THINGS ARE NOT AS BAD AS YOU THINK

After several people recommended that I read a fairly new book on cognitive biases, I read Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World– and Why Things are Better Than You Think (2018) by Hans Rosling. It is a good read. It is about how thinking goes wrong and specifically how so much of our thinking about the world is wrong. That’s because of the availability bias. We know what we know due to what the media offers us via the news, journals, TV shows, movies, etc.

It’s also because of several biases that drive the media generally— our bias for the negative, the fearful, the bad, the dramatic, the sensational, etc. and given the media, most people think that the world is in really bad shape. Yet it is not.

“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.” (p. 13)

Now to demonstrate that Rosling quotes the numbers— the numbers that originate by the United Nations and other international organizations. The problem Rosling says is that “our brains often jump to swift conclusions without much thinking.” He says that we have “dramatic instincts” by which we give meaning to things and which accounts for our attraction to dramatic stories. From there he identifies various mechanisms (he calls them “instincts”) that trick our brains to draw false conclusions. I have here labeled them as biases (to not confuse how the word instinct is typically used).

“But we need to control our drama intake. Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is...” (p. 15)

The first one that he addresses is the “gap instinct” which is driven by binary thinking which you probably know as either-or thinking, black-or-white thinking. It seems that we humans love to dichotomize: good versus bad; heroes versus villains, rich versus poor. That’s why we tend to divide the world in two on a great many issues. And whereas— “... the world used to be divided into two but isn’t any longer. Today, most people are in the middle. There’s no gap between the West and the rest, between developed and developing, between rich and poor.” (p. 27)

He asks, “of the world population, what percentage lives in low-income countries?” The majority suggests the answer was 50 center or more, the average guess was 59%. The real figure is 9 percent (p. 30). That led him to divide the world population of 2017 into four levels.

“Today the vast majority of people are spread out in the middle across levels 2 and 3, with the same range of standards of living as people had in Western Europe and North America in the 1950s.” He next identifies the “negativity” bias— our tendency to notice the bad more than the good. Extreme poverty rate (defined as living on Level I, on less than $2 a day) has moved from 85% (most of humanity) in 1800 to 9% in 2017 (page. 52). And in the “last 20 years extreme poverty dropped faster than ever in world history.” This negativity bias feeds the media. Media needs the drama that negative stories create to sell newspapers and news broadcasts.

Next is the fear bias. “When we are afraid, we do not see clearly. ... Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.” (p. 103). The image of a dangerous world has never been broadcasted more effectively than it is now. Journalists have done an incredible job in reporting every disaster as if it were the worst ever. As a result, the world seems terribly dangerous and getting worse! Yet paradoxically, “the world has never been less violent and more safe.” (p. 107). Today there are far, far less annual deaths from disasters than ever before. It was 453 per million in 1920, today it is 10 (p. 110).

“In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely ... Only ten ended in fatal accidents.” (112) “Today, conflicts and fatalities from conflicts are at a record low. I have lived through the most peaceful decades in human history. Watching the news, with its never-ending flow of horrifying images, it is almost impossible to believe that.” (113).

The size bias refers to the “instinctive urge to look at a lonely number and misjudge its importance.” Rosling illustrates this with the number 4.2 million— the number of babies who died last year. Alone that is terrible. But if you compare the number with itself at different times, it looks very different. In 2015 it was 4.4 and in 1950 it was 14.4 million (131).

The generalization bias. “Everyone automatically categorizes and generalizes all the time. Unconsciously.” (146). While it is necessary and useful to generalize, it can also be very distortive of one’s perspective. “Wrong generalizations are mind-blockers for all kinds of understanding.” The challenge is to be aware when you are generalizing, and to be conscious of the categories that you create and use. Then as a critical thinker, to question the categories.

The destiny bias. This is “the idea that innate characteristics determine the destinies of people, countries, religions, or cultures. ... things are the way they are ... and will never change.” (p. 167). It may have once made sense when people lived in circumstances that didn’t change much. But not today. Seeing things as not changing operates today as a blinder that prevents seeing the need to update our knowledge. Yet how often we say things like: “He won’t change.” “The politics of Africa won’t change.” “That organization won’t change.”

The single perspective bias. Simple ideas are attractive and we all love the moment that a single idea seems “the key” to everything. It leads to wanting problems to have a single cause which then blind us to multiple causation and systemic causation.

The blame bias — the urge to “find a clear, simple reason for why something bad happened.” (206). Find the guilty party! The problem with finding “the bad guy,” is that when you do, you usually stop thinking. You assume that you are done with thinking, and you can move on. Yet almost everything is more complicated than that! Stop looking for villains and keep looking for causes and contributing factors.

“If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.” (p. 221) “Reflecting reality is not something the media can be expected to do. You should not expect the media to provide you with a fact-based worldview ...” (212). Systemic factors encourage them to produce skewed and over-dramatic news.

The urgency bias is the urge to do something now, today, or it will be too late. “This moment will never come back. Act now.” Yet when you feel the urgency to act now, you will think less critically, if at all. If you feel that you have to learn something now, slow down. Stop cramming. That’s not the best way to learn something. Urgency creates stress and stress amplifies our biases which then blocks us from critical thinking. Stress leads to poorer decisions and can numb you to a real emergency.

Reading Factfulness would be a good antidote for all of those cognitive biases which those in media and in politics seem so susceptible to and which they perpetuate upon us. For the most part, news and politics are two areas that play upon our natural biases the most. As such, they create more unsanity and distorted thinking, not less. And that makes them dangerous to our mental and emotional health.

The next news report that you hear— take a moment to consciously listen for drama, sensationalism, vividness, blame, personalizing, urgency, fear, etc. then believe about 10 percent of what you hear. It will do your brain good.