Do adults make scale errors too? How function sometimes trumps size.

Scale errors-futile attempts to use impossibly sized items as though they were appropriately scaled-have been thought to exist only in young children. Here, we document a similar version of the underlying phenomenon among adults. When asked to select 1 of 2 tools to achieve an instrumental goal, adults in Study 1 frequently selected, via keypress, a tool that was "for" the goal despite the tool being clearly ill sized in the given instance. In...