POSITIVE CORNER #15: Our View of the World – Fundamentally Flawed and Too Negative
How can we make the right decisions to solve global problems when even highly educated people often get their assessments of the situation very far and systematically wrong? This was one of the core ideas of the Swedish researcher Hans Rosling, who began conducting scientific research over 20 years ago into the extent of our systematic misconceptions about the state of the world. The regular studies he initiated repeatedly show that even monkeys, when making a random selection from certain assessments of the global situation, are closer to reality than thousands of people in the same survey. On average, people’s assessments were significantly worse and tended to be far too negative in almost all areas.
In one of the more recent surveys, conducted in 2020 with over 1,000 respondents selected at random and on a representative basis across Scandinavia, the GapMinder Foundation, which carried out the survey, reached the following conclusion:
"Monkeys do better than people in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland on sustainability facts!
We have a brand new test with 18 questions related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which we tested on people in four Nordic countries.
Most humans got 1 to 4 correct answers. They would have scored better if they had closed their eyes and picked answers randomly, as all questions had three answer options which means that the average monkey (or human with closed eyes who don’t know what answers they choose) would pick the right answer every third time, by pure luck, giving them 6 correct answers. [...]
It was yet more proof that humans suffer from systematic misconceptions on important global facts despite all of this data and these facts being freely available on the internet!
Some of the shocking misconceptions we found included:
Many wrongly believe that fossil fuels are no longer the major energy sources.
In people’s heads there are 10 times more refugees than in reality.
Most have the impression that suicides are becoming more common in the world.
Many wrongly think that more than a third of all plastic waste ends up in oceans.
With our heads full of misconceptions such as these, we won’t be able to build a sustainable future. Knowledge should be shared by as many people as possible, if we are to choose the right path to a sustainable planet." (ref. https://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/studies/sdg2020/).
What can we conclude from this:
The world is probably far better than we think.
To make effective decisions aimed at further improving global living conditions, we need to make a huge, sustained effort to educate people about global realities.
Two leading figures in this field are the health researcher Hans Rosling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling), who died in 2017, and the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker), both of whom have published extensively on this subject.
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