PRESS RELEASE 30 NOVEMBER 2020

 

Today, Gapminder launches a new free educational service called the Worldview Upgrader, which will help people and organizations realize their ignorance and rid themselves of common misconceptions. 

 

For many years, Gapminder has tested the public knowledge and identified systematic misconceptions about global trends and proportions and invented different tools to fight these misconceptions. Today, we are releasing this groundbreaking new online service in which users can test themselves and replace misconceptions with updated facts.

 

The format is simple: ABC questions about global trends and proportions. All questions have been carefully selected based on the strict criteria that most people answer them wrongly. As we disclosed in our latest study (the Sustainable Development Misconceptions Study 2020), these fact questions capture widespread misconceptions about global trends and proportions that most people suffer from. The sum of which adds up to a completely wrong worldview. With this new service, users can test their preconceived ideas about important global trends that almost everyone is wrong about. If they learn the facts and answer the questions correctly, they can get a certificate that proves they have upgraded their worldview. The initial test contains global questions across all the subjects of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Gapminder’s goal is to make it easier for people to quickly rid themselves of misconceptions. As the world keeps changing, the facts change, and the questions will be updated and new ones will be added. The Worldview Upgrader will provide a simple way to upgrade people’s worldview.

 

Ola Rosling, co-founder of Gapminder, said:

“Together with my father Hans Rosling, I gave a TED-talk in 2014 (“How not to be ignorant about the world”) where I described my vision to capture and dismantle systematic misconceptions. After years of hard work, today it becomes reality and I am super excited about this!

 

“Many people rely on the media to understand the world, but it mostly focuses on exceptional and temporary events and, because of that, it can’t be expected to give people a good picture of big proportions and the slow changing trends. But in a globalized world, everyone needs a worldview that is based on data, and it needs to keep upgrading as the world changes. The staff in companies, schools and other organizations are currently wrong about the state of the world, often because they have facts that were true more than forty years ago. The Worldview Upgrader helps people and organizations quickly rid themselves of the most common misconceptions. Fortunately, the misconceptions are systematic, so we realized we could build a systematic solution to the problem. I’m convinced this will lead to better decisions for positive change, and I know my father would have loved it.” 

 

In the first version launched today, there’s one global test with one question for each of the UN Goals. Over the next couple of months we will roll out hundreds of new test questions about all aspects of global development that most people are wrong about.

 

The service is free to use. All you need is an internet connection. We hope that journalists, teachers and students, politicians, business leaders and staff, will test themselves and realize what they are wrong about. 

 

In the coming months, we will also announce our plans to help educate organizations to use the service and get certificates that prove their staff have an upgraded worldview. 

 

About Gapminder

Gapminder was founded by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling in 2005. It is an independent educational non-profit specialized in global misconceptions. It aims to fight common misconceptions with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. 

www.gapminder.org

 

About the Worldview Upgrader

The Worldview Upgrader is a service that helps people and organizations quickly rid themselves of the most common misconceptions and replace them with updated facts. You can test yourself or your team and get certified at upgrader.gapminder.org

 

 

If you would like to schedule an interview with Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling or have inquiries regarding the new service, please contact: 

 

Klara Elzvik, Media Relations Coordinator

[email protected]

+46 70 229 9983

PRESS RELEASE 23 NOVEMBER 2020

 

Now Gapminder has a brand new knowledge test about the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), where people score 82% wrong! 

“Time and time again, our tests show widespread and systematic misconceptions about the world around us. We are now testing the knowledge of the UN global goals, as it is crucial that we have accurate information if we are to succeed in solving our biggest challenges – otherwise we risk focusing on the wrong things,” said Anna Rosling Rönnlund, co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation 

Gapminder has been testing the public’s knowledge of global trends and proportions for many years, as reported by CNN, BBC and Factfulness. Now we have a brand new test with 18 fact questions relating to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Today we disclose the terribly bad results in a study called the Sustainable Development Misconceptions Study 2020. We tested the public in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden using Novus online panels. On average, 82% of answers were wrong!

Out of a possible 18, the average number of correct answers in each country was:

• Sweden: 3.4
• Denmark: 3.2
• Norway: 3.2
• Finland: 3.1

 

All four countries were almost equally wrong in the same way. The study reveals 18 systematic misconceptions about the world which needs to be corrected if people are to have a meaningful say in how we build a sustainable future. 

 

Misconceptions we found include:

• Many wrongly believe that fossil fuels no longer provide most of the world’s energy.
• In people’s heads there are 10 times more refugees than in reality.
• Most have the impression that suicides are becoming more common in the world.
• Many wrongly think that more than a third of all plastic waste ends up in oceans.

