By Shane O'Driscoll*
Over the last hundred years, has the number of deaths per year from natural disasters approximately halved, stayed the same, or doubled? Take a guess.
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman calls it ‘negativity dominance’ while other psychologists refer to the phenomenon as ‘negativity bias’. It involves believing that things are worse than they actually are. It’s part of human nature, and in the modern era, these biases are strongly reinforced by traditional media and social media platforms. If it bleeds, it leads. This logic applies to general information flows: negative stories get more traction.
How strong is this bias? Swedish physician Hans Rogler spent much of his life trying to highlight these negative tendencies, providing counterevidence and measuring the gap between perception and reality. His work is summarised in a popular 2018 book, Factfulness and continues with the Gapminder Foundation.
The book analyses public perceptions collected from survey data and compares these beliefs with empirical evidence. The variations between beliefs and real data reinforce the ‘negativity bias’. The work is commendable and enlightening.
Inspired by this work, Qwizard, replicated some of these questions in a pub quiz environment, collecting the results and comparing the statistics. As the authors of Factfulness regularly highlight, a monkey would score higher than the respondents on most questions.
Over the last hundred years, has the number of deaths per year from natural disasters approximately halved, stayed the same, or doubled?
Answer: halved
How many got it right? NZ pub quiz teams: 13.0%, Factfulness survey data: 10%
According to the World Bank, in all low-income countries, what is the rate of girls who finish primary school: 20%, 40% or 60%?
Answer: 60%
How many got it right? NZ pub quiz teams: 17.9%, Factfulness survey data: 9%
What percentage of the world's one-year-old children today have been vaccinated against at least one disease, according to research by Dr Hans Rosling? 20%, 50% or 80%
Answer: 80%
How many got it right? NZ pub quiz teams: 20.9%, Factfulness survey data: 14%
According to author Hans Rosling, how many people in the world have some access to electricity? 20%, 50% or 80%
Answer: 80%
How many got it right? NZ pub quiz teams: 47.8%, Factfulness survey data: 25%
In 1996, tigers, giant pandas and black rhinos were all listed as endangered. How many of these three species are more critically endangered today?
Answer: 0
How many got it right? NZ pub quiz teams: 2.4%, Factfulness survey data: 7%
Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school, on average. How many years have women of the same age spent in school: 3, 6, or 9 years?
Answer: 9 years
How many got it right? NZ pub quiz teams: 4.1%, Factfulness survey data: 20%
Compare these statistics to the average score across a group of monkeys, which would be 33.3%.
Note that the pub quiz results are based on team data, with a minimum sample size of 400 people, while the Factfulness surveys involved 12,000 respondents across 14 countries. Factfulness research covers 13 questions in total. Qwizard offered a sample of relevant questions that fit with their pub quiz format.
Overall, the comparisons with the empirical evidence are emphatic, supporting the theory that human preconceptions and negative bias dominates our thinking. Across all the questions, the monkeys reign supreme.
For human results to improve, the negativity bias needs to first be recognised. People should expect that bad news will dominate information flows and is more likely to reach us. Understanding these biases may help to introduce some positivity and may mean we could beat the monkeys.
Shane O'Driscoll is the CEO of Qwizard, the supplier of our weekly quiz.
19 Comments
Evolutionarily we're not wired to have to form such detailed understandings of anything much further than walking distance.
So in the absence of holding all that knowledge, we fill the gaps with our guesses.
Another interesting read. Great Saturday morning.
To a degree I can see how this gap between actual and perceived has been exploited. For example the proliferation of expensive, constipating, regulations like traffic management, worksafe, earthquake strengthening, making children's playgrounds so safe, children don't learn essential skills around risk taking and consequences.
The challenge then is closing the gap and unwinding some of the regulations, accepting that pain, suffering and even (qualitatively premature) loss of life are inherent to living.
But I think there are a lot of vested interests and egos that will do all they can to prevent such unwinding and perpetuate or even grow that perception:reality gap. After all there is very good coin to be siphoned out of people's pockets.
children don't learn essential skills around risk taking and consequences.
