Mesofacts: Facts You Used to Know that Could be Wrong
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Mar 22, 2010
Samuel Arbesman, writing in the Boston Globe last month (
Warning: Your reality is out of date), introduced a new word that I've already found quite useful: the
mesofact. His rationale for the term:
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don't change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth's population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it's about 6.8 billion...
These slow-changing facts are what I term mesofacts. Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling...
Just a few decades ago, dinosaurs were thought to be cold-blooded, slow-witted lizards that walked with their legs splayed out beside them. Now, scientists think that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded and fast-moving creatures. And they even had feathers! Just a few weeks ago we learned about the color patterns of dinosaurs (stripes! with orange tufts!).
His example about new elements hit home. After taking my sons to see Avatar, they said the name unobtainium (the mineral mined from the moon Pandora) was funny, since it was just like ununtrium, ununquadium and ununpentium - elements I had never heard of. Turns out the periodic table now contains 118 elements.
When conducting market research, we need to be aware of two types of mesofacts: those that describe our customers and those that drive the research process itself.
Customers change faster than our understanding of them changes. For three years in a row, through 2007, about 45% of Vovici customers were using our feedback management platform to conduct employee surveys. When we added that question back to our annual account review this year, I was shocked to see that it had declined to 25%. In retrospect, the decline made sense in terms of the work we do emphasizing customer loyalty and how the greater economic climate has reduced the perceived priority of employee research. Still, it was a surprise. Are there mesofacts about your customers that you take for granted? If so, it is worth asking customers those questions again - the answers today might surprise you.
For the research process itself, those of us educated before the 2000s often hold onto mesofacts about what is best. How many rating points is best for an agreement scale? The traditional 5-point Likert scale - strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, strongly agree - remains popular. However, I would say its efficacy is an illusion of its 78-year tradition. Research now shows that 7-point bipolar scales have greater reliability (see Rating Scale Best Practices) than 5-point scales. Worse, though, over 100 studies into acquiescence response bias demonstrate that some respondents will agree to almost any assertion. Saris, Krosnick and Shaeffer in their paper "Comparing Questions with Agree/Disagree Response Options to Questions with Construct-Specific Response Options" make a compelling case to replace all use of the agreement scales with rating scales specific to each question instead.
Recognizing that some things that we took to be facts no longer are facts will help us improve our research. For those of us trained in the Mesolithic Survey Age (after face-to-face surveys ruled the earth and before online surveys evolved from mouse-like creatures), this will be particularly difficult!