Why do we use Analogies?

Analogies help us learn

As we've discussed, analogies help us learn by using old information that we have a firm grasp of, and apply it to new information that we might have trouble with. Analogies can help point out important features of new concepts so we don't get lost in the weeds of a new concept.

Children and Analogical Learning

Many instructors use analogies when teaching young children new ideas. Complex reasoning skills have yet to develop, and verbal explanations for new concepts might rely on vocabulary children don't have yet. Through the use of "progressive alignment", instructors slowly build concepts by relating simple concepts which, through scaffolding, get more and more complex. While little ones might not understand the concept of "invertebrate", they might slowly be able to use analogical reasoning to understand that worms are like caterpillars, and eventually that worms are like squids and octupi.

This video details the Wason card task and gives you and inside look at an explanation using evolutionary psychology. Check it out!

Wason Card Task

The Wason card task gives us great insight into how analogies help us learn. In this task, the participant is asked to show how we might prove that a set of information adheres to a set of rules. This logic test starts by using numbers and letters, and typically participants have a hard time reasoning their way through it.

However! A funny thing happens when you turn switch up the context of this task. You use the same mechanisms, ask the same questions, but the proctor makes the topic into something we know a lot about, like social contracts, the task gets way easier! Not only can analogies help us learn, but they can help us reason through difficult issues.

More Examples

Motor Learning

Analogies aren't just useful for solving mental problems, they can improve motor learning, too. In this study, researchers found that using analogies encourages the development of motor skills that would normally take many more hours of practice.

This might sound hard to believe until you have an example: think about catching a football as if you were cradling a baby. This is a regularly-used analogy that improves motor learning. In this example, instead of starting from a place of total confusion, we're given a familiar base (cradling a baby) from which to build this new motor skill.

Health Risks

Analogies are also used successfully in medical contexts to explain different health risks and share important information, not just between doctors and patients, but also educators and students.

One example of medical analogy is comparing a cancer screening to a car alarm, and cancer to car theft. In the base situation, a car alarm can signal car theft, but sometimes the car alarm doesn't sound, or it goes off falsely. This helps us understand that while cancer screenings are generally effective in identifying cancer, sometimes they create false negatives or positives.

It's important to note that the research shows medical analogies are most effective when they're tailored to specific listeners, and they're not one-size-fits-all solutions to explaining complex problems. We can apply this conclusion to motor learning, too. In order for an analogy to truly work, its base has to be familiar to the listener. That said, it's still impressive that analogies can make difficult information so much more accessible.

Galesic, & Garcia-Retamero, R. (2013). Using Analogies to Communicate Information about Health Risks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 27(1), 33–42. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.2866

Morgan, J. (2021, February 26). How analogies support learning | Tes Magazine. Www.tes.com. https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/how-analogies-support-learning

Zacks, & Friedman, J. (2020). Analogies can speed up the motor learning process. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 6932–6932. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-63999-1

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