Gapminder Foundation

GAPMINDER UPGRADES OUR WORLDVIEW

Ola Rosling chairs the Gapminder Foundation, which has a way of presenting facts in an easily accessible and understandable way that has attracted great international attention. With support from the Erling-Persson Foundation they have scaled up their activities further, and are now seeing companies also begin to understand the benefits of fact-checking their worldview.

Gapminder has attracted a great deal of attention. Bill Gates described ‘Factfulness’ as one of the most important books he has read and decided to hand it out free to all US college students in 2018. Can it go any further?

Yes, because the fundamental problem remains: people are not keeping up with the rapid changes in the world because the human brain is not particularly well suited to processing data. It means that nearly everyone has a view of the world that is constantly lagging 50–60 years behind the reality. Gapminder is needed for as long as people use inaccurate perceptions or out-of-date facts to understand the present.

But it sounds like a more or less impossible task to ‘update the human brain’?

It’s largely a matter of psychology. To get across a fact-based worldview you have to have a respectful relationship with the party that is doing the

“Nearly everyone has an image of the world that lags 50–60 years behind the reality.”

learning, so to speak. After all, people are unwilling to acknowledge their mistakes. As soon as someone points out ignorance, people do everything possible to defend why there is nothing wrong with being wrong, and why actually they weren’t wrong at all. And so on. That is actually the greatest barrier.

But aren’t there many who are good at spreading up-to-date facts today?

To put it bluntly, I think this is a real problem. It remains because no market force seems to have an incentive to change it. News bodies like CNN or the BBC ought to be able to fix this, because they are communicating with people all the time. Yet they seem to be contributing to cementing things. When we meet journalists from big media companies they are also mistaken about what the world is actually like.

So everyone is wrong?

If there are any people who are not wrong about the world, it is generally the leaders of international corporations. The big commercial forces, those at the very top of global companies, become successful by being right. They have an incentive. But the rest of society seems to prefer to be wrong about the world. Then they can embellish their own role, cementing former glories. In the past Europe was ahead of everyone else. It feels so good to go round believing that, that we kind of don’t want to hear anything else. In our fixed view of ourselves and the world around us nothing has happened in, say, Africa for many decades.

“To get across a factbased worldview you have to have a respectful relationship with the party doing the learning.”

“This project is unique in human history. Never before has it been possible to test what people think about things in such volumes. But thanks to the internet and online panels, over the past two years we’ve been able to ask 8,000 newly formulated factual questions about the world.”

Gapminder did not disappear when Hans Rosling died. Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund continue to realise its ideas.

How can Gapminder change that?

Before this project started we were in a development phase. We also received support from the ErlingPersson Foundation then. The book ‘Factfulness’, for example, starts with something we call The Gapminder Test, which we were able to design with the assistance of that donation. It is a fact test consisting of 13 questions. Those taking the test can then compare their answers with the average in a total of 14 countries.

In our earlier work we measured the public’s knowledge about global development. It emerged that there was huge ignorance of basic facts about the world. That led to the idea of developing teach-

ing aids that teachers in lots of countries could use. However, producing these proved harder than we thought. Having made this attempt, however, we are now convinced that we can go even further with our model. As well as schools and teachers, we can also reach companies and their leaders, who want both employees and the public to have an up-to-date, fact-based worldview.

Now we get invited to global companies, teaching conferences and all kinds of contexts. There is interest from every part of society. The challenge now is to build a tool that can be used without us needing to travel and give presentations, like my father did.

It was to enable us to take this step that we received a new donation from the Erling-Persson Foundation for the project period 2020–2021, which we called ‘The Scaling Phase’.

What have you done that is new?

We’ve scaled up in various ways. And when we expand our field, we come across even more ignorance and more misconceptions. In line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, our main focus will be on sustainability. We have also started measuring general knowledge about such things as migration, African business, gender and the world market, together with experts in each area. The very first preliminary results show that people are just as ignorant about basic facts in these areas as they are about global development – particularly if these facts indicate a positive trend. Anyway, that is one branch of Gapminder’s new scaling phase: asking masses of questions in new areas and checking the answers against actual facts. Really interesting things emerge. We asked questions such as ‘How many airports do you think there are in Panama?’. There are somewhere around 60 small private airfields. And people guess two! Or take the question ‘How many amusement parks are there in Pakistan?’. None, most people think. But there are four! This project is unique in human history. Never before has it been possible to test what people think about things in such volumes. But thanks to the internet and online panels, over the past two years we have been able to ask 8,000 newly formulated factual questions about the world.

“As well as schools and teachers, we can also reach companies and their leaders, who want both employees and the public to have an up-to-date, fact-based worldview.”

One part of the ‘scaling phase’ was therefore to measure knowledge and gather facts in more areas. What was the other part?

The second element of the scaling phase focused on making all this knowledge available. At the end of 2020 we published an online service called Worldview Upgrader. It’s a platform full of educational materials on various subjects where you can answer questions and then find out straight away whether your worldview accords with the actual facts. As

“The gap between what people think and actual facts can open a window so that the person actually wants to find out more.”

I said, most people give the wrong answers – but that’s precisely what’s interesting about it. The gap between what people think and actual facts can open a window so that the person actually wants to find out more.

But if Gapminder grows, won’t your need for donations also grow?

No, we don’t think so. Of course, we want our services to remain free for ordinary people. However, we are seeing many companies now discovering the value of understanding the world and gaining collective knowledge. They have a genuine interest, which is obvious when you think about it: if you’re going to build strategies for the future and your employees have things completely wrong, it’s going

to be extremely difficult! That’s why we predict that more and more companies will choose to pay for our training and tools as we grow.

What has the support from the Erling-Persson Foundation meant to Gapminder?

We first received support when Hans was still alive. That paid for the development of the teaching materials we made just before he passed away. Then Hans died and we received a new donation that enabled us to drive Gapminder further and manage Hans’s legacy, the popular education legacy. We had all the visions – we had developed them with Hans – but the fact that we were able to continue realising them is largely thanks to the funding from the Erling-Persson Foundation. The Foundation believed in the idea itself, rather than thinking that Gapminder disappeared with Hans. Thanks to that we are still here, to sum it up in simple terms.

15,000

The number of factual questions that the Gapminder team has tested on the public to find the areas where there are gaps in knowledge or where knowledge is outdated. Thousands of questions were identified that users get wrong more often than when answers are generated at random.

19

Gapminder has developed niche knowledge tests for areas such as global warming, women managers, threatened species and many more. In total there are now 19 different tests making up Worldview Upgrader.

765,000

The number of users of Worldview Upgrader up to and including December 2021. Worldview Upgrader is a tool for education that is freely available on the web and where users can test their knowledge about global and sustainable development.

ABOUT THE PROJECT Recipient: Gapminder Foundation – an independent educational organisation founded by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund. Gapminder’s mission is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview everyone can understand.

Title: ‘Global Factfulness Project – The Scaling Phase’.

What it involves: Creating a large number of questions in areas where there is great ignorance, compiling them into subject tests and making these widely available online. The project also includes developing a business model that can finance Gapminder’s Factfulness project in the future.

Funding: The Erling-Persson Foundation is supporting the project with a total of SEK 8.6 million over two years; donated 2019, active 2020–2021.

Development

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