I call this preference for single causes and single solutions the single perspective instinct.

Factfulness is … recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us.

Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality.

Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.

Most countries that make great economic and social progress are not democracies.

free access to data doesn’t turn into knowledge without effort.

The gap instinct divides the world into “us” and “them,” and the generalization instinct makes “us” think of “them” as all the same.

We could fill a whole book with images showing the striking similarities between the lives of people living on the same incomes in different countries, and the huge differences in how people live within countries.

When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate. In most cases, they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.