Jingle-jangle fallacies refer to the erroneous assumptions that two different things are the same because they bear the same name (jingle fallacy) or that two identical or almost identical things are different because they are labeled differently (jangle fallacy). In research, a jangle fallacy describes the inference that two measures (e.g., tests, scales) with different names measure different constructs. By comparison, a jingle fallacy is based on the assumption that two measures which are called by the same name capture the same construct.
An example of the jangle fallacy can be found in tests designed to assess emotional intelligence. Some of these tests measure merely personality or regular IQ-tests. An example of the jingle fallacy is that personality and values are sometimes conflated and treated as the same construct.
In psychometrics, while the jingle-jangle fallacies may be evaluated using Principal Components Analysis, this approach generally only works for up to 200 scale items or as many items as a set of respondents can be expected to fill out in a survey. Larsen and Bong proposed the first large-scale solution to the jingle and jangle fallacies under a combined name, the Construct Identity Fallacy. The paper proposed and tested use of Natural Language Processing similarity algorithms, including Latent Semantic Analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and WordNet approaches to evaluate large sets of scale items based on their semantic similarities.