People don’t like new ideas (possibly including this one)
Why your best ideas are rejected, what makes others go viral, and how to stop fluency bias from narrowing your world
If you’re someone who comes up with a lot of new ideas—for work, for play, for artistic or creative endeavors—then you’ve probably had the experience of sharing your idea with another person only to have them dismiss it, misunderstand it, or reject it outright.
We’re excited to share our new ideas with other people, but the negative responses we get are disorienting and frustrating.
The frustration is partially due to the fact that American culture proclaims appreciation for bold ideas, fresh thinking, and innovation. But in reality, we don’t like new ideas very much at all—at least not at first. They tend to be met with skepticism and rejection—and sometimes even violence.
Take Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who suggested handwashing could stop women from dying of childbed fever. He was so widely mocked by his colleagues that he suffered a mental breakdown and died in an asylum. Today, doctors wash their hands and then put on protective gloves—proving that not only did we accept his idea of clean hands, we doubled down on it.
Galileo proves that sometimes new ideas aren’t just rejected—they’re the basis for a death sentence. Jan Hus, Socrates, and Hypatia also died for proposing ideas that made people uncomfortable.
Even without a death sentence, being rejected before being validated (and even lionized) is a common trope. And don’t get the idea that rejecting new ideas is a thing of the past—Darwin, Turing, and Tesla are more recent examples of this tendency.
Groupthink is hard to escape
Our distaste for new ideas makes sense in many ways. Groupthink gets a bad rap, but it helped us survive over evolutionary time.Throughout human history, going along with the group has been safer as well as easier. Tribes developed ways of doing things that fit with their environments, knowledge, and skill sets. New, untested ideas could threaten the group’s survival. So being skeptical became a feature of human cognition.
Of course groupthink sometimes goes in surprising directions. Occasionally, terrible new ideas catch on for no clear reason. We wonder why our good new idea is rejected when a dumb idea gains acceptance despite obvious flaws:
Remember when we were going to intercept asteroids, land satellites on them, mine rare minerals, and bring them back to Earth? (Despite the fact that we are still using rubber bands to launch planes off aircraft carriers.)
And remember when Meta launched its virtual real estate venture and investors plunked down $10 billion in 2021 alone? (As if Second Life hadn’t already asked and answered the same question 15 years earlier.)
Where was all the skepticism then?
Why this happens: Fluency bias
If you want to better understand why some ideas get rejected too early—and others accepted too easily—start with fluency.
Fluency is the ease with which our brain processes information. The easier something is to understand, the more likely we are to believe it. Research shows that people are less likely to believe a sentence if it’s printed in a hard-to-read font. Same words. Just harder to read.
That’s a problem in a world where the most important ideas—on immigration, crime, abortion, or climate—are often complex. Simplicity feels true, even when it’s not.
That’s a problem because it makes it harder for us to appreciate the kind of nuanced, counterintuitive solutions that complex challenges are likely to require. And it makes it more likely that the majority will accept oversimplified but ineffective solutions.
We never said that!
Also frustrating is the fact that when we do change our views, we tend to just quietly adopt the new idea without ever acknowledging we were wrong.
Consider the recent about-faces on the origins of COVID-19 and Biden’s mental acuity. “Everyone” knew that COVID couldn’t have come from a lab, until work by reputable scientists began to show that it probably did. And the idea that the president was suffering from a significant cognitive decline was dismissed by most people until Jake Tapper’s book acknowledged that it was an open secret in the White House that the president was not “the best Joe Biden ever.”
These ideas went from “don’t be ridiculous” to “everyone knows that” and it’s unclear what changed the public consensus.
What to do about it
If you want to human better—or just be a little more open-minded—learn to recognize the effect of fluency in your reactions. That feeling of “ick” or “nope” might not mean something is wrong. It might just be disfluent.
That song you hate? That style you think is ugly? That new idea that rubs you the wrong way? Here’s how you can give it a fair shake:
Spend some time thinking about whether it seems factually inaccurate versus unfamiliar.
Suspend judgment and spend some time getting familiar without making a ruling on good/bad, true/untrue, pleasing/displeasing
Try to get some mental distance from the idea, for example by imagining yourself looking back on it in a few years’ time (research shows this kind of imagined temporal distance can make us less critical).
And if you’re one of those rare people who loves novelty—who doesn't fall victim to fluency bias and is quick to adopt new ideas—congrats. You’re in the minority. Not only can you see and appreciate new ideas much more readily than the average person, you’re also in a position to help other people spot the value in something new.
Our resistance to unfamiliar ideas may be natural, but progress depends on pushing through it. We need more good ideas.
P.S. Share this with someone else who knows what it’s like to have their new ideas rejected.
In my field, chasing novelty or that thing that is unexpected but might or might not actually be true is a needed skill. My postdoc advisor (Marc Kirschner of Harvard Med) called it 'trust but verify' after the old advice about dealing with the USSR. You'll see a new connection or unexpected finding and you have to find the Goldilock spot where you are open to whether or not this might be a new thing (if you close your mind, you'll miss following the connection) yet a key skill is to figure out what the killer experiment is to support or disprove that new idea/hypothesis about what you're seeing or what it means.
It is fundamental to developing good science. I wouldn't necessarily congratulate those in science who go after novelty blindly though--my spouse's favorite saying with experimental pitches he hears is "if that made any sense, it would be a powerful idea" :) And, we can see where the latest is at, but I still think the verdict about COVID as Wuhan market versus some lab leak is at the least out, the administration's tilting of that discussion notwithstanding and without having examined the evidence for or against myself (or known if we are getting or being given accurate information). One must stay especially wary of whose information we are considering, if they are acting in good faith, and how they are backing up their assertions with provable facts.