Optimal Newness

This week I'm reading a book about the science of popularity by Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine.

One of the central insights from Thompson’s research is that people love "familiar surprises”.

Thompson deconstructs example after example to reveal how these twin forces (known-ness and new-ness) work to attract and keep the attention of audiences and consumers.

Many of the examples in the book come from what Thompson calls the "culture markets" - music, television, movies, video games, websites and mobile apps - but the anecdote I want to share is about how this bias works the science economy.

It opens with a quote from Max Planck the theoretical physicist who said “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Thompson then describes a study that observes and quantifies this, in the context of grant applications for original scientific research.

A team of university researchers wanted to know what types of proposals get funded by prestigious institutions like the National Science Foundation. Ambitiously original ones? Conservatively incremental ones?

So they designed an experiment to measure it.

First, they prepared around 150 research proposals and gave each one a novelty score.

Then they recruited panel of over 100 world-class scientists to evaluate the proposals.

Here’s what they discovered …

The most novel proposals got the worst evaluations.

And the most familiar proposals also got low evaluations.

The highest evaluations went to the proposals that were slightly new.

They discovered there is an “optimal newness” for proposal ideas. They had to be advanced, but acceptable.

A graph showing the optimal newness effect is shown above. The horizontal axis is the proposal’s novelty and the vertical axis is its evaluation.

Thompson observes that many funding-seekers (scientific and otherwise) already understand this phenomenon, and it can be heard in pitches that frame new concepts as tweaks of existing ones.

Our service is like “Airbnb for cars” (Uber).

Click.

Confirmed.

Thanks for explaining, Derek Thompson!