Psychologists have introduced thousands of new constructs and measures over the past few decades in their quest to understand human behavior.

Check that, it seems to have nothing to do with understanding human behavior, which is, in theory, their job.   Instead, it appears to be the confluence of publisher bias for novelty and everybody wanting their own toothbrush when the communal “toothbrush” (an existing construct and measure) works just fine.

This image is not from a modern art museum nor AI manipulated, it’s from a study published in Nature Human Behaviour.  Each tile shows one measure.  The larger the tile the more frequently its been used.

The vast majority of these are seldom reused and therefore, just trees falling in the woods, making no noise.  Instead of building upon each other they add layers of muddy complexity.   Isolated intellectual endeavors in hubris rather than building blocks toward cumulative knowledge.

This creates a landscape where the potential for meaningful progress is diluted by the lack of coherence.  Look at our own domain, fundraising

The goal of any field is to navigate the tension of advancing itself with “new” while standardizing around agreed things that matter and how to measure them.

What you don’t want is people making up new labels for the same thing (Jangle fallacy) or calling it the same thing but measuring something different (Jingle fallacy).

A familiar Jangle example is the Grit term, made very popular by a ‘star’ academic.  The problem?  Grit is almost entirely a re-labeling of the Big Five Personality trait, Conscientiousness.  Nothing about Grit was new or helpful unless your goal is speaker fees and book sales.

Fundraising suffers from much Jingle and Jangle and people wanting their own toothbrush.  It’s a waste of time, money and a barrier to advancing the field.  Here’s a few examples of terms that fit in both fallacy buckets.

Jingle Fallacies (same term, different things being measured)

• Loyalty.  Is this measured with a set of behaviors or attitudinal measures or a bastardized stew of both?
• Stewardship.  I’ve yet to come across a standardized definition, much less measures for this.
• Engagement.  My least favorite, favorite.  There as as many ways to measure this as there are days in the year and most have no predictive value.

Jangle Fallacies (different terms measuring same thing)

•  Is it loyalty or merely repeat giving?  Is Net Promoter Score (NPS) or our measure, Relationship strength, the same?  No, NPS has no predictive value, ours does.  This is jingle and jangle.  Only one is worthwhile.
• Is it stewardship or any interaction with the donor that doesn’t directly ask for money?
• Is it engagement or moving your finger/computer mouse on a device (click, like, share)?

This doesn’t even delve into the byzantine world of coding schema in a database full of jingle and jangle within a single organization, much less across organizations.

We’d endorse and help organize and lead a sector wide jingle/jangle committee, presumably one jointly supported by the various trade groups representing us.

The aim is cumulative knowledge through refinement and synthesis.  In many cases, we need to start using the same toothbrush.

Kevin