Understanding Society
Mean World Syndrome
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Why does the world feel worse even when many measures of human welfare improve? Doug approaches ‘mean world syndrome’ through Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History: news selects exceptional disasters, while gradual progress rarely becomes a headline. Negativity bias makes danger command attention; availability bias makes memorable horrors seem common. The result is a public more cynical, pessimistic, and fearful than the underlying evidence warrants.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
The clinical symptoms of the mean world syndrome are cynicism, misanthropy, and pessimism. People who follow the news are more likely to agree with statements such as ‘Most people only care about themselves.’ They more often believe that we as individuals are helpless to better the world. They are more likely to be stressed and depressed.
A few years ago, people in thirty different countries were asked a simple question. ‘Overall, do you think life is getting better, staying the same, or getting worse?’ In every country from Russia to Canada, from Mexico to Hungary, the vast majority of people answered that things were getting worse. The reality is exactly the opposite. Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labor, deaths from natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever.
So, why don’t we realize this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is—be it a terrorist attack violent uprising, or natural disaster—the bigger its newsworthiness. You’ll never see a headline reading NUMBER OF PEOPLE LIVING IN EXTREME POVERTY DOWN BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY. Nor will you ever see a broadcast go live to a reporter on the ground who says, ‘I’m standing here in the middle of nowhere, where today there is no sign of war.
Why are we humans so susceptible to the gloom and doom of the news? Two reasons. The first is what psychologists call negativity bias: we’re more attuned to the bad than the good. Back in our hunting and gathering days, we were better off being frightened by a spider or a snake hundred times often than one time too few. Too much fear wouldn’t kill you; too few surely would.
Second, we are also burdened with an availability bias. If we can easily recall examples of a given thing, we assume that thing is relatively common. The fact that we’re bombarded daily with horrific stories about aircraft crashes, child snatchers and beheadings—which tend to lodge in the memory—completely skews our view of the world. As the Lebanese statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb dryly notes, ‘We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press.