Most people in the richest countries are absolutely wrong about the state of the world. How can I know? Gapminder has tested their knowledge and here are the terrible results from the Misconception Study 2017. We asked people in 14 countries, 12 basic fact questions about the world and here is how many correct answers they scored. 15% scored zero correct answers. Most people got one or two right, here are all the results. Only one person managed to get 11 correct and nobody got 12. The average score was 2.2, which is a terrible result showing that most people in these countries are absolutely wrong about the world. We didn't ask tricky questions. For example, let's look at question number 7. How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last 100 years? We give you three alternatives, A, B or C. Do you think deaths per year from natural disasters A decreased to less than half? B remained more or less the same or C more than doubled. 12,000 people answered this question across 14 countries. You can see how most people choose alternative B or C. Now let's look at the data. Thanks to the International Disaster Database, we know that 100 years ago between 1910 and 19, on average, 330,000 people died every year from natural disasters. Now how did that change? Here are the alternatives A, B and C. Decade by decade, it increased until the 1930s. But since then, humanity's preparedness for disasters has improved like crazy and since the 1960s, the number has been below alternative A. The world population increased from 2 billion to 7 billion during the same 100 years. So the per capita rate dropped even further down. The world is a much much safer place today than it used to be. But instead, people think it's equally dangerous or even worse. Of course, every death from disaster is covered today by the news in even more detail. And even if nobody is lying, it's very easy to get the impression that the world is getting worse. Let's look at the results again. Alternative A is the correct one we market in green. 42% pick the wrong alternative B and 48% pick the very wrong alternative C and only 10% pick the right answer. This is what we call terrible results. Maybe you think that is too harsh? That we shouldn't expect people to know these global statistics? Come on, people are just randomly guessing A, B or C. Well, what does randomly guessing really mean? We went to the zoo and gave the same question to chimpanzees by marking bananas A, B and C. And to our big surprise, the chimpanzees pick the right answer every third time. So compared to the monkeys, 33% of them got it right. And that's what humans would score if they were randomly guessing. But they were not. They performed worse than random systematically across all countries. They would score better if they closed their eyes and don't read the question. How is that even possible? That people score worse than monkeys on basic global fact questions. And remember, this was only question number seven. We asked 12 of these questions. Poor girls schooling income levels, extreme poverty, lifespan, future children, white population increases, where people live, child vaccination, women's education, tigers, pandas and black rhinos, and the access to electricity. All of the questions had ABC alternatives. And almost everywhere, people scored worse than random. So on all 12 questions, the monkeys got an average of four correct answers. Eight to percent of the humans were worse than that. And only 10% were better. But these were not just any humans. All 14 countries belong to the richest in the world, where people have the longest education. The pattern was the same across all the countries with small variations. In South Korea, people scored an average 2.8 while in Belgium only 1.8. Now let's not get depressed by these terrible results. Instead, let's be curious. Like with visual illusions, if 90% of people see something wrongly, we don't tell them to get glasses. Instead, we write these kind of curious books for kids to learn more about these strange phenomena. Let's be curious. What's going on in people's heads when they score worse than random and global fact questions? The study is called the Misconception Study because we have identified three mega misconceptions that we think most people are suffering from, which makes them score so bad. Number 1. The world is very unequal. But this leads to the common misconception that the world is divided in two, with few people who are very rich and many people who are very poor. In reality, most people live right here in between these two groups and they are protected against natural disasters and their children are vaccinated. Number 2. There are many bad things in this world, which leads to the second common misconception that the world is getting worse. With better and better news coverage, we hear about more terrifying things every day and it's hard to keep track of all the slow, great progress. But life expectancy keeps increasing and fewer children are dying. Poverty rate has fallen faster than ever before. And finally number 3. The world population is increasing at the slower rate than before, but it's still increasing, which leads to the third misconception that the population just increases, as if something drastic was needed for it to stop. But across religions and cultures, women today have fewer babies than their mothers used to have. Of course, in extreme poverty today, women still have five babies on average and for that number to drop, they need the same thing as everyone else. They need to leave extreme poverty, get education and contraceptives and the sooner the better. And the main reason the population is growing is not that people live longer lives. No, it's an effect of the large generations that were born a few decades ago. So to summarize, with these three mega misconceptions in your head, you will score worse than random on our basic global fact questions. And that's what people do in 14 countries in our misconception study 2017. People suffer from an over-dramatic world view and it causes a lot of stress and bad global decisions. So what are we going to do about this problem? Well, gap minor develops free teaching materials to give people a fact-based world view. And we can start with you. Please go to this website and take the gap minor test 2018, where the same 12 questions appear. And if you score 12 out of 12, we will give you this nice diploma as a starting point. Then a good advice is to read the Factfulness book, where we analyze these findings in greater detail. We are currently preparing for the Misconception Study 2018. And if you know of any reliable global fact that you think people have neglected, please send them to us, go to this link. Full content from GapMind is freely available, including these slides that I'm showing and the data from the study. Please follow GapMinder on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to stay tuned and see our next videos where we will analyze the results from each of the questions separately.