Factfulness, Instincts, and Antidotes — Hans, Ola and Anna Rosling

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - Hans Rosling

Instincts, mega-misconceptions, and antidotes

The late physician Hans Rosling, in his questionnaires to people around the world, noticed a recurring pattern: that people tend to think that “the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless — in short, more dramatic — than it really is”. They often gave incorrect answers to basic world facts, like population growth, immunization rates, and poverty. This was true not only of the college students he taught, but of the political and corporate leaders he spoke to at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

As Rosling later asks:

“How [can] business people make sensible decisions for their organizations if their worldview [is] upside down?”
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, & Anna Rosling Rönnlund. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

Indeed, these distortions prompted Hans Rosling, along with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund (the Roslings), to write Factfulness with the tagline: ten reasons we’re wrong about the world and why things are better than you think. In it, they outline ten “mega misconceptions” or “instincts” that people make, and potential antidotes for them.

Gap instinct

The Roslings begin Factfulness with the gap instinct, which describes our tendency to divide the world into categories — a “dramatic instinct toward binary thinking” that distorts our sense of proportions. The most common example, of course, is the misconception that there are poor countries and rich countries only. “While extreme and unacceptable poverty exists”, the Roslings remind us that “low income countries are much more developed than most people think”.

Indeed, around three quarters of people today live in middle-income nations (with a high amount of intranational variation as well); and child mortality around the world is on the decline. The gap instinct, while simple and convenient, is not helpful if we want a proportionate worldview.

To defend against the gap instinct, the Roslings say it’s important to remember that things are rarely categorical. Because gradients and ranges exist, it’s essential to compare averages and extremes with care. Sometimes, their distributions will overlap, telling a different story. Likewise, we should realize that we ourselves lie somewhere on the distributions we talk about. Our conditional experience affects the way in which we perceive and extrapolate.

The authors provide us with a particularly pragmatic antidote:

“Misconceptions disappear only if there is some equally simple but more relevant way of thinking to replace them.”
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, & Anna Rosling Rönnlund. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

For this reason, Rosling likes to talk about country incomes on four levels. While simple, it is more representative than the rich-poor or developed-developing dichotomies we tend to use.

Negative instinct

Second is the negative instinct, which describes our deep-seated belief that “the world is getting worse”. While the specter of climate disaster and nuclear war looms, humanity has made numerous strides forward. For one, “over the last 20 years, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has almost halved”.

Factfulness shows readers that many bad things, like world hunger, legal slavery, HIV infections, oil spills, ozone depletion, and plane crash deaths, are declining. Meanwhile, many good things, like literacy rates, democracy rates, scholarly articles, new movies and music, internet access, and immunization rates, are rising around the world (learn more at Gapminder).

Our instinct for the negative is distorted by the way in which we absorb the present and perceive the past. We are prone, for example, to romanticize the past. We “glorify [our] early experiences”, as nations “glorify their histories.” Selective news reporting adds further to the dilemma. Negative news, like corruption and disease, are abrupt, visceral events. Journalists, after all, do not report on the thousands of flights that do not crash. Progress is often slow, haphazard, and rarely newsworthy.

Bad and better

To manage our negative instinct, the Roslings say it helps to recognise that world trends can be both “bad and better”. Yes, abhorrent crimes against humanity persist to this day. Humankind has a lot to work on. But we shouldn’t disregard the progress made in between. At the same time, we must not censor history. Doing so would “deprive ourselves and our children of the truth”, and inhibit our ability to learn from the achievements and mistakes of our forebears.

“Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, & Anna Rosling Rönnlund. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

Straight line instinct

Similar to the gap instinct is the straight line instinct, which describes our tendency to assume that trend lines continue as they have in the past. Around 8,000 BC, the world population was estimated at around 5 million people. Today, the number sits at nearly 8 billion people. Here, the straight line instinct would anticipate continued exponential growth. We know, of course, that population studies expect world numbers to decelerate, moving between 9 and 12 billion instead by 2100.

While the example is trite, it is emblematic of our behaviour. Many people see the historical rise in housing prices and assume it must continue evermore with utmost certainty. Conversely, when financial markets dip for an extended period, many believe that prices will keep falling.

My point is not whether these expectations are right or wrong. Rather, it is the Roslings’ reminder that relations and distributions can take many forms: “straight lines”, “s-bends”, “humps”, and “doubling lines”. It’s critical then to recognize what shapes are likely and why. There may be feedback loops and tipping points in the system that are not yet reflected in historical data. So the past is not always an indicator of the future.

Sometimes, the phenomenon is not immediately intuitive either. The authors point out, for example, how dental health may deteriorate with rising income as people buy more candy, but improve as income rises even further (i.e., with access to dental care and public education).

Destiny instinct

A close cousin of the straight line instinct is the destiny instinct. As Rosling writes, “it’s the idea that things are as they are for ineluctable, inescapable reasons… unchanging and unchangeable”. We know, of course, that most things in our physical, natural, and social world are constantly changing. History has shown this many times over with the economic transformations that followed the agricultural, industrial, and internet revolutions.

Our cultural and legal institutions are just as malleable. Hans recalls, for example, that “abortion in Sweden was still, except on very limited grounds, illegal” in the 1960s. “Young pregnant students”, he says, “travelled to Poland” for safe abortions. Then, just “five years later, Poland banned abortion and Sweden legalized it” — reversing the flows of young women. To paraphrase Niall Ferguson in The Great Degeneration, institutions can and do change, much like a slow moving landscape.

