Everett M. Rogers > Quotes

“The five attributes of innovations are (1) relative advantage, (2) compatibility, (3) complexity, (4) trialability, and (5) observability.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Complexity is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to understand and use.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“The more we know about how to do something, the harder it is to learn how to do it differently”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Innovations that are perceived by individuals as having greater relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, observability, and less complexity will be adopted more rapidly than other innovations.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Diffusion investigations show that most individuals do not evaluate an innovation on the basis of scientific studies of its consequences, although such objective evaluations are not entirely irrelevant, especially to the very first individuals who adopt. Instead, most people depend mainly upon a subjective evaluation of an innovation that is conveyed to them from other individuals like themselves who have previously adopted the innovation”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Even though the software component of a technology is often not so easy to observe, we should not forget that technology almost always represents a mixture of hardware and software aspects. According to our definition, technology is a means of uncertainty reduction that is made possible by information about the cause-effect relationships on which the technology is based.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Thus we see that the diffusion of innovations is a social process, even more than a technical matter.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Trialability is the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Compatibility is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with the existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Observability is the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Relative advantage is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“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.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“when two or more individuals are homophilous.III When they share common meanings, a mutual subcultural language, and are alike in personal and social characteristics, the communication of new ideas is likely to have greater effects in terms of knowledge gain, attitude formation and change, and overt behavior change.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Other examples of fads are hula hoops, mood rings, flip-up sunglasses, and umbrella-hats.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“More effective communication occurs when two or more individuals are homophilous.III”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“discontinuance is a decision to reject an innovation after it has previously been adopted. Discontinuance may occur because an individual becomes dissatisfied with an innovation, or because the innovation is replaced with an improved idea.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“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.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“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.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“A further refinement of this proposition includes the concept of empathy, defined as the ability of an individual to project into the role of another. More effective communication occurs when two individuals are homophilous, unless they have high empathy. Heterophilous individuals who have a high degree of empathy are, in a socio-psychological sense, really homophilous. The proposition about effective communication and homophily can also be reversed: Effective communication between two individuals leads to greater homophily in knowledge, beliefs, and overt behavior.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“This intensive two-year campaign by a public health worker in a Peruvian village of 200 families, aimed at persuading housewives to boil drinking water, was largely unsuccessful. Nelida was able to encourage only about 5 percent of the population, eleven families, to adopt the innovation. The diffusion campaign in Los Molinas failed because of the cultural beliefs of the villagers. Local tradition links hot foods with illness. Boiling water makes water less “cold” and hence, appropriate only for the sick. But if a person is not ill, the individual is prohibited by village norms from drinking boiled water. Only individuals who are unintegrated into local networks risk defying community norms on water boiling. An important factor regarding the adoption rate of an innovation is its compatibility with the values, beliefs, and past experiences of individuals in the social system. Nelida and her superiors in the public health agency should have understood the hot-cold belief system, as it is found throughout Peru (and in most nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia). Here is an example of an indigenous knowledge system that caused the failure of a development program.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Diffusion is a special type of communication concerned with the spread of messages that are perceived as new ideas. Communication is a process in which participants create and share information with one another in order to reach a mutual understanding.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“An important factor regarding the adoption rate of an innovation is its compatibility with the values, beliefs, and past experiences of individuals in the social system.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“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.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“For example, the villagers in Los Molinas did not understand germ theory, which the health worker tried to explain to them as a reason for boiling their drinking water.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“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.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“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.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“A technology cluster consists of one or more distinguishable elements of technology that are perceived as being closely interrelated.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“Heterophilous communication between dissimilar individuals may cause cognitive dissonance because an individual is exposed to messages that are inconsistent with existing beliefs, an uncomfortable psychological state.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations

“The result was an “agricultural revolution” in which the number of persons fed and clothed by the average American farmer shot up from fourteen in 1950, to twenty-six in 1960, to forty-seven in 1970.”
― Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations