by Hans Rosling
CHAPTER SIX
THE GENERALIZATION INSTINCT
Why I had to lie about the Danes, and how it can be smart to build half a house
Dinner Is Served
An orange sun was setting behind the acacia trees on the savanna of the Bandundu region south of the Congo River, half a day’s walk from the end of the paved road. This is where you find the people who live in extreme poverty: they are stuck behind that mountain, beyond where the road ends. My colleague Thorkild and I had spent the day interviewing the people in this remote village about their nutrition, and now they wanted to throw us a party. No one had ever walked so far to ask them about their problems.
As Swedish villagers would have done 100 years ago, they were demonstrating their gratitude and respect by serving their guests the biggest piece of meat they could find. The entire village was gathered in a circle around Thorkild and me as we were presented with our plates. On top of two large green leaves lay two whole, skinned, grilled rats.
I thought I might throw up. Then I noticed that Thorkild had already started eating: we were both very hungry after a whole day’s work with no food. I looked around at the villagers who were smiling at me expectantly. I had to eat it, and I did. It was actually not that bad: it tasted a bit like chicken. To be polite, I tried to look happy as I swallowed it down.
Then it was time for dessert: another plate, full of big, white larvas from the palm nut tree. And I do mean big—each one was longer and thicker than my thumb, and had been lightly fried in its own fat. But I wondered, had they been too lightly fried? Because they seemed to be moving. The villagers were proud to offer us such a delicious treat.
Remember, I am a sword swallower. I should be able to push anything down my throat. And I am not usually a fussy eater: I had even once eaten porridge made from mosquitos. But no. This, I couldn’t do. The heads of the larvas looked like little brown nuts and their thick bodies like transparent wrinkled marshmallows, through which I could see their intestines. The villagers gestured that I should bite them in two and suck out the insides. If I tried I would puke the rat back up. I did not want to offend.
Suddenly, an idea. I smiled softly and said regretfully, “You know what, I am sorry, but I can’t eat larvas.”
Thorkild turned to me, surprised. He already had a couple of larvas hanging out of the corners of his mouth. He really loved those larvas. He had previously worked as a missionary in Congo, where they had been the highlight of every week for one whole year.
“You see, we don’t eat larvas,” I said, trying to look convincing. The villagers looked at Thorkild.
“But he eats them?” they asked. Thorkild stared at me.
“Ah,” I said. “You see, he comes from a different tribe. I come from Sweden, he comes from Denmark. In Denmark, they love eating larvas. But in Sweden it’s against our culture.” The village teacher went and got out the world map and I pointed out the water separating our two countries. “On this side of the water they eat larvas,” I said, “and on this side we don’t.” It’s actually one of the most blatant lies I have ever told, but it worked. The villagers were happy to share my dessert between them. Everyone, everywhere knows that people from different tribes have different customs.
The Generalization Instinct
Everyone automatically categorizes and generalizes all the time. Unconsciously. It is not a question of being prejudiced or enlightened. Categories are absolutely necessary for us to function. They give structure to our thoughts. Imagine if we saw every item and every scenario as truly unique—we would not even have a language to describe the world around us.
The necessary and useful instinct to generalize, like all the other instincts in this book, can also distort our worldview. It can make us mistakenly group together things, or people, or countries that are actually very different. It can make us assume everything or everyone in one category is similar. And, maybe most unfortunate of all, it can make us jump to conclusions about a whole category based on a few, or even just one, unusual example.
Once again, the media is the instinct’s friend. Misleading generalizations and stereotypes act as a kind of shorthand for the media, providing quick and easy ways to communicate. Here are just a few examples from today’s newspaper: rural life, middle class, super mom, gang member.
When many people become aware of a problematic generalization it is called a stereotype. Most commonly, people talk about race and gender stereotyping. These cause many very important problems, but they are not the only problems caused by wrong generalizations. Wrong generalizations are mind-blockers for all kinds of understanding.
The gap instinct divides the world into “us” and “them,” and the generalization instinct makes “us” think of “them” as all the same.
Are you working for a commercial company on Level 4? There’s a great risk you’re missing the majority of your potential consumers and producers because of your generalizations. Are you working in finance in a big bank? There’s a great risk you are investing your clients’ money in the wrong places, because you’re bundling together people who are vastly different.
FACT QUESTION 9
How many of the world’s 1-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?
A: 20 percent
B: 50 percent
C: 80 percent
To compare ignorance between different kinds of experts, the regular polling companies couldn’t help me. They don’t have access to the staff of big corporations and government organizations. That’s one reason I started polling my audience at the start of my lectures. I have tested a total of 12,596 people at 108 lectures over the last five years. This question gets the worst results. Look at the table on the next page, where I have ranked 12 groups of experts according to how many picked the most incorrect answer.
