Facts Versus Our Opinions and Beliefs

I am often astonished by the ability of human beings (myself included!) to form strong opinions and then, in the face of mountains of facts that directly contradict our opinions- to stubbornly maintain them.  Let's explore.

  

 

 

 

These images were created by Alicia Falco.  To me they illustrate the ideal- new facts altering and pushing out our existing opinions that have become outdated.  After the third image, we would go back to the first, with fresh new opinions about the matter in question.  Then, life being what it is:

Rinse and Repeat.

Yet we all see a daily parade of examples of people and groups of people and entire corporations and even, can you believe it, political parties wherein some madcap opinion got formed along the way and now it is unshakeable.  The trouble is, these opinions often stand in the way of good communication and progress in the world.  They are not harmless.

Diffusion of Innovations is a theory of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through social systems; the chief architect of Diffusion theory is Everett Rogers.  Diffusion research often unveils surprising resistance to the spread of new ideas that, many years later in retrospect, seem so obviously beneficial that we would have expected almost instantaneous adoption.

Dentistry has a number of examples of surprisingly slow diffusion, and therefore opinions that were not shaken loose by new facts.  My favorite involves innovator Dr. Michael Buonocore.  He was the first dentist to bond or adhere a restoration to a tooth, in 1955.  This was enamel-only adhesion yet was still a major advance.  Adhesive restorations have spectacular advantages over any filling material that is only stuffed passively into a tooth.  Yet the widespread adoption of adhesive dental restorations took until the late 1970's.  Twenty years!  Imagine if Microsoft and Apple took this long with new product development and releases... 

With the advent of dental adhesion there were still technical hurdles to using bonded composite resin restorations in back teeth.  These hurdles involved wear resistance of the materials and also the strength of bond to the insides of teeth (dentin) in the high-stress back-tooth environment.  Once again however we find slow adoption of new ideas.  In 1985 excellent bonding techniques for dentin were independently developed by Takeo Fusiyama and John Gwinnett.  Around this time the wear resistance of the filling materials was dramatically improved as well.  Yes, the whole package of a bonded, tooth-colored restoration for use in molar areas was worked out back in the Reagan Era, and yet to this day many practitioners still stand by silver amalgam restorations, an innovation introduced during the presidency of Andrew Jackson.  Gack!

Take a minute and have a good, honest look at your own field.  See any innovations that took a long time to be adopted?   See any that should be introduced, already?  

What would cause us humans to be so stubborn about our opinions and beliefs once they are formed?  Some would say it's our ego, our dislike of being proved wrong.  Losing face; what a strange little expression that is!  Yet whenever something fundamental about ourselves needs examining, I turn to thoughts of our evolutionary past, to the forces that formed us.  There were likely supreme advantages to being either stubborn in adherence to choices made, or to being highly flexible when presented with new information about the world around us.  The middle ground, being wishy-washy, was a dangerous dead zone.

Imagine a tribe of early humans, with no modern knowledge of geography, no GPS, in fact "No phones, no lights, no motor cars", who are faced with a steadily cooling climate and the spectre of glaciers.  There would be an advantage to getting the idea in their head, expressed in the language of the times of course, of "Go south!  It's warmer there!"  Strict absolute adherence to this plan would save the tribe, especially when they saw contradictory evidence, like better weather temporarily behind their backs or a beautiful tempting valley lying off in the wrong direction.  Yet what if the tribe had set out to go north instead?  Then the advantage goes to the leader who first recognizes, "Hey, we're freezing our flintknappers off here, we gotta turn around RIGHT NOW!" and convinces his flock to turn around in spite of the wasted time and tacit admission of being wrong.

Do you see?  Either strategy has a decent chance of success, so we have ended up today with two groups in opposition: people who tend to hold tightly to their opinions no matter what and people who are mentally highly flexible.  It's the undecided folks, the ones who prevaricate, who go north, then south, then north by northwest, then camp in the same place for a time, then set out again in a random direction...  That's how we lose.

On balance I prefer to live in the mentally flexible category.  In today's complex world, great advantages reside there.  Put simply, it's oh so nice to be ahead of the curve, and maintaining outdated opinions often keeps us back.

My favorite story of all on this topic was relayed by Everett Rogers in his textbook.  The Royal Navy was the most important force that held the British Empire together for centuries; in fact the RN is chiefly responsible for English being the most widely spoken language of commerce and science in the world today.  You'd think that such a successful institution as the RN would be highly innovative, constantly tossing their outdated opinions aside like old chewing gum wrappers.  Think again...

From, then, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition by Everett M. Rogers:

Scurvy control illustrates how slowly an obviously beneficial innovation spreads. In the early days of long sea voyages, scurvy killed more sailors than did warfare, accidents, and other causes. For instance, of Vasco da Gama’s crew of 160 men who sailed with him around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, 100 died of scurvy. In 1601, an English sea captain, James Lancaster, conducted an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of lemon juice in preventing scurvy. Captain Lancaster commanded four ships that sailed from England on a voyage to India. He served three teaspoonfuls of lemon juice every day to the sailors in one of his four ships. These men stayed healthy. The other three ships constituted Lancaster’s “control group,” as their sailors were not given any lemon juice. On the other three ships, by the halfway point in the journey, 110 out of 278 sailors had died from scurvy. So many of these sailors got scurvy that Lancaster had to transfer men from his “treatment” ship in order to staff the three other ships for the remainder of the voyage.

