The Conduct of Inquiry¶

Kaplan, A. (1964). The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science. Chandler Publishing.

Type: Book
Intellectual base: Review or monograph
Year: 1964
Link: https://casbs.stanford.edu/conduct-inquiry-methodology-behavioral-science
Cited from: cognitive_science

Cited by¶

9 citations across 9 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes¶

Law of the Instrument
- Academic research: methodological monoculture, where a researcher's primary method (regression, ethnography, RCT, formal model) becomes the lens through which all problems are read, foregrounding method-amenable problems and dismissing others as out of scope.
  This sourceCoins 'the law of the instrument' ('Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding') and observes that a scientist 'formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled' — the canonical statement of method/tool shaping which problems are perceived, supporting the academic-methodology, consulting-framework, and pedagogy instances.

Mechanisms¶

Access/Occlusion Matrix
- The classic misuse is the streetlight effect
  This sourceDescribes the drunkard’s-search principle: inquiry is distorted when it looks where observation is easiest rather than where the object is likely to be.
Clickstream Deviation Scan
- Its defining failure is the streetlight effect — it can only see behaviour that is digital and instrumented, so offline users, those who abandon before they generate events, and anyone the product already excluded are simply absent from the data, and optimising to the visible trace can quietly deepen that blind spot.
  This sourceDescribes the streetlight error as searching where observation is easiest rather than where the answer is most likely.
Code Crosswalk Validation
- Its failure mode is the streetlight effect
  This sourceDescribes the streetlight effect as searching only where inquiry is easiest rather than where the answer is likely to be.
Domain Restriction
- The classic misuse is the streetlight effect
  This sourceWarns against searching only where inquiry is easiest and most illuminated rather than where the answer is likely to be found.
Multi-Level Dashboard
- Its failure mode is dashboard theater — a board that looks like control while doing none of it — and the subtler streetlight effect,
  This sourceDescribes the streetlight effect: teams watch what is easy to render rather than what matters, leaving hard-to-plot signals out of attention.
Refresh Burden and Accumulation Audit
- It misleads when it counts only the costs that are easy to meter (sends, opens) and misses the ones that matter (brand trust, genuine attention), a streetlight effect
  This sourceDescribes the drunkard’s-search bias of looking where observation is easiest rather than where the sought answer is likely to be.
Tool Repertoire Inventory
- Its failure mode is that an inventory catalogs what a team has and can subtly reinforce the very frame it was meant to expose: a rich, tidy catalog invites the reflex of picking the nearest tool from it — a textbook case of the law of the instrument, where owning good hammers makes everything look like a nail.
  This sourceWarns through the law of the instrument that possession of a favored tool can make every problem look suited to it.
Top-Cost-Source Intervention
- Its central failure is attacking the visible cost rather than the largest reducible one — the streetlight effect, where teams optimize what is easy to measure instead of what actually dominates.
  This sourceDescribes the streetlight-like error of searching where observation is easiest rather than where the answer is most likely to be found.

Verification¶

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Links previously used in the corpus¶

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 7 other ways.

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