Lack of Source Credibility often creates extraordinary resistance to breakthroughs in many fields if the ideas originate outside of the club of their profession. A number of examples come to mind, the two most extraordinary are probably the stories of John Harrison, Alfred Wegener.

The story of John Harrison, so brilliantly told in the 1995 book “Longitude” by Dava Sobel chronicles the epic quest to solve the thorniest scientific problem of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the great age of exploration, sailors attempted to navigate the oceans without any means of measuring their longitude: All too often, voyages ended in total disaster when both crew and cargo were captured or lost upon the rocks of an unexpected landfall. Thousands of lives and the fortunes of seafaring nations hung on a resolution.

To encourage a solution, governments of Europe established major prizes for anyone whose method or device proved successful. The largest reward of £20,000 — truly a king’s ransom — was offered by the British Parliament in 1714. The scientific establishment — from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton — had been certain that a celestial answer would be found and invested untold effort in this pursuit. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, imagined and built the unimaginable: a clock that solved the problem by keeping precise time at sea, called today the chronometer. His trials and tribulations to win the prize throughout a forty-year obsession are the culmination of this remarkable story. His greatest opposition came from the great minds of his day, including Sir Edmund Halley, who comprised the jury upon whom the award of the prize was dependent. Convinced that the answer lay within their own fields of expertise, they shunned Harrison’s assertion that an accurate clock, and not the stars, provided the solution. They shunned it, to a great extent, because he was neither nobleman, not astronomer. It was a source credibility, or ethos problem. He was a carpenter, who turned to making wood clocks for churches and eventually, refined and minituarized the making of world’s first timepiece, accurate enough to save lives at sea, dominate the shipping lanes and help build an empire.

Shortly before his death in 1955, one of the greatest minds of our age wrote a glowing foreword to a book by the eminent geologist Charles Hapgood, who had written a book renouncing the entire idea of continental drift, or what is now known as plate tectonics. As late as our own years in public schools, long after overwhelming evidence existed in support of continental drift, text books were still being printed and high-school science teachers continued to “teach” that the idea was folly.

What accounted for decades of opposition to the idea? The scientist who wrote the first work in support of the idea shortly before WWI, Alfred Wegener, lacked source credibility. In the words of Bill Bryson, from his sensational 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything:

Clearly the time was ripe for a new theory. Unfortunately, Alfred Wegener was not the man that geologists wished to provide it. Wegener had no background in geology. He as a meteorologist, for goodness sake. A weatherman-a German weatherman. These were not remediable deficiencies.

As a result of a lack of source credibility, it took a half-century, a modern scientific dark-age of geology, for serious consideration to be granted to one of the fundamental truths of our scientific age.

Casey Jones and Dr. Daniel Bonevac’s theoretical work on how individuals and groups of individuals form perceptions on all subjects, how we as individuals can better understand our own perceptions, and how communicators, leaders and educators in any field can more effectively move other’s perceptions.

This is an important post, both for the Jones&Bonevac Blog which deals with Marketing and this blog here at Thought About Thought, which provides a forum for individuals from wildly divergent fields to meet and discuss the subject matter of the attached paper. We are addressing here the nature of thought and perception. We are publishing here a model we believe will allow all of us to better understand and discuss this subject.

This is not a traditional academic paper, nor is it a traditional marketing paper; however, we believe that the model we have created from our perspectives and backgrounds in these fields is unique, and perhaps could not have been created in any other way. We look to publish a final version of this paper in another form at a later date. We will also be publishing an extensive work applying this model to the particular field of Marketing. Between now and then, please feel free to post your comments about this work as they apply to Marketing on our Jones&Bonevac blog, and as they apply to the model itself and its application to other fields on the blog at ThoughtAboutThought.com

View the PDF:  A Unified Model of Advocacy in Perception Space

Excerpt:

We use language for various purposes. We describe the world. We ask questions. We issue commands. We make agreements. And we try to persuade. Marketers and advertisers try to persuade people to buy products. Public relations specialists try to persuade people to have positive perceptions of organizations. Political consultants try to persuade people to support causes and candidates. Executives try to persuade people to work effectively, to agree to a contract, to accept a job, and so on. Parents try to persuade children to listen to them. Attorneys try to persuade people to favor their clients. All those activities have something important in common. Marketers, advertisers, public relations specialists, political consultants, executives, and lawyers, in fact all of us, are advocates either full time or part time. When we seek to convince someone, we are in the business of practical persuasion, of persuading people to change their minds or do things.

Most of us spend our lives thinking. We think about food, sex, safety, money, politics, science, nature, our looks, our dress, and our neighbors. We think about the world and everything in, beneath and beyond it. We think about quarks and cosmology. We think about ideas, notions, concepts and beliefs. Rarely, we believe, do we think enough about thinking.

Each of us lives in a world that is a combination of what we refer to as real and what we ourselves perceive. Since each of us has a unique blend of perceptions, each of us lives in a world unique from others. The world, as each of us perceives it, has much in common with many individual worlds around us. We share perspectives with those who are much like us; who share our nationality, race and religious beliefs. Our worlds are similar to, but some would say profoundly different from others who have in common these general things, but are of a different gender. The further we travel, the more the world that others live in differs from our own. If we assume there is a base reality; if we assume at least that there are those external things over which we jointly have no control, like gravity, or the sum of two plus two, then what of perceived reality? What do we think about what governs our perceptions?

The authors and contributors to this blog share a common interest. We think about thinking. As a bird is not tethered to the earth by gravity, so can someone who thinks about the source of their own perceptions avoid being tethered to a reality that may be only a construct of what others believe. Each of us lives in a reality that is in large part a function of what others have persuaded us is true or real and which is, in fact, worthy of debate. We discuss and contend “truth” with each other.  Our lives are governed by the outcomes of political and economic debates in which we may take part, but the rules of which we do not clearly understand.

So we will present here a model of how all of us might think about thinking. A model of perceptions and the reasons we hold them to be true or false. We believe our cognitive-objects, called perceptions, and the study of advocacy, or how-t0-change perceptions, are vital to intellectual freedom. We invite you to think about thought with us. We invite your posts and comments. If you wish to contribute on a regular basis and help us drive thediscussion, please contact the site administrator, Brett Jones, at info@jonesandbonevac.com

Regards,

Casey C. Jones and Daniel Bonevac, Ph.D.