IN his book “Factfulness,” Hans Rosling, M.D., asks, “How can so many people be so wrong about so much?”
He found it “frustrating and worrying that people were so wrong about the world.” How indeed “could policy makers and politicians solve global problems if they were operating on the wrong facts? How could business people make sensible decisions for their organizations if their worldview were upside down? And how could each person going about their life know which issues they should be stressed and worried about?” Of course, “we are all wrong sometimes — even me, I will readily admit that — but how could so many people be wrong about so much?”
Hans Rosling
It isn’t because people lack knowledge, Rosling said. Perhaps, he added, the problem is that our knowledge is outdated, “often several decades old.” People, he said, have a worldview dated to the time when their teachers had left school. Eventually, Rosling realized that “there was something more going on.” It wasn’t just an “upgrade problem” that could be fixed with better teaching tools.
Rosling said he had a defining moment in Jan. 2015 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The participants included the world’s “most powerful and influential political and business leaders, entrepreneurs, researchers, activists, journalists, and even many high-ranking [United Nations] officials….” Rosling said they knew more than the general public about poverty, but they were wrong about future population growth and the availability of basic primary health care. “Here,” Rosling noted, “were people who had access to all the latest data and to advisers who could continuously update them. Their ignorance could not possibly be down to an outdated worldview.”
Rosling believed he had found the “culprit” — the main reason why many people, including very intelligent people, misinterpret the facts even when they are right there in front of them:
He blames our “dramatic instincts” which lead to an “overdramatic worldview.”
Think about the world, Rosling said.
“War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading.”
In fact, Rosling said, “the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”
Believe it or not.
According to Rosling, the overdramatic worldview is so difficult to shift because it comes from the very way our brains work.
“The human brain is a product of millions of years of evolution, and we are hard-wired with instincts that helped our ancestors to survive in small groups of hunters and gatherers. Our brains often jump to swift conclusions without much thinking, which used to help us to avoid immediate dangers. We are interested in gossip and dramatic stories, which used to be the only source of news and useful information. We crave sugar and fat, which used to be life-saving sources of energy when food was scarce. We have many instincts that used to be useful thousands of years ago, but we live in a very different world now.
“Our cravings for sugar and fat make obesity one of the largest health problems in the world today. We have to teach our children, and ourselves, to stay away from sweets and chips. In the same way, our quick-thinking brains and cravings for drama — our dramatic instincts — are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview.”
Rosling said we still need these dramatic instincts to give meaning to our world and get us through the day. “But we need to learn to control our drama intake,” he added. “Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray.”
To be continued
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