There is mounting evidence children's intelligence has declined since 2010. In basically every area, so it's not as if literacy has fallen and numeracy has improved, it's all down.
One of the theories is that computers are designed to make everything fairly easy, and the human mind needs to be challenged to develop decent cognition and reasoning skills. Likewise with modern telecommunications it's easy to ghost people or interact when you feel like it, so kids also aren't developing decent in person social skills.
Anything of lasting value requires friction, yet we are wanting life to be as safe and predictable as possible - which is a fools errand anyway.
Or the relevant measurements haven't kept up with the changing curriculum?
Eg. I couldn't even tell you how many shillings in a sixpence!
It sounds like it's most measurements. Could be worth a watch
https://youtu.be/Fd-_VDYit3U?si=edIn50gLcX1bjJfj
A few European countries have removed devices from schools. Many of the big tech billionaires send their kids to schools that don't have devices.
If I may pick apart some excerpts from that clip - he says it's all correlative at this stage, contradicts himself about gen z being the first to be lagging, by referencing some research stretching to the 1960's where tech adoption negatively affected learning. He also mentions kids attending "more" school now, perhaps there's something in that.
I don't buy that kids are getting dumber, nor that technology is a main reason, more likely our definitions of intelligence and aims for education are mismatched. What is the aim of education for kids?
Consider if we compared our manual skill proficiency against that of 50+ years ago, we'd measure poorly but what good are such skills with modern technology beyond novelty, knowing that learning them is simply a YouTube or AI prompt away.
Anecdotally I see plenty of young people excelling in (notably in creative & sporting) endeavours that traditionally have taken people many years to master, im sure in part because the learning material is so easily accessible online.
Perhaps we are moving into a new age of post-literacy? Some broader ideas discussed here: https://youtu.be/xb3zfu1rqFg?si=VV6jZDPOSrNNpX4T really interesting longview stuff
Also, please note that big tech billionaires are not role models.
Devices are being pulled out of schools across Europe. They're linking them to decreased attention spans, increases in anxiety, lower literacy, etc.
Some of these downsides aren't just limited to children either.
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I've not noticed any perceptable decline in children's intelligence; certainly ever diminishing social playing beyond the bounds of adult supervision - but that's another story.
However the general intelligence of politicians and journalists is clearly declining. Some of their proposals show wide knowledge (Google search) but no linking thought processing. For example the $685m harbour bridge cyclepath or the proposed three free GP visits per year whether we need them or not when NZ has too few GPs and half of those we do have are about to retire. And paid for by capital gains - a tax revenue that shrinks when there is a recession. I'm sure readers have their own favourites. Fifty years ago politicians were often tackling the wrong problems in ways that didn't work but at least they could string ideas together persuasively.
See the clip above.
Humans are taking massive risks by accelerating GHG levels causing global warming, but at the same time strengthening building earthquake design and construction standards (I agree to this), seat belts in cars,driving speed limits, food safety regulations, air safety rules...
'making children's playgrounds so safe, children don't learn essential skills around risk taking and consequences.' makes sense imo if you are a school board of governors member or teaching staff not wishing to supervise every child all day at school. Parents can allow and facilitate childrens learning of risk taking through managing childrens learning experiences in rivers, at beaches, near sea cliffs, with rock climbing, skiing, biking, tramping, canoeing, contact sports and even non contact sports where sprains and broken bones can happen.
accepting that pain, suffering and even (qualitatively premature) loss of life are inherent to living.
Need it be? What's the point of growth if not working toward eliminating such undesirable (and uneconomical) things.
I wonder how AI would perform
That'll be the next muting of intelligence.
Shows our pub quiz talent isn't up to par, or maybe that one overly cynical person in the quiz team is getting too much air time.
Media set the tone on parliamentary politics. They report the combat there. They don't report the work.
Business and commerce is 90% co operation. And 3% competition. If you didn't see that you would never get on an airliner again.
Yet the discussion focuses on the competition.
Pretty true. The better businesses are usually the ones that are able to work in well with both suppliers, employees and customers.
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