Quotes from Everett M. Rogers

The prejudice of [research] training is always a certain 'trained incapacity': The more we know about how to do something, the harder it is to learn how to do it differently

When villagers in Third World countries are asked in surveys, "What is the most important problem in your life?" they consistently respond, "Water." Typically, village families walk several miles to obtain a reliable source of water, and three to four hours per day are spent by water-gatherers in carrying the water to their home.

We conceptualize five main steps in the innovation-decision process: (1) knowledge, (2) persuasion, (3) decision, (4) implementation, and (5) confirmation.

Because of the pro-innovation bias, we know much more (1) about the diffusion of rapidly spreading innovations than about the diffusion of slowly diffusing innovations, (2) about adoption than about rejection, and (3) about continued use than about discontinuance

What Is Diffusion? Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system.

Most innovations, in fact, diffuse at a disappointingly slow rate. Scurvy control illustrates how slowly an obviously beneficial innovation spreads (Mosteller, 1981). In the early days of long sea voyages, scurvy was a worse killer of sailors than warfare, accidents, and all other causes of death. For instance, of Vasco de Gama's crew of 160 men who sailed with him around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, 100 died of scurvy.

The results were so clear that one would expect the British Navy to adopt citrus juice for scurvy prevention on all its ships. But it was not until 1747, about 150 years later, that James Lind, a British Navy physician who knew of Lancaster's results, carried out another experiment on the HMS Salisbury.

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

The QWERTY keyboard is inefficient and awkward. This typewriter keyboard takes twice as long to learn as it should, and makes us work about twenty times harder than is necessary. But QWERTY has persisted since 1873, and today unsuspecting individuals are being taught to use the QWERTY keyboard, unaware that a much more efficient typewriter keyboard is available.

Typewriters became mechanically more efficient, and the QWERTY keyboard design was no longer necessary to prevent key jamming. The search for an improved design was led by Professor August Dvorak at the University of Washington, who in 1932 used time-and-motion studies to create a much more efficient keyboard arrangement.

The newer arrangement requires less jumping back and forth from row to row; with the QWERTY keyboard, a good typists' fingertips travel more than twelve miles a day, jumping from row to row. These unnecessary intricate movements cause mental tension, typist fatigue, and lead to more typographical errors.

One might expect, on the basis of its overwhelming advantages, that the Dvorak keyboard would have completely replaced the inferior QWERTY keyboard. On the contrary, after more than 50 years, almost all typists are still using the inefficient QWERTY keyboard.

Diffusion Is the Process by Which (1) an Innovation (2) Is Communicated Through Certain Channels (3) Over Time (4) Among the Members of a Social System

An innovation is an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.

The average American school lags twenty-five years behind the best practice" (Mort, 1953).

A fad is an innovation that represents a relatively unimportant aspect of culture, which diffuses very rapidly, mainly for status reasons, and then is rapidly discontinued.

Other examples of fads are hula hoops, mood rings, flip-up sunglasses, and umbrella-hats.

The adoption of other highly visible innovations like new cars and hair styles is especially likely to be status motivated.

Family planning experts, in calculating the effects of contraceptive campaigns, estimate the number of births averted by calculating the pregnancies that would have occurred if contraceptives had not been adopted; the concept of births averted is not very meaningful to a peasant family in a Third World country that is being urged to adopt a preventive innovation like family planning.

An illustration of a diffuser incentive is that paid to vasectomy canvassers in India (described in Chapter 9). These canvassers had each had the vasectomy operation themselves, and then earned a small incentive by convincing other men like themselves to adopt.