By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
We are used to hearing about “technophobia,” or a fear of new, confusing, powerful and scary gadgets. In modern times, however, it’s opposite — technophilia — is likely to play a stronger role. Take the current launch of the Apple Watch. While it is likely to generate at least some criticism and disappointments, it will, by all indications, succeed in the market anyway. After all, that is what we expect new technology to do: to be adopted and to make life easier and better over time. We expect our next computer to be thinner, faster, and prettier than our last computer. This belief in the success and inevitable advance of technology has a name: the “Technology Effect.”
The Technology Effect is explored in a new study (Clark, Robert & Hampton, 2015) showing that we tend to associate technology with success and to overestimate the chances that any given new technology will be adopted. In our minds, “new,” “different,” “cool,” and “better” all become merged in a positive glow of technological optimism. Sure, we will curse our computers when they don’t do what we want, and we’ll be frustrated when Siri doesn’t understand what we’re asking. But on the whole, we still love our gadgets, love what they can do — and what’s more — we expect them to succeed in getting better and better over time. And sometimes that assumption is accurate, and sometimes it isn’t. In legal cases having to do with technology, most notably intellectual property cases, our general attitudes toward technology and its success can be highly relevant. In this post, I’ll take a look at the study and what it means for those cases that overlap with technology.
Research: We Love Technology and Overestimate Its Effectiveness
Researchers from the University of Missouri and the University of South Dakota (Clark, Robert & Hampton, 2015) sought to investigate the attitudes that we bring when evaluating technological innovation. Over the course of three studies, they discovered “an implicit association between technology and success that has conditioned decision makers to be overly optimistic about the potential for technology to drive successful outcomes.” When research participants made simulated investment decisions, solved resource dilemmas, or took implicit association tests, they exhibited a strong tendency to both equate technology with success and to overestimate technologies’ chances for success.
According to professor Chris Robert in a comment to ScienceDaily, “It turns out that people have more confidence that unfamiliar technologies will provide solutions to a range of problems. People seem to put new technology in a category of ‘great things that work which I love but don’t understand,’ whereas they are not as excited about familiar technologies like electricity, solar power or telephones, and they don’t believe these technologies are as likely to provide new solutions.”
Implication: Account for Jurors’ Technophilia in Patent Cases
To the extent that technophilia just makes us hopeful or thrilled about the new Apple Watch, it’s not really a bad thing. But when it leads us to make biased assessments of the performance of technology in the marketplace, it could lead not only to bad investment choices, but to skewed decisions in litigation as well.
Benefitting from Technophilia
The field of litigation most associated with technology is probably patent and other intellectual property litigation. In that context, it is easy to see how this tendency toward technophilia could lead to a pro-patentee bias. If we are motivated to believe that new inventions are effective and successful, then we could be biased toward a feeling that those inventions deserve protection. That squares with our own experience in patent mock trials, where all things being equal, mock jurors want to protect the patent holder.
Patentees can seek to augment that effect by giving particular attention to their invention story, knowing that story tracks with jurors’ own expectations about inevitability and benefits of technological progress. In patent damages scenarios, jurors will also sometimes need to think hypothetically about what a particular technology will do or would have done in the market. Or they may need to speculate about the licensing arrangement the parties would have reached if they had reached one. In that setting, optimism about technology is likely to be a force pushing those estimates up. In other cases, it is more complex, with both sides potentially claiming to be the ones on the side of technological innovation. Assessing and adapting to jurors’ tendency to be on your side from the start can be important to your strategy and your case assessment.
Reducing Technophilia
In other cases, a bias toward technology will work against you. If you’re a patent defendant arguing invalidity, for example, you might be in the position of claiming that the patentee’s shiny new invention is just an obvious extension on an old and less shiny example of prior art. In a scenario like that, a tendency to equate new technology with success and effectiveness is going to run counter to your interests. So how do you reduce unrealistic expectations for technology?
One thing that we know from the case of other biases, like hindsight, is that awareness helps to some extent. Sensitizing jurors to the existence and the strength of the bias can improve their ability to resist its influence. So acknowledge the bias. Remind jurors of our tendency to valorize each new innovation, and provide examples — the number of people willing to wait in line for a new Apple product before the reviews are even in. In addition, it also helps to understand the cause of our tendency to be too optimistic regarding technology. According to the study authors, overestimates of technologies’ effectiveness can come from an imbalance in publicity: We hear a lot more about the successes than about the failures. So one strategy is to create some perspective by reminding jurors that many new technologies fail, often without very many people knowing about it.
Whether technophilia is likely to help or to hurt your case, it will often be a good idea to learn what attitudes your potential jurors are bringing into the case:
- Do they own the newest technology?
- Are they likely to adopt a new gadget immediately, or to wait until many others have it?
- Do they believe that new technologies tend to make life better, or worse?
- If they had to estimate, what percentage of new patented products do they believe are successful in the market?
- Are they aware of examples of successful products in the case-relevant area of technology? Or examples of unsuccessful products?
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Other Posts on IP-Relevant Attitudes:
- Persuade Jurors You Play Fair in the Patent Sandbox
- Tell Your Patent Invention Story In a Way That is Worth Copyrighting
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Clark, B. B., Robert, C., & Hampton, S. A. (2015). The Technology Effect: How Perceptions of Technology Drive Excessive Optimism. Journal of Business and Psychology, 1-16.
Image Credit: 123rf.com, used under license