8 - Ignoring Behavioral Science: Practices and Perils

Summary

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Thomas Watson, Chairman, IBM, 1943

How amazing it is to behold the ways in which otherwise intelligent and creative people can be extraordinarily resistant to recognizing scientific advances at the threshold. Western Union, the greatest international communication system of the world, is said to have generated an internal memo in 1876, with this message: “This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

While many of these presumed verities are part of our scientific folklore, there is apparently no doubt that Lord Kelvin, an important contributor to the principle of the conservation of energy, and the president of the Royal Society in London, said in 1895, “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” (Lindley, 2003).

Sometimes our vision of the future requires not a leap of faith but a scientific jump-start. Grass-roots visionaries are sometimes both imaginatively bolder and less delayed by establishmentarian constraints. Recent advances, for example, in childbirth practices involving less use of maternal anesthesia, the redesign of birthing areas in maternity hospitals, and the acceptance of nurse-practitioner midwives, have resulted largely from pressures brought by women resisting the old ways.

If the development and widespread use of the telephone, or of aircraft, or of computers had been delayed for a year or two, due to the short-sightedness of those in positions required to promote their development, perhaps little would have been lost in the total picture of things, especially in the long run.