Size instinct

You might have also picked up on the size instinct from the examples above. Numbers can look big or small when we have nothing to compare it to. To paraphrase former U.S. SecDef Ash Carter in Inside the Five Sided Box, the price of prevention seems exorbitant until we understand the cost of inaction. The remedy, of course, is obvious: compare, contrast, and divide. Of course, we have to choose our anchors carefully. Bad benchmarks and assumptions are equally distorting.

“In Sweden, a fatal bear attack is a once-in-a-century event. Meanwhile, a woman is killed by her partner every 30 days. This is a 1,300-fold difference in magnitude. And yet one more domestic murder had barely registered, while the hunting death was big news.”
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, & Anna Rosling Rönnlund. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

Generalization instinct

Humans love to analogize, categorize, and generalize. While “they give structure to our thoughts”, it “can also distort our worldview”. Politics today is an example of this. It suffers from a toxic mix of the gap, generalization, and fear instinct. Today, you are either ‘left’ or ‘right’, with ‘us’ or ‘them’. And with that comes a slew of stereotypes and prejudices that ignore our multidimensional wants and beliefs.

The Roslings remind us to question our categories. We should not assume that we are “normal” and others are “idiots”. Empathy is necessary to overcome the generalization instinct. As importantly, we should “beware of generalizing from one group to another”. Hans recalls, for example, that following the Korean War, “doctors and nurses discovered that unconscious soldiers stretchered off the battlefields survived more often if they were laid on their fronts rather than on their backs” (to avoid “[suffocation] on their own vomit”).

But “the success of the recovery position inspired new public health advice [in the 1960s]… to put babies to sleep on their tummies”. And it was only until 1985 that doctors learned that the “generalization error” might contribute to sudden infant deaths. The authors lament that “it took Swedish authorities another seven years to accept their mistake and reverse the policy” — a harrowing reminder of generalization risk, and the need to reassess our position as new evidence surfaces.

Single perspective instinct

A running theme throughout Factfulness is our desire for simplicity. Experts are not immune, either. As Maslow’s hammer goes, ‘to the man with the hammer, everything is a nail’. Often, we’ll overextend ourselves, believing our limited knowledge is sufficient to understand multifaceted phenomena. What’s more, victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect do not realize when outside expertise or alternative solutions are necessary. And when this single perspective instinct is taken to extremes, dogmatism and ideology takes root — “[blinding us] to information that doesn’t fit [our] perspective”. Rosling reminds us to “welcome complexity”, to “be open to ideas from other fields” and “to look at the world in lots of different ways”.

Fear instinct

The next instinct is fear. While a valuable evolutionary response, fear can distort our senses and inhibit critical thinking. At the time of writing, the Roslings point out that “3,172 people [in the U.S.] die from terrorism over the last 20 years”. By contrast, “alcohol contributed to the death of 1.4 million people [in the U.S.] during those same years”.

Should we feel as strongly an aversion towards alcohol poisoning, heart disease and road accidents as we do to terrorism? There’s no easy answer. But we should endeavor, the Roslings say, to “[be] afraid of the right things”. We have to remember that “frightening and dangerous are two different things”. Risk, after all, is a function of magnitude and likelihood.

Redirecting our fears and priorities, however, is tricky, especially when the fear and negative instinct are working in tandem. Here, the authors offer a helpful tip: “ask yourself what kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?”. If your answer is ‘nothing’, then you’re probably beyond the realm of fact and reason.

Blame instinct

Many of us like to play the blame game. Executives, politicians, journalists, foreigners, refugees, bankers, and consultants. The list goes on. The blame instinct is simple and convenient. It makes us feel righteous. But like the gap and generalization instinct, hunting for heroes and villains “distracts us from the more complex truth”. We can find the “more likely suspects”, Rosling says, in institutions and technology, and “multiple interacting causes – a system”.

“Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was syphilis… In Russia, it was called the Polish disease. In Poland, it was the German disease; in Germany, the French disease; … We need someone to blame, and if a single foreigner came here with the disease, then we would happily blame a whole country. No further investigation needed.”
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, & Anna Rosling Rönnlund. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

Urgency instinct

The final instinct in Factfulness is the urgency instinct. While our propensity to act might serve us well in the ancient savannas, it’s not always helpful in the modern world. Stress and urgency, the Roslings remind us, “amplifies our other instincts” because people get less time to think carefully. As a consultant, I’ve seen too many workplaces concoct an unhealthy mix of urgency, fear, and negativity. Each division, in their race to meet some arbitrary deadline or target, pursues the wrong initiative and misallocates capital. They miss the bigger picture.

Factfulness: Bad but better

To close, I can see why Factfulness is “one of the most important books” to Bill Gates. The Roslings show how different instincts can combine in a lollapalooza way — distorting our worldview and hindering high quality decision-making. Their reflections provide a bulwark against the drama of contemporary media and public discourse; and are worth incorporating into one’s mental model.

Before we criticise the Roslings for being too rosy, remember this: things are bad but better. Yes, humankind is endlessly dysfunctional. Crimes against humanity demand urgent action. The Roslings too are worried about “the risks of global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty”. But we do ourselves, history, and truth-seeking a disservice if we live myopically. To take effective, proportionate action, we must try to see the world as it really is. Factfulness is an important reminder of that.

Reference

Rosling, Hans., Rosling, Ola., & Rosling Rönnlund, Anna. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Available at < https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/ >
Carter, Ash. (2019). Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon. More articles and research from Carter at < https://www.belfercenter.org/person/ash-carter/publication >
Ferguson, Niall. (2012). The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economeis Die.