Are you smarter than a chimp?

I watched a great talk called, "How not to be ignorant about the world" by Hans Rosling. He demonstrates that people, regardless of education level, are often less knowledgeable about the world than they think. Hans jokes in his talk that monkeys randomly selecting the answers to his quiz do better than the people answering them!

To get the idea, try answering the four questions below to see how you go.

1. In 1950 there were fewer than one billion children (aged 0-14) in the world. By 2000 there were almost two billion. How many do UN experts think there will be in 2100?
    
   A. Four billion
   B. Three billion
   C. Two billion
    
2. What percentage of adults in the world today are literate – can read and write?
    
   A. 80%
   B. 60%
   C. 40%
    
3. On average, in the world as a whole today, men aged 25-34 have spent 8 years in school. How many years on average have women in the same age group spent in school?
    
   A. 7 years
   B. 5 years
   C. 3 years
    
4. In the last 20 years the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has...
    
   A. Almost doubled
   B. Remained more or less the same
   C. Almost halved

You can find the answers to the quiz at the end of this post along with the percentage of people who selected the correct answer. The questions were part of the Ignorance Survey that was conducted in the US in 2013.

So how did you go? If you didn't do very well then you're in good company with the vast majority of respondents! As you can see by the percentages, the respondents did worse than monkeys randomly choosing the right answers 33% of the time.

One of the issues Hans raised was whether the problem was due to people not reading and listening to the media. It turns out that after surveying the media with these questions, they fared no better than the general population. The problem was that even the media themselves didn't know basic facts about the world!

In the second part of the talk, Han's son Ola provided some tips for beating the chimps. He pointed out that the reason that we often get these questions wrong is due to:

1. Personal bias - we tend to generalize from our own experience which is not representative of the broader population
2. Teachers often teach outdated information based both on what they learnt during their schooling and on outdated text books
3. News bias - sensational and unusual events are more likely to make headlines and these are not representative of world events

These biases lead to the misconceptions that:

1. Everything is getting worse
2. The gap is increasing between rich and poor
3. People need wealth before social development can occur
4. Sharks are dangerous

Ola suggests that people's scores on the world fact survey will immediately and dramatically improve if they generalize in the opposite direction, recognizing instead that:

1. Most things improve
2. Global wealth can be represented as a normal bell curve with most people in the middle
3. Most people are already socially developed before they have wealth
4. Sharks are not actually very dangerous to us since they kill very few people - so recognize that fear exaggerates danger

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Answers to the quiz (along with the percentage of respondents who selected the correct answer):

1. C (7%)
2. A (22%)
3. A (24%)
4. C (5%)