These results were so clear that one would have expected the British Navy to promptly adopt citrus juice for scurvy prevention on all ships. Not until 1747, about 150 years later, did James Lind, a British Navy physician who knew of Lancaster’s results, carry out another experiment on the HMS Salisbury. To each scurvy patient on this ship, Lind prescribed either two oranges and one lemon or one of five other supplements: a half pint of sea water, six spoonfuls of vinegar, a quart of cider, nutmeg, or seventy-five drops of vitriol elixir. The scurvy patients who got the citrus fruits were cured in a few days and were able to help Dr. Lind care for the other patients. Unfortunately, the supply of oranges and lemons was exhausted in six days.

 
Certainly, with this further solid evidence of the ability of citrus fruits to combat scurvy, one would expect the British Navy to have adopted this innovation for all ship’s crews on long sea voyages. In fact, it did so, but not until 1795, forty-eight years later, when scurvy was immediately wiped out. After only seventy more years, in 1865, the British Board of Trade adopted a similar policy and eradicated scurvy in the merchant marine.

Why were the authorities so slow to adopt the idea of citrus for scurvy prevention? Other, competing remedies for scurvy were also being proposed, and each such cure had its champions. For example, Captain Cook’s reports from his voyages in the Pacific did not provide support for curing scurvy with citrus fruits. Further, Dr. Lind was not a prominent figure in the field of naval medicine, and so his experimental findings did not get much attention. While scurvy prevention was generally resisted for years by the British Navy, other innovations, such as new ships and new guns, were readily accepted. So the Admiralty did not resist all innovations.

 

265 years to fully adopt a proven life-saving innovation.

 

And you know what the kicker is?  All the other navies and merchant fleets of the world took even longer...

  

 

 

 

Comments

[Joel D Canfield]

Rick, I love how you take a thin slice of your expertise and make it relevant to anyone with a brain. Nicely done.

I suspect that besides the clear aspects of fear holding us back from making changes there's also the fact that we often use 'decisions made' as a shortcut. We don't have the time to re-decide everything we do, so some stuff just gets decided and left. I wear a seatbelt, even if I'm just moving the car in the carport. It's a decision I chose not to revisit; the downside is so small and the upside so large that it ain't worth rethinking.

Sometimes when the situation or the environment changes we forget to briefly re-evaluate our 'decisions made' category.

But I'm guessing arrogance and fear play a role, too.

[Dorothy Shapland]

In the field of education it often seems that the PROVEN innovations in the classroom never make it to policy because of the resistance of those above!
I wonder - were there cooks on ships smuggling citrus on board for personal use because they'd seen results, and it just took years and years for the practice to make it as rule of law?
I have certainly felt as if I'm smuggling good practice into my classroom and waiting for the ideas to catch on, spread and become mandated! It's the biggest reason I teach teachers on the side - they need to start sneaking in the good fruits now, and let the rules catch up later!

[Tom Bentley]

Rick, it would probably take only a little chill on my flintknappers to suggest a course change, but I'm fickle that way. I've been lucky in some innovation quarters, like in 1997 requesting that I be able to telecommute full time from my software manual-writing job because I wanted to move 75 miles south to live with my girlfriend. No one had ever telecommuted for that company before (and remember, modems were 9600 baud!), but my boss respected my work, and I continued to produce manuals for them from home for the next 3 years.

Then again, I still like the sound of an old 60s V-8 engine over that of a green-is-good Prius...

[Seattle Bathroom Remodel]

Wow, that was a great read! Thank you so much for doing such a fantastic job with this, i’ve bookmarked your site so I can stay up to date with your stuff.

[Affordable Medical Insurance]

I love how you take a thin slice of your expertise and make it relevant to anyone with a brain. Nicely done. That was a great read!

[Richard Wilson DMD]

Thank you both, SBR and AMI. I hope to write more that has meaning for you. Stay tuned! Plus I am enlisting patients and others who make a difference in the world around them to write guest posts on fascinating topics. I hope to have specifics from some of them soon.

[insulation for homes]

Rick, I really like how you take a slim piece of your skills and create it appropriate to anyone with a mind. Perfectly done.
I suppose that besides the obvious factors of worry positioning us returning from creating changes there's also the point that we often use 'decisions made' as a quick way. We don't have plenty of a chance to re-decide everything we do, so some products just gets determined and eventually left. I use a car seatbelt, even if I'm just going the car in the car port. It's a choice I determined not to revisit; the disadvantage is so little and the benefit so huge that it ain't value rethinking.

[E.S Akshay]

Thanks for sharing with us...................