A recent blog post at Infection Control Today discusses new research that shows how beliefs are spread in societies.  Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

“As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change,” Sreenivasan adds. “People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that wouldn’t change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10.”

This research can easily be applied to the healthcare industry, and hand hygiene practices in particular, when a culture of change is adopted by “true believers”.
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Read the post here.