Recently, I was listening to a TED talk by Hans Rosling (pictured left, a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician, and Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet) who introduced a new barrier to development: Ignorance.
He started by asking the audience a few questions. The first was; ‘Looking at the global average, how many years did women, now aged 30, spend at school: three, five or seven years?’ The vast majority answered three, yet the correct answer is actually seven years. Everyone is aware that there are countries and areas where girls have extreme difficulties with education, but in the majority of the world, where most people live, girls tend to go to school for as long as boys do. Women still face gender discrimination, but schooling is no longer an issue. When we are asked these sorts of questions, we tend to answer with the worst scenario in mind, and ignore the majority.
The second question was; ‘How has the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty changed in the last 20 years? Has it doubled, remain the same, or halved? The answer is that poverty has almost halved, yet in the US, only 5% of the public got it right. This is due to preconceived ideas. Those who think they can never end extreme poverty don’t realise how much progress has already been achieved. Hans Rosling suggests that the first thing you need when looking at how to improve the future, is to ensure you have the correct facts about the present.
These questions, selected from the ‘Ignorance Project’ run by Hans and his son, Ola Rosling, highlight that the public’s score when asked these questions is worse than randomly selected answers from chimps! This needs to change if we are to see further development. People are fixated on preconceived ideas. The challenge is to think differently, not to focus on the minority, and to understand where the majority sits. At an EU Media Conference, Hans asked the audience; ‘What percentage of the world’s one-year-old children are vaccinated against measles? 20%, 50% or 80%?’ The answer is 80%, and yet only 6% of the audience answered correctly. The problem is not that people don’t listen to the media, but that the media is always looking for sensational headlines, which can often be at odds with the real facts.
So why are we so ignorant? Our view of how life is biased by where we grow up. We all have different experiences from communities and the people we meet, so we all have our own personal bias. In Ola’s opinion, ‘some teachers tend to teach outdated world views, trotting out what they learnt at school rather than how the world has changed since. Textbooks will always be outdated as it is impossible to keep up with the rapid development that we are experiencing. Outdated facts, combined with our personal bias and a little manipulation by the media, only further our ignorance.’
Ola Rosling explains how we must use our human intuition to overcome our ignorance. Generalising is the key, and here are his four rules of thumb:
- Most things improve. However most of us have the misconception that everything is getting worse. So if you’re sitting with a question in front of you and you’re unsure. You should guess “improve.” Don’t go for the worst case.
- Most people are in the middle. We must not let extreme facts obscure our intuition. Yes, the gap between the richest and the poorest is increasing, but if you take away the richest and poorest 1%, the gap is actually decreasing, and decreasing very rapidly.
- The majority already have it – for example electricity, and girls attending school. Our world is developing quickly, and for most people, services and resources are widely available.
- If you are afraid of it, you are going to exaggerate the problem. Fear of anything, such as earthquakes, other religions, terrorists, or even sharks, is likely to lead you to come to the wrong conclusion. These fears need to be put into context within global statistics/views.
A better understanding of the world we live in today, will give us a better chance of succeeding in the future.
Kitty (UVI) – Head of Alumnae
