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The Semmelweis Reflex
The Semmelweis reflex, a term the writer Robert Anton Wilson popularized, names the tendency to reject new evidence when it contradicts established norms and beliefs. It is close to ordinary confirmation bias. The Vienna version cut deeper. Accepting his explanation meant confronting the possibility that for years they had carried death to the patients they were trying to save, on their own hands, and the evidence implicated them. One account of the episode names the trap: “the paradox of being healer and murderer was intolerable for most.”
Had no idea that this was an established concept or the background story here. As anyone who has worked on an “innovation team” inside a big or established company knows how this goes all too well.