Why Factfulness’ contradiction matters

Simon de Deney / Uncategorized / factfulness, story, storytelling /

January 24, 2019

Bill Gates thought it so important, he gave it away free to all US students who graduated in 2018. What was it? Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund’s Factfulness. It’s a great read with a great contradiction at its heart.

Read it and you come away with, possibly perversely, both a more positive and more realistic view of trends in human progress. It’s also one of those books that makes you feel smarter than you actually are (that might just be me).

Rosling lays out ten human biases he shows are responsible for our distorted world view. He describes these as:

The Gap,
Negativity,
Straight Line,
Fear,
Size,
Generalisation,
Destiny,
Single Perspective,
Blame, and
Urgency instincts

They are all cognitive biases which tend to make us believe that the world is going to hell in a handcart rather than ascending heavenward (but on a stopping train).

World leaders wronger than chimps

Rosling describes how he illustrated how common these cognitive biases among different audiences. He used to travel the world asking audiences questions about human progress. Ostensibly to make things easier they were presented with multiple choice answers. Typical questions were:

“In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school? A: 20%, B: 40%, C: 60%” and
“In 1996 tigers, giant pandas and black rhinos were all listed as endangered. How many of these three species are more critically endangered today? A: Two of them, B: One of them, C: None of them”

Yet, overwhelmingly his audiences got them wrong. They consistently held gloomier views than the facts supported. Even at the World Economic Forum, where you’d really expect the participants to be far better informed than the rest of us, Rosling gleefully reports that they got fewer of the answers right than ‘chimps’ (Rosling’s affectionate way of describing choosing the answers randomly).

Rosling’s prescription? More facts

Rosling, completely reasonably, argues that we need to be better informed to help us guard against this emotionally distorted view of the world that is factually inaccurate, rather depressing and which opens so many of us up to the siren requiems of agenda media and populist terrormongers.

Yet the most powerful and memorable parts of Factfulness are emotionally driven – his stories.

The magic washing machine

For example, Rosling tells a simple, moving story about his mother’s reaction when they first got a washing machine. “She said, ‘Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.’ Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the ‘ABC’s’ – this is where I started my career as a professor, when my mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for herself. She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. And we really, we really loved this machine.”

Ice hotels and Africa

Or, in another powerful tale, Rosling also describes giving, what he calls, ‘the lecture of my life’, to 500 women leaders at an African Union conference called “The African Renaissance and Agenda for 2063.” He explained how extreme poverty could be ended in Africa within 20 years. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the African Union’s chair, sat right in front of him. When he asked her afterwards for her feedback, she said, “the graphics were nice, and you are good at talking, but you don’t have any vision.”

Rosling continues, “What?! You think I lack vision?” I asked in offended disbelief. “But I said that extreme poverty in Africa could be history within 20 years.” Nkosazana replied, “Oh, yes, you talked about eradicating extreme poverty, which is a beginning, but you stopped there. Do you think Africans will settle with getting rid of extreme poverty and be happy living in only ordinary poverty?… As a finishing remark you said that you hoped your grandchildren would come as tourists to Africa and travel on the new high-speed trains we plan to build. What kind of a vision is that? It is the same old European vision.” Nkosazana looked me straight in my eyes. “It is my grandchildren who are going to visit your continent and travel on your high-speed trains and visit that exotic ice hotel I’ve heard you have up in northern Sweden… But my 50-year vision is that Africans will be welcome tourists in Europe and not unwanted refugees.” Then she broke into a broad, warm smile. “But the graphics were really nice. Now let’s go and have some coffee.”

It’s a beautifully self-deprecatory story, particularly as one of Rosling’s targets in the book are people who believe they know better.

Reconciling the impossible?

The irony of Factfulness is that the very mechanism responsible for the ten cognitive biases, our feelings or emotional responses – the mechanism that leads us to answer more of Rosling’s questions wrongly than chimps – is also the one that helps us remember Rosling’s arguments. The feelings generated by his stories are the positive side of the coin.

Win hearts without losing our minds

It’s this irony, I’d argue, that lies at the heart of Factfulness, which presents – if I can be grandiloquent – humanity with one of its great challenges. Namely, is it possible to combine our instinctive thinking with the kind of thinking that facts and factfulness demand? The stakes couldn’t be higher. The rise of populism, distrust of ‘elites’, climate change denial, conspiracy theorising, ‘anti-social media’ all rely on exploiting our feelings of fear allied to the cynical confidence that factfulness isn’t strong enough to withstand these feelings. It’s a game that instinctive thinking tends to win and often leads us to make poor decisions. However, if we can use the facts to work out something that more accurately reflects the reality of a situation and then communicate that with a story which appeals to our instinctive thinking, it should be possible to “win hearts without losing our minds”.

Stories not stuffing

Even less globally, Factfulness’ contradiction matters. For example, stuffing facts into our children rather than engaging them with stories which helps them to remember the facts is an incredibly inefficient and unmotivating way to educate. Or organisations which allow negative stories to circulate when they may actually be performing well are likely to suffer unnecessarily: most social workers do an extraordinary job, alleviating suffering and saving lives daily. But, predictably, we only get to hear about the stories of when things go catastrophically wrong such as, in the UK, with the ‘Baby P’ or the Victoria Climbie cases.

Perhaps it’s time to look at Storyfulness?