Transcriber: Sarah M Reviewer: Keira White
It seems fair to make the assumption
that everything in the world is going wrong.
Cities are being put into lockdown,
activists are being jailed for standing up for the rights
of underprivileged groups and protesters,
even bystanders, some of whom are children,
are being detained and killed
for questioning autocratic military regimes,
and, as such, quite understandably,
most people believe that the world is a terrible place.
Yet for some reason,
they don’t seem to feel quite the same way about their local areas.
This is an example of the fascinating phenomena
of individual optimism and social pessimism
which several studies have found to apply to communities almost universally.
In one study, for example, the proportion of respondents
who rated the environment in their local area,
nation and the whole world, as being very or fairly bad
was recorded in a number of countries.
This revealed that people generally thought
of their local area as being better than the rest of their country.
And in most countries, people also felt
that they were better off than the rest of the world.
In particular, it was found
that if asked about the environment of a specific country,
the likelihood of an individual responding negatively increased exponentially
the further away the country in question was.
So why does this matter, you ask?
Why are we seeing this?
Why are we?
Or at least, why do we seem to be social pessimists?
Well, experts typically land on three main reasons.
One, that we rarely take the time to consider issues of a large magnitude,
such as those affecting an entire country, or indeed, the whole world,
and so when posed questions regarding them,
we tend to give answers
that are not exactly, fully thought out.
Two: the nature of the questions themselves asked in the study
I discussed, among others,
leads to an unintended bias.
That is, people think: “Well, if there weren’t a problem,
why would they be asking any of these questions?”
A reasonable judgment to make.
And three and perhaps most importantly,
the already limited knowledge that individuals possess
regarding the subject matter of these questions
is further restricted to that of transitory,
or temporary occurrences that they have heard about recently,
and are not representative of the bigger picture;
an example of a tendency known as availability bias.
Usually, word of these transitory occurrences
comes from the media, who have a knack
for reporting on extremely unusual, large scale events, or sudden changes.
This is not their fault.
Sensationalist reporting is simply what grabs our attention
and keeps us reading, listening, or watching,
but what it does mean is that our worldview has become,
and still is, shaped not by the steady and pervasive global trends
that media outlets seem to omit in their stories,
but rather by strange, atypical events that fail to accurately capture reality.
And the effect of this is that our preconceptions regarding
global development are far more negative than the reality of the situation.
Perhaps the most notable example of this systemic pessimism
can be seen in the results of a recent study
on global poverty conducted by international research firm Ipsos.
52% of the people whom they surveyed
in a number of countries
believed that global poverty has been on the rise in the last 20 years.
A further 28% thought that it had stayed at the same levels,
meaning that only one in five people were able to correctly identify
that the proportion of the global population
living in poverty has in fact, fallen over the last two decades.
And what’s interesting is that the share of people
who were able to identify this was disproportionately lower
in high income countries, only 9% in France, Italy and Japan.
This is in line with the theory of availability bias
which, I discussed earlier because in the last 20 years,
it has largely only been the populations
of low and middle income countries who have experienced
the effects of development first hand, leaving us
and those in the “developed world” with increasingly outdated views.
In fact, if you look at the data,
it’s shocking the sheer extent of change we’ve managed to simply gloss over
because in the last 20 years,
global poverty has not just dipped by a measly 1 or 2%
but fallen by an incredible 20.
In fact, hunger, child labour,
teen pregnancies and smoking are all in decline.
And this change comes hand-in-hand with an increase
in the average length of time spent in education, literacy rates,
access to the Internet and even height.
So, I guess what I’m trying to say to you is this:
Yes, the world is still afflicted with its fair share of problems,
but, for our faith in humanity, I urge you all to take a big step back.
Consider the bigger picture
because only then is it that we will be able to appreciate
all it is that we have achieved so far.
Thank you.
(Applause)