For example, subjects had a negative reaction to a running shoe equipped with nanotechnology that adjusted fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters.
I wonder if this is typical of the new ideas being tested. There are reasons other than novelty for being dubious about it-- for example, that's a use of nanotech which I believe is well beyond current capability. One might wonder whether it will actually work, or is it a case of nanotech as magic pixie dust?
Also, I don't know whether those implicit bias tests have been checked to see whether the apparent implicit bias shows up in people's actions.
A lot of people probably saw this on hacker news but I thought I'd share it anyway - People are biased against creative ideas, studies find
To sum up, most people dislike uncertainty so much that they'll reject pretty much anything new, good or not. The article states that "Anti-creativity bias can be so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea." By "creative idea," I of course mean lawful creativity - the article seems to suggest that at a certain point, every creative suggestion starts to sound about as useful as "let's put pictures of purple unicorns on the wall to help ourselves be more productive," if you're biased enough.
What's a good way to fight this? Obviously solving the problem of being creative is a totally different matter. But I would suggest the usual "if you were a different person injected into your own life to improve things" approach and start by taking every single suggestion seriously and thinking it through as if you were only dealing with the issue for the very first time, and then as time went on, improve at making quick unbiased evaluations of creative ideas.