A lot has been said over the last few days about the way people react to
metric. Discussion points have included anecdotal evidence of how it is
received both in the USA and the UK, theorising about group behaviour and
the theories of eminent psychologists.
It would certainly help to understand why people may resist change to metric
or have misaprehensions about it if we are going to encourage people to
change and adapt. I don't think it's very helpful though to make too many
broad assumptons about the character of people in the population and
branding them (by implication) as weak or inferior in some way if they won't
change to metric.
I think the key to this is to be honest with oneself and "don't do unto
others ..." etc. We are all capable of reluctance to change if we can't see
any value in it. We are also inclined to hang on to things we treasure. Our
task is to convince people of the value of the change to metric and
hopefully help them to place any nostalgia for traditional measurement units
into perspective.
Phil Hall