The worst results come from an annual gathering of global finance managers at the headquarters of one of the world’s ten largest banks. I have visited three of them. I can’t tell you which one this was, because I signed a piece of paper. A roaring 85 percent of the 71 well-dressed bankers in the room believed that a minority of the world’s children had been vaccinated. An extremely wrong answer.
Vaccines must be kept cold all the way from the factory to the arm of the child. They are shipped in refrigerated containers to harbors around the world, where they get loaded into refrigerated trucks. These trucks take them to local health clinics, where they are stored in refrigerators. These logistic distribution paths are called cool chains. For cool chains to work, you need all the basic infrastructure for transport, electricity, education, and health care to be in place. This is exactly the same infrastructure needed to establish new factories. The fact that 88 percent are vaccinated but major financial investors believe it is only 20 percent indicates that there is a big chance they are failing at their jobs by missing out on huge investment opportunities (probably the most profitable ones in the fastest-growing parts of the world).
You make this kind of false assumption when you have a “them” category in your head, into which you put the majority of humanity. What images are you using to imagine what life is like in this category? Are you perhaps recalling the most vivid and disturbing images from the news? I think that is exactly what’s going on when people on Level 4 answer this badly on this kind of fact question. The extreme deprivation we see on the news ends up stereotyping the majority of mankind.
Every pregnancy results in roughly two years of lost menstruation. If you are a manufacturer of menstrual pads, this is bad for business. So you ought to know about, and be so happy about, the drop in babies per woman across the world. You ought to know and be happy too about the growth in the number of educated women working away from home. Because these developments have created an exploding market for your products over the last few decades among billions of menstruating women now living on Levels 2 and 3.
But, as I realized when I attended an internal meeting at one of the world’s biggest man
ufacturers of sanitary wear, most Western manufacturers have completely missed this. Instead, when hunting for new customers they are often stuck dreaming up new needs among the 300 million menstruating women on Level 4. “What if we market an even thinner pad for bikinis? What about pads that are invisible, to wear under Lycra? How about one pad for each kind of outfit, each situation, each sport? Special pads for mountain climbers!” Ideally, all the pads are so small they need to be replaced several times a day. But like most rich consumer markets, the basic needs are already met, and producers fight in vain to create demand in ever-smaller segments.
Meanwhile, on Levels 2 and 3, roughly 2 billion menstruating women have few alternatives to choose from. These women don’t wear Lycra and won’t spend money on ultrathin pads. They demand a low-cost pad that will be reliable throughout the day so they don’t have to change it when they are out at work. And when they find a product they like, they will probably stick to that brand for their whole lives and recommend it to their daughters.
The same logic applies to many other consumer products, and I have given hundreds of lectures to business leaders making this same point. The majority of the world population is steadily moving up the levels. The number of people on Level 3 will increase from two billion to four billion between now and 2040. Almost everyone in the world is becoming a consumer. If you suffer from the misconception that most of the world is still too poor to buy anything at all, you risk missing out on the biggest economic opportunity in world history while you use your marketing spend to push special “yoga” pads to wealthy hipsters in the biggest cities in Europe. Strategic business planners need a fact-based worldview to find their future customers.
Reality Bites
You need the generalization instinct to live your everyday life, and occasionally it can save you from having to eat something disgusting. We always need categories. The challenge is to realize which of our simple categories are misleading—like “developed” and “developing” countries—and replace them with better categories, like the four levels.
One of the best ways to do this is to travel, if you possibly can. That’s why I made my global health students from Karolinska Institutet, the medical university in Stockholm, go on study visits to countries on Levels 1, 2, and 3, where they attended university courses, visited hospitals, and stayed with local families. Nothing beats a firsthand experience.
Those students are usually privileged young Swedes who want to do good in the world but don’t really know the world. Some of them say they have traveled: often they have had a cappuccino at a café next to an eco-tourism agency, but never entered a single family home.
On day one of a trip to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala in India, or Kampala in Uganda, they usually express surprise that the city is so well organized. There are traffic lights and sewage systems and no one is dying in the street.
On day two, we usually visit a public hospital. When they see that there is no paint on the walls and no air-conditioning and 60 people to a room, my students whisper to each other that this place must be extremely poor. I have to explain that people living in extreme poverty have no hospitals at all. A woman living in extreme poverty gives birth on a mud floor, attended by a midwife with no training who has walked barefoot in the dark. The hospital administrator helps. She explains that not painting the walls can be a strategic decision in countries on Levels 2 and 3. It’s not that they can’t afford the paint. Flaking walls keep away the richer patients and their time-consuming demands for costly treatments, allowing hospitals to use their limited resources to treat more people in more cost-effective ways.
My students then learn that one of the patients cannot afford to pay for the insulin he has been prescribed for his newly diagnosed diabetes. The students don’t understand: this must be an advanced hospital if it can diagnose diabetes. But how bizarre if the patient cannot then afford the treatment. Yet this is very common on Level 2: the public health system can pay for some diagnosis, for emergency care, and for inexpensive drugs. This leads to great improvements in survival rates. But there’s simply not enough money (unless the costs come down) for expensive treatments for lifelong conditions like diabetes.
