How Well Do Facts Travel?

I did not coin this phrase. There is an effort by a professor @ the London School of Economics to explore this topic. Jon Adams has several papers on his research, using historic precedent on the rise of scientific advances, and how the new “facts” are disseminated, believed (or not believed) by a population.

It’s cool stuff, and highlight various behavioral psych books that I like, but what does this have to do with analytics?  I’m playing with this professor’s ideas in relation to new insights that an analytic may have, and whether the end user population would believe the insight enough to act on it (those of you who know me, know I like this topic).  So, I guess it’s a microcosm of the larger scale behavior Dr. Adams is describing.  Here’s a link to a brief PPT I thought was illustrative from his writing:

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/pls/portallive/docs/1/15951696.PPT

There’s bias on both sides (the purveyor of a new belief and the user who has a “gut” understanding) in this slide in particular. Who wants to budget from their own position anyway? People hate that. The trick are teh techniques we can use to make them move from their current point of view.