[True: Is the world getting worse? 3 reasons for your negative intuition bias

"Do you think the world is getting better or worse today?"

In TV reports and social news, we always see a lot of news: overfishing and sea pollution have caused many species to become endangered, excessive emission of greenhouse gases has caused global warming, terrorist attacks have occurred in certain regions, and so on.

Most of the time we receive relatively negative news, and over time it seems that there are more bad things in our lives.

According to a statistic mentioned in the book The Truth, when people in 30 progressive countries were interviewed "Do you think the world is getting better or worse today?", more than half of all countries answered that it was getting worse.

【Is the world really getting worse? Or is it actually being misjudged by our negative intuition?】

Before mentioning three common negative intuitions, I would like to ask you one more question:

"How many girls in low-income countries around the world will finish primary school today?"

A. 20% / B. 40% / C. 60%

Among those in advanced countries, only 7 percent answered this question correctly. Most still believe that girls in low-income countries are exaggerated because of gender discrimination.

However, the answer to this question is 60%. I was shocked when I saw the answer, it turned out to be so high!

In fact, the world is actually getting better. In addition to the above-mentioned high school attendance rate of girls, the average life expectancy of the world's population has exceeded 72 years, and the child mortality rate has dropped from 40% in 1900 to <4% today;

The amount of ozone depleting substances has also been reduced by 80 times since 1970, and the rate of land protection has also increased from 0.03% in 1900 to 15% now.

In fact, these data all tell the signs of the world for the better.

【Three main causes of our negative intuition】

1. Bring past memories to the present:

Everyone is used to remembering the past. Things and data learned in childhood and youth are often ingrained in our minds.

As a result, when the world grows older and the world progresses rapidly, the common sense in the mind is not updated, and all that is remembered is the more tragic and unfriendly data in the past.

2. Selective coverage by news media and activists:

Because the human brain evolves and is accustomed to remembering negative things, which is beneficial to human survival.

Therefore, most news reports have to be shocking and scary enough to attract human attention. This is why we always see reports of tragedies on the news, but rarely news that the world is progressing.

With the rapid advancement of technology, we receive more and more information every day, but also thousands of fake news. Most people always think from the news that the crime rate is increasing year by year, but in fact it is gradually decreasing.

3. Talk about bad things as getting better, as if cold-blooded

Many people may feel that there are still many tragedies going on in the world. Yes that's right, there will never be a day when nothing bad happens.

But in fact, the world is getting better; it doesn't mean that we should ignore the bad things that are decreasing, but we should keep a positive attitude to face the problems.

[Truth-seeking habits you should cultivate to reverse negative intuition bias]

According to the above three reasons, in order to reverse the negative intuition, we should maintain these two mentalities: "doubt the accuracy of news reports at any time" and "expect bad news to be easily exaggerated".

For too much negative news and fake news, we must learn to be suspicious and critical at the first moment of receiving the information, and don’t make rash comments before carefully understanding the truth, otherwise it will easily become the transmission of fake news and negative intuition By.

We also try to distinguish between "state" and "trend to change." There can be parts of the world that are bad, but they can be getting better, the two are not in conflict.

Regarding bad news is easy to be rendered, remember that when you see bad news in the future, you should also pay attention to whether the good news is reported; if there is always only one-sided bad news, sometimes it only means that the world's monitoring of bad things is improved, not necessarily It's the world getting worse.

Maintain a positive attitude and always maintain a critical thinking to face all the information received in life, in order to avoid negative intuition bias, really identify the problem and solve it.

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