Known as “law of the instrument” or “law of the hammer,” this cognitive bias is perhaps most familiar as a quip, one usually attributed to Abraham Maslow (yes, he of the hierarchy of needs):
If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.
The law of the instrument states simply that it’s easy to be over-reliant on a familiar or available tool, rather than spending the time or effort to locate a tool that might be more appropriate or useful.
It’s impossible to overstate how frequently this bias comes up for me—often with an eye-rolling, literal way, such as trying to use a box cutter as a screwdriver.
Those instances are easy to track, of course, literal as they are. It’s the conceptual tools that are harder to track, and often more frustrating:
- Meetings. It’s a default for me and many colleagues. We need to share information that could very well be an email? Eh, let’s schedule a meeting!
- Data tracking. I love tracking data and information—even (especially!) useless information! It’s such a passion of mine that I will default to tracking data even when it has little to no applicability to the problem at hand.
- Analogies. I also love a good analogy—but I’m prone to overuse them, especially when making an argument. In discussion, analogies can illuminate overlooked elements of a problem…but they can also direct our attention to aspects of a problem that don’t matter.
The temptation to use our “hammers” is hard to resist. And that’s not just because we love our hammers—it’s often because we don’t know there are other tools out there.
Taylor Coe 