientific progress and practical application.
In 1927, a psychologist named Truman Lee Kelley identified a curious problem that continues to plague educational research nearly a century later. He called it the "jangle fallacy": the tendency to assume that two things are fundamentally different simply because they have different names. It's the conceptual cousin of the "jingle fallacy," where we mistakenly believe two things are identical because they share the same label.
While the jingle fallacy gets more attention (perhaps because it's easier to spot when someone conflates "creativity" in art class with "creativity" in mathematical problem-solving), the jangle fallacy is arguably more insidious. It creates artificial divisions in our understanding, fragmenting what should be cohesive knowledge into competing silos.
‘Equally contaminating to clear thinking is the use of two separate words or expressions covering in fact the same basic situation, but sounding different, as though they were in truth different. The doing of this latter the writer will call the “jangle” fallacy. “Achievement” and “intelligence” sound as though they were different; they have different “jangles,” and thus we treat them as though they were different in truth.’
– Truman Lee Kelley (1927, pp. 63-64)1
It’s fascinating to read this book in 2025 as it marks the start of education’s obsession with standardised testing but Kelley is admirably prophetic and forward thinking for the time in the sense that he advocates testing as a means of informing judgement, not absolute judgement itself.
Grit, Conscientiousness, and Other Déjà Vu
A good example of the jangle fallacy from educational psychology is the relationship between conscientiousness and grit. When Angela Duckworth introduced "grit" as the combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals, it was heralded as a breakthrough discovery that could revolutionise education. Yet decades of personality research had already established conscientiousness (one of the "Big Five" personality traits) as encompassing remarkably similar qualities: self-discipline, persistence, goal-directed behaviour, and the ability to delay gratification.
There’s a decent body of evidence2 which has since revealed substantial correlations between grit and conscientiousness, leading many to question whether they represent genuinely distinct constructs or simply different labels for the same underlying trait. The key difference appears to be temporal focus: grit emphasizes very long-term persistence, while conscientiousness includes both short and long-term self-regulation. But this distinction may be more semantic than substantive. Both predict academic achievement, career success, and life outcomes through nearly identical mechanisms.
Consider also the concept of "effort". A notion that appears across virtually every learning theory but means subtly different things in each context. In Cognitive Load Theory, effort refers to the mental resources required to process information. In self-regulated learning theory, it's about the deliberate application of strategies and persistence. In motivation research, it's connected to goal orientation and mindset.
I came across the term from Katharina Scheiter, where in her commentary on cognitive load research, she suggests we may indeed be falling into the jangle fallacy trap. The "effort" discussed in cognitive load theory and the "effort" explored in self-regulated learning might be describing overlapping phenomena from different theoretical vantage points, like blind scholars examining different parts of the same elephant.
The Seductive Appeal of Novelty
So what is behind the jangle fallacy and why is it so prevalent in the social sciences? Part of the answer lies in the academic incentive structure. There's little career advancement in saying, "Actually, what we're studying is quite similar to what those researchers over there have been investigating for years." There's considerable reward in claiming to have discovered something genuinely novel.
This creates what a kind of terminological inflation: the tendency to mint new vocabulary to distinguish one's work from existing research, even when the underlying phenomena may be substantially similar. The result is a proliferation of constructs that may be more linguistic than substantive.
The jangle fallacy also thrives in the gaps between disciplines. Educational psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and instructional design each have their own conceptual frameworks and preferred terminology. When researchers from different fields study similar phenomena, they naturally express their findings in their discipline's native language, creating an illusion of studying different things entirely.
The Practical Consequences
The jangle fallacy isn't merely an academic curiosity, it has real consequences for educational practice. When research appears fragmented and contradictory due to terminological confusion, it becomes easier for practitioners to dismiss scientific findings altogether. Why grapple with the complexities of cognitive load theory when you're already familiar with "mental effort" approaches, particularly when they seem to be saying different things?
This fragmentation also impedes the development of coherent, evidence-based practice. Instead of building cumulative knowledge around core phenomena, we end up with competing frameworks that may be describing similar underlying realities. Teachers receive mixed messages about what works, not because the evidence is unclear, but because different research communities have wrapped similar insights in different conceptual packaging.
The phenomenon is particularly problematic in educational technology, where rapid innovation creates pressure to distinguish new approaches from existing ones. "Personalized learning," "adaptive instruction," "individualized education," and "differentiated teaching" may represent genuine innovations, or they may be terminological variations on enduring educational challenges. The jangle fallacy makes it difficult to tell the difference.
Beyond the Fallacy
Recognizing the jangle fallacy doesn't mean all educational constructs are secretly the same thing. Some terminological distinctions reflect genuine differences in phenomena, mechanisms, or applications. The challenge is developing the conceptual sophistication to distinguish meaningful differences from terminological confusion.
