Lazy thinking?

Now, I’m the last who should throw stones. I can be quite guilty of lazy thinking, particularly when there’re commercial decisions to be made. (Providers have done a fabulous job of making sure you can’t compare apples to apples, and when there’re so many such situations…) Yet, there’s one place where I struggle with the consequences. That’s in our professional field, and it seems like there’re too many opportunities to yield.

A trigger was a recent conversation where an individual was talking about generations. Grouping folks by when they’re born is problematic at best. For one, the boundaries used seem to vary by who’s doing the categorizing. Not a solid basis. Moreover, the research suggests that there really aren’t meaningful differences. What do exist are explainable by age differences (which isn’t the same thing, for one it’s a continuum, not discrete chunks). Really, it’s a mild form of age discrimination, differentiating people by when they’re born, not who they are or how they behave. (Also problematic is the notion that events affect certain segments of the population, but that’s a longer conversation).  It’s one of the myths in my book on same.

Other examples include learning styles, hemispheres, gender differences, and more. First, they’re categorizations on things that people can’t control. Second, they don’t get backing from data. I just read that medical science has been excluding women from research based upon an assumption about temperature variability that was exposed as being irrelevant!

Sure, it’s much easier if we can reliably group people into segments that mean we have a reliable basis to do different things. Marketers do this with psychographics, for instance. Demographics can also matter. The problem here is that we’re using unreliable metrics. First, there are assumptions that turn out to be flawed. They frequently use self-report, also problematic. Some also have a flawed theoretical foundation.

Yes, it’s hard to keep on top of all of this. Ideally, you’d have time to investigate them all. In practice, there are other things to do. We all need ways to simplify our lives. Plus, vendors are telling you that they, at least, are immune to the complaints (with self-interest at stake).  On the other hand, there are good sources of insight from reliable translators of research. There are also practices we can follow to make it manageable. More help is on the way (at the LDA we’re working on it; stay tuned).

While lazy thinking is understandable, it’s not acceptable, at least not in our professional field. While we may not be sued for malpractice, we certainly should be responsible. So let’s avoid taking the easy path, at least when it matters. In our professional capacity, it matters when we’re designing for our learners. Let’s do so on evidence, not assumptions.