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In politics, there's a thing called the Bandwagon Effect. Call it "rally 'round the winner" or "the herding instinct," it boils down to following the crowd.
We can't help it. We're social animals. Our groups are important to us. But the need to belong can backfire, especially in innovation.
In order align ourselves with the mainstream, we will follow rather than venture, agree rather than argue, accept rather than challenge. Even though we know that "all new ideas have an element of foolishness when they are first conceived." (Wish I had said that first, but Alfred North Whitehead did.)
In 1980, Ronald Reagan was declared the winner of the presidential race a few hours before folks in California had finished voting. The idea that the bandwagon effect affected the outcome prompted the present ban on making such predictions until the country is finished voting.
Innovators, inventors, and scientists, it has been found, will censor their own work when they believe that their unusual results contradict the currently accepted wisdom.
 In the first experiment of my high school physics class, we were instructed to record the temperature on a thermometer, fan the thermometer for a precise amount of time, then record the temperature again. Some of us managed to see the temperature decrease based on the assumption that fanning would cool the thermometer.
In a romanticized movie about Marie Curie, a young Marie runs home from school after such an experiment to report proudly to her mother that she was the only student in her class who did not bend her observations.
It takes courage and conviction to stick to your guns in the face of ridiculous-looking results. Take heart from Marie Curie, who said, "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
See also The Cage of Affinity
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