This requires a certain terminological skepticism; a healthy wariness of new constructs that don't clearly distinguish themselves from existing ones. When researchers propose new frameworks, we should ask: What specific phenomena does this explain that existing theories cannot? What unique predictions does it make? What distinctive interventions does it suggest?
It also requires greater intellectual humility within research communities. Instead of rushing to establish terminological territory, researchers might benefit from first exploring whether their phenomena of interest connect to existing knowledge. This doesn't diminish the value of their work, in fact it actually enhances it by building on accumulated understanding rather than starting from scratch."
The Deeper Issue in Education Research
The jangle fallacy ultimately reflects a deeper challenge in educational research: our field's struggle to build cumulative knowledge. Unlike physics or chemistry, where new discoveries typically build clearly on previous work, education research often feels like a series of independent explorations, each creating its own conceptual world.
This isn't necessarily a failure of the field. Education is enormously complex, involving cognitive, social, cultural, and institutional factors that resist simple unification. But I do think it means we need to be more intentional about connecting our work to existing knowledge, even when that knowledge comes wrapped in different terminology.
The price of ignoring the jangle fallacy is continued fragmentation of understanding at exactly the moment when education needs more coherent, evidence-based approaches. The reward for overcoming it is the possibility of building the kind of cumulative knowledge that can genuinely transform how we teach and learn.
In the end, the map is not the territory. The words we use to describe educational phenomena are tools for thinking, not the phenomena themselves. When we mistake terminological differences for substantive ones, we lose sight of the underlying reality we're trying to understand and improve.
Kelley, T. L. (1927). Interpretation of educational measurements. World Book Company.
Schmidt, F. T. C., Nagy, G., Fleckenstein, J., Möller, J., & Retelsdorf, J. (2018).
’Same same, but different? Relations between facets of conscientiousness and grit’.
European Journal of Personality, 32(6), 705–720.
Credé M, Tynan MC, Harms PD. ‘Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature’. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2017 Sep;113(3):492-511.
Suzuki, T., & Sun, J. (2021). Grit and personality traits: A meta‑analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 89,104036.
"Instead of building cumulative knowledge around core phenomena, we end up with competing frameworks that may be describing similar underlying realities. Teachers receive mixed messages about what works, not because the evidence is unclear, but because different research communities have wrapped similar insights in different conceptual packaging."
This quote is too long for a T-shirt, but it deserves both airing and wearing--anything to get the message out. In my field of reading it's exemplified by the confusion many have between Mark Seidenberg's triangle model and Ehri's theory of orthographic mapping, both of which reveal the importance of uniting phonology, orthography, and semantics in learning to read. Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist, bases his theory on computational simulations, and Ehri, an educational psychologist, bases hers on empirical studies in the classroom. I communicated with one professor who was familiar with Seidenberg's TM but not Ehri's OM--and yet, it's the latter that is most familiar to teachers. The challenge, as you say, "is developing the conceptual sophistication to distinguish meaningful differences from terminological confusion."
Thanks for bringing this important issue to our attention!
Here is the original extract from Kelley:
"The glibness with which we differentiate between achievement and intelligence is explained in part by the fact that our language is at fault. To use an illustration given by Thorndike (1904, page 14), the expression "college student," found so frequently in general discussions, covers a multitude of classes: male and female; part time, full time; extension students and those in residence; native, foreign; lower class-[page break] men, upper classmen, graduates ; etc. In each connection the expression "college student " sounds the same, and thus we come to treat it as a single concept. Dr. Thorndike quotes Professor Aikins as describing this as the "jingle" fallacy because there is merely a verbal resemblance and no sufficient underlying factual similarity between the classes.
"Equally contaminating to clear thinking is the use of two separate words or expressions covering in fact the same basic situation, but sounding different, as though they were in truth different. The doing of this latter the writer will call the "jangle" fallacy. "Achievement" and “intelligence" sound as though they were different; they have different "jangles," and thus we treat them as though they were different in truth. There is a modicum of difference between them, and in so far as this only is the issue, it is proper to distinguish them, just as we may use two nearly related words to draw a fine distinction; thus, " He is upright but not honorable" or " He is fearful but not cowardly," etc. Literary ingenuity creates for our entertainment the man who is fearful but not a coward. It may be that such men exist in blood and bone, but certainly by no known means can the rank and file be classified separately upon these two traits. Nor can they upon the of achievement and intelligence. We can mentally conceive of individuals differing in these two traits, and we can occasionally actually find such by using the best of our instruments of mental measurement, but to classify all the members of a single school grade upon the basis of their difference in these two traits is a sheer absurdity. The deviation of achievement- age-minus-mental-age from zero, or of achievement-age- divided-by-mental-age from 1.00, are such measures of difference, and neither is ordinarily to be trusted." (pp. 63-64)
And because I tend to go down the rabbit hole on things like this, I discovered that "Professor Aikins" is actually Herbert Austin Aikins.