To me, two of the middle instincts described in the book Factfulness seem closely related: the “size instinct” and the “generalization instinct.” Both can cause us to misjudge the importance of a given factor in a situation.
Hans Rosling describes the size instinct with the following anecdote: early in his career, he spent time as a primary care doctor at the only hospital in a mostly rural, poor area of an African country. A pediatrician friend from Sweden had come for a short visit. After observing Rosling’s behavior during the previous night’s hospital shifts, he took Rosling to task for providing basic care, but not using heroic, complex measures to save a child who’d been admitted to the hospital, suffering from diarrhea and malnutrition. Rosling countered—right now he was the only medical professional in the area with skills to do the procedure needed to save that one child, which would also have required expensive equipment. Over time, he could save many more children by training other medical professionals to provide basic rural health care and by improving the equipment available to them. That way, far fewer children would have to be admitted to the hospital needing complex, heroic measures. Concentrating on that one critically ill child distorted its importance and actually reduced the chances of making a substantial difference in the area’s rates of child mortality.
Per the book’s authors, the somewhat related generalization instinct is often needed to help us live our everyday lives and to make decisions. The problem comes when we overgeneralize—Roslings’ favorite target is the overgeneralization of “developed” and “developing” countries. According to them, “The challenge is to realize which of our categories are misleading … and replace them with better categories.”
To me, our tendencies both to over-categorize and/or to over-stress an isolated case show up in a persistent quandary in journalistic ethics (yes—there is such a thing). Journalists in all media learn fairly early that most people are drawn to stories. In contrast, most of us tend to find statistics boring and overly dry. So, “if it bleeds, it ledes”—journalistic shorthand for telling a compelling story. Ideally, any story chosen should typify the larger pattern it is being used to represent.
For nearly all of us, what we experience directly carries more weight than what we experience at second or third hand. Therefore, journalists, politicians, and others who want to capture our attention try to draw analogies between what we know directly and the positions they are trying to get us to support.
One story, of the shyster “welfare queen,” was instrumental during the 1990’s in helping push through welfare reforms that limited eligibility and instituted additional work requirements for those receiving government assistance. Since nearly all of us know someone who at one time or another has “gamed the system” to obtain an otherwise undeserved benefit, we could relate.
A different story that got extended currency in the run-up to passage of the Affordable Care Act was the story of Barack Obama’s terminally ill mother having to deal with health insurance procedures while her own health was severely compromised. It was a compelling story that any of us who’ve ever lost a loved one to cancer or some other horrible disease can also relate to.
Were either of these stories representative of the larger issues they tried to address? Perhaps not. In order to determine the size or the generality of each story, we’d have had to wade through studies and statistics of the incidence and prevalence of welfare cheats or of terminally ill patients and their families dealing with health insurance claims. Sometimes such studies exist. At other times they either do not exist or are difficult to access.
To counter our size and generalization instincts, therefore, we usually need access to reliable data. We also need to vary our media sources to get differing perspectives. We need to seek out and discuss viewpoints with those whose life experiences are different from our own. From the Roslings’ perspective, it can help to travel widely, actually living for extended periods in a culture different from our “home” culture. We need to test our assumptions, especially about presumed uniformity among people we expect to be different from us but similar to each other.
We need stories, and we need statistics. Otherwise, our mental rooms tend to stay filled with sometimes comforting but ultimately damaging elephants.
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