On one particular occasion a student’s misunderstanding of life in countries on Level 2 nearly cost her very dearly. We were visiting a beautiful and modern private hospital in Kerala, India, eight stories tall. We waited some time in the lobby for a student in our group who was late. After 15 minutes, we decided not to wait for her any longer and walked down a corridor and got into a large elevator, big enough to take several hospital beds. Our host, the head of the intensive care unit, pressed the button for the sixth floor. Just as the doors were sliding closed, we saw the young blond Swede rush into the hospital lobby. “Come, run faster!” shouted her friend from the door of the elevator, and she stretched her leg out to stop the doors from closing. Everything then happened very quickly. The doors just continued to close tightly around my student’s leg. She cried out in pain and fear. The elevator started moving upward. She cried out louder. Just as I realized this young woman’s leg was going to get crushed against the top of the doorway, our host leaped across the elevator and hit the red emergency stop button. He hissed at me to help and between us we prised the doors far enough apart to release my student’s bleeding limb.
Afterward, our host looked at me and said, “I have never seen that before. How can you admit such stupid people for medical training?” I explained that all elevators in Sweden had sensors on the doors. If something were put between them, they would instantaneously stop closing and open instead. The Indian doctor looked doubtful. “But how can you be sure that this advanced mechanism is working every single time?” I felt stupid with my reply: “It just always does. I suppose it’s because there are strict safety rules and regular inspections.” He didn’t look convinced. “Hmmm. So your country has become so safe that when you go abroad the world is dangerous for you.”
I can assure you that the young woman was not at all stupid. She had simply, and unwisely, generalized from her own Level 4 experience of elevators to all elevators in all countries.
On the last day, we have a little ceremony to say goodbye where I sometimes learn something about the generalizations other people make about us. On this particular occasion in India, my female students arrived on time, beautifully dressed in colorful saris they had bought locally. (The elevator-door leg injury was nicely healed.) They were followed ten minutes later by the male students, evidently hungover and dressed in torn jeans and dirty T-shirts. India’s leading professor of forensic medicine leaned over to me and whispered, “I hear you have love marriages in your country but that must be a lie. Look at these men. What woman would marry them if their parents didn’t make them?”
When visiting reality in other countries, and not just the backpacker cafés, you realize that generalizing from what is normal in your home environment can be useless or even dangerous.
My First Time
I do not mean to sound critical about my students. I am no better myself.
In 1972, as a fourth-year medical student, I studied at the medical school in Bangalore. The first class I attended was on examining kidney X-rays. Looking at the first image, I realized this must be kidney cancer. I decided to wait awhile before telling the class, out of respect. I didn’t want to show off. Several hands then went into the air and the Indian students one by one explained how best to diagnose this cancer, how and where it usually spreads, and how best to treat it. On and on they went for 30 minutes, answering questions I thought only chief physicians knew. I realized my embarrassing mistake. I must have come to the wrong room. These must not be fourth-year students, these must be specialists. I had nothing to add to their analysis.
On our way out, I told a fellow student I was supposed to be with the fourth-years. “That’s us,” he said. I was stunned. They had caste marks on their foreheads and lived where exotic palm trees grew. How could they know much more than me? Over
the next few days I learned that they had a textbook three times as thick as mine, and they had read it three times as many times.
I remember this whole experience as the first time in my life that I suddenly had to change my worldview: my assumption that I was superior because of where I came from, the idea that the West was the best and the rest would never catch up. At that moment, 45 years ago, I understood that the West would not dominate the world for much longer.
How to Control the Generalization Instinct
If you can’t travel, please do not worry. There are other ways to avoid using wrong categories.
Find Better Categories: Dollar Street
Anna would always insist that the trips I did with my students were a naïve and unrealistic way to teach most people about the world. Few people wanted to spend their hard-earned money traveling to far-flung places only to try a pit latrine and experience the unglamorous everyday life on Levels 1, 2, or 3, far from the beach, the great cuisine and bars, and the fairy-tale-like wildlife.
Most people were just as uninterested in studying the data about global trends and proportions. And anyway, even looking at the data, it was pretty hard to understand what it meant for everyday life on different levels.
Remember the photos used to describe the levels in the chapter on the gap instinct? They all come from Dollar Street, a project that Anna developed to teach armchair travelers about the world. Now you can understand how people live without leaving your home.
Imagine all the homes in the world lined up on one long street, sorted by income. The poorest live at the left end of the street and the richest live at the right end. Everybody else? Of course, you know it by now: most people live somewhere in the middle. Your house number on this street represents your income. Your neighbors on Dollar Street are people from all over the world with the same income as you.