Stigma Is the Enemy of Science and Human Progress

"If there's one lesson history keeps trying to teach us, it's this: Human beings are remarkably bad at recognizing important discoveries while they're happening. Again and again, ideas that later became foundational to our societies were first met with ridicule and fear, then quietly dismissed. Not because they were disproven, but because they didn't fit what most people already believed was possible."

"These ideas fell victim to what psychologists call structural stigma: the embedding of doubt and dismissal into social, institutional, and policy-level systems that determine which questions are considered legitimate long before evidence can fully emerge (1). Structural stigma isn't just about individual skepticism. It's what happens when organizations, industries, and professional communities quietly decide which lines of inquiry are acceptable and which are not. When that happens, curiosity disappears not because an idea is wrong, but because it is risky."

Human beings frequently fail to recognize important discoveries as they emerge, often reacting with ridicule or dismissal when new ideas challenge prevailing beliefs. Structural stigma embeds doubt and dismissal into social, institutional, and policy systems, channeling which questions are considered legitimate long before evidence accumulates. Organizations, industries, and professional communities can quietly determine acceptable lines of inquiry, making research professionally risky and stifling curiosity. Many past technologies—electricity, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, radio, television, computers, and the internet—faced institutional resistance that reduced investment and slowed progress until persistent research forced reconsideration.

Read at Psychology Today