As an analogy: gradual deterioration may escape the response that an abrupt equivalent change would trigger.
False as biology — frogs escape well before the water is dangerous — and included because the institutional pattern it names is real and well documented. Normalisation of deviance is the researched version.
In practice
- A subscription price rises 4% a year for six years and no customer cancels, though a 27% rise in one year would have emptied the book.
- A team's meeting load grows by one recurring invitation a month until nobody has a clear afternoon, and no month was the problem.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation for the institutional pattern is habituation: each step is small enough to fall inside the range people already treat as normal. Another is the shifting baseline, in which each generation takes the conditions it inherits as the starting point.
- In its favour
- The institutional version is documented under other names, including normalisation of deviance in accident research and shifting baselines in fisheries science.
- Against it
- The biology is false, and the analogy can excuse inaction by implying that people cannot notice gradual change, which they generally can once a measurement is kept.
- Standing
- False as biology; frogs do escape. Retained because the institutional pattern it names is real and well documented.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- Proverbs that recur across cultures