Why are scientists at the apex of their careers least likely to adopt new technology? The quick answer is obvious, they got to where they are doing things their way and there is no reason to fix something unbroken. Younger scientists don't have much choice because they don't write the checks, the use the tools the principal investigator has.

It's scientists in the middle most likely to adopt new tools, or adopt the tools of collaborators and even competitors.

What it means for Thermo Fisher Scientific is that high-status scientists may not be the most effective use of their marketing budget. For Science 2.0 it means that adoption will not happen from the top down, counting on that will slow the pace. The sweet spot for influencers is in the middle.

The authors analyzed how quickly 8,259 life scientists, spread across the globe, started using commercial kits to perform site-directed mutagenesis - genetic modification - in the period 1988-1997. Though that research technique was developed in the 1970s, it remained cumbersome until 1988 when commercial kits appeared on the market, providing researchers with a proven set of materials and step-by-step instructions. Such kits allow life scientists to work faster, publish faster, and so improve their status. Mutagenesis remains popular in Europe though their regulations ban and restrict other forms of genetic modification, so that helped uptake also.

Studying scientists as customers allowed the authors to measure status in two different ways: First, by how many times each scientist's work was cited by fellow researchers; and second, by how central each scientist was in the network of scientific collaboration. Studying scientists also allows researchers to measure the effects of status in a manner that is not confounded by differences in wealth or education. 

The differences in scientists' behavior were rather large. The odds of a scientist in the top 30-40% of the citations hierarchy to start using a kit were about 50% greater than those of a scientist at the bottom 10% and about 100% greater than those of a scientist in the top 10%. The odds of a scientist in the top 40-50% of the citations hierarchy to start using a kit following the adoption by one additional prior collaborator were about twice those of scientists at the bottom 10% or the top 10%.

A similar pattern emerged when measuring status as being central in the network of scientific collaboration: Middle-status scientists were more likely to adopt the kits quickly and were more prone to social influence than either low or high-status scientists.

Experiments in social psychology provide an explanation for these findings. People of low status don't expect to improve their situation much by their actions whereas those of high status don't see the need to do so. As a result, people in the middle of the status hierarchy are most sensitive to opportunities and threats to their status.

"This work," says Dr.
Christophe
Van den Bulte, who teaches marketing at the Wharton School, "has some implications for firms and not-for-profit organizations marketing new products to customers other than scientists. First, when the product is subject to peer influence, they may be better off targeting not only high-status prospects who are influential but also middle-status prospects who are easier to convert quickly. This is especially so for products that help users increase their status, like the commercial kits we studied. Second, conflicting findings on the power of opinion leaders have come from studies assuming that everyone is equally influenceable or assuming that the higher one's status, the lower one's susceptibility to peer influence. Our findings indicate that a more nuanced approach may be necessary to understand who influences whom."