CONCEPT
Pro-Innovation Bias
Rogers's self-critical term for the persistent structural bias of diffusion research toward treating adoption as desirable and non-adoption as failure — and the distortion it introduces into every account of technological change.
Pro-innovation bias is the assumption that an innovation should be diffused to and adopted by all members of a social system, that it should be diffused rapidly, and that it should be neither reinvented nor rejected. Rogers identified this bias as the most persistent and least recognized distortion in diffusion research — and in his own earlier work. The bias operates not through deliberate advocacy but through structural position: the people who study and promote innovations are, by definition, people who have engaged with those innovations deeply enough to find them interesting, and that engagement systematically disposes them toward favorable evaluation. Rogers's career-long push against this bias is one of his most important legacies, and the one most urgently needed in the AI transition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The bias manifests in several ways. It privileges studies of successful diffusions over studies of failed or harmful ones. It treats non-adopters as problems to be solved rather than as