The study was done in collaboration with AFRY, as part of a long-term relationship to promote a fact-based worldview. Experts at AFRY and at universities across the world provided help with fact-checking and advice about the data for all questions.

AFRY’s CEO Jonas Gustavsson explained the company’s motivation in working together with Gapminder  “If we are to succeed in accelerating the sustainable transformation of society, wide-ranging cooperation is needed to raise knowledge levels. That’s why we are highlighting the importance of a fact-based worldview based on science. We believe that when you know better, you do better.”

The full report with more details about the questions and the results is here.

 

About Gapminder

Gapminder is an independent non-profit foundation founded by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling. It aims to fight common misconceptions with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. Gapminder supports the UN’s global goals for sustainable development by working for increased knowledge about sustainable development at local and global levels.

 

About AFRY

AFRY is an international engineering, design and advisory company, supporting its clients to progress in sustainability and digitalisation. It is made up of 17,000 devoted experts within the fields of infrastructure, industry and energy, operating across the world to create sustainable solutions for future generations.

 

About the Global Goals for Sustainable Development

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals represent the most ambitious agenda for sustainable development adopted by member states. The aim is to eliminate extreme poverty, reduce inequality and injustice in the world, promote peace and justice and resolve the climate crisis by 2030.

 

About the study

The Gapminder Sustainable Development Misconceptions Study consists of 18 questions, all of which are connected to the UN global goals. A survey was carried out by Novus on behalf of Gapminder and AFRY between the 20th and the 27th October 2020. A total of 1,036 random and representative interviews were conducted with members of the public (18–79 years of age) in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. In the UK, the survey was conducted by Google Surveys, with 150 respondents in February 2020.

 

Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling are available for interviews. If you would like to schedule an interview or have any further questions regarding the study, please contact: 

 

Klara Elzvik, Project Coordinator

[email protected]

+46 70 229 9983

 

We are soon launching a new free service to fight common misconceptions about all the UN goals with hundreds of new fact questions most people are wrong about. Sign up here to help us test it before it launches, or stay tuned for updates on twitter, facebook, linkedIn or instagram.

Here’s a sneak peak of our new service, coming soon…

This is the fourth Corona video in a series listed here.

Every day we hear about more Corona deaths, and it always feels like bad news. But if you follow the weekly change, even the peak of the week might be a drastic decline compared to what we expected.

You can download the free video, slides and data, and use them under Creative Common Licence BY 4.0 in any way you like (!) as long as you mention “based on free stuff from Gapminder.org”. Thank you!

— DATA SOURCES These trends shows data that has been slightly cleaned up by Gapminder, based on the daily data from ECDC, downloaded on June 10 2020 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/download-todays-data-geographic-distribution-covid-19-cases-worldwide Gapminder has calculated the 7-day sums and multipliers. On some dates in some countries, there are sudden large increases of reported deaths, which stand out from the regular weekly cycles. This happens when the health-care system brings a pile of records from other parts of their administration, such as deaths outside hospitals or at care-homes for the elderly. We have re-allocated these higher numbers to earlier dates to avoid a false impression of sudden increase of deaths. There are probably many more such artificial impressions of sudden increases left in the data but we can’t remove those because we don’t have access to primary records of patients, but please contact us at [email protected] if you can help improve the data.

This video was produced by Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling.

LICENSE : This video, slideshow and data are all free to use, edit and redistribute and even sell, under Creative Common License CC BY 4.0, just remember to mention “based on free stuff from gapminder.org”.

This is the third Corona video in a series listed here.

In this film we present our estimate of a common duration, which is several days shorter than the average duration of 26 days. Our purpose is to have a useful rule of thumb for what delay to expect between a behavioural change and a change in weekly death statistics. We can’t use the longer averages for this, because they are influenced by a minority of cases that have much longer durations than normal, before symptoms, before death or before reporting. Such long durations are quite common, and they have great variation, but they won’t be the first to indicate the effect of a behavioural change.

You can download the free video and slides and use them under Creative Common Licence BY 4.0 in any way you like (!) as long as you mention “based on free stuff from Gapminder.org”. Thank you!

— DATA SOURCES Numbers are based on (but not identical to) the mean durations from CDC — COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios, Table 2: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html#table-2  

This video was produced by Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling.

LICENSE : This video, slideshow and data are all free to use, edit and redistribute and even sell, under Creative Common License CC BY 4.0, just remember to mention “based on free stuff from gapminder.org”.

This is the second Corona video in a series listed here.

In this video Ola Rosling explains how the weekly multiplier of deaths let us keep track of the pandemic and compare it across countries and over time. The virus is capable of multiplying itself amongst us, and kill us. We change our behaviour to stop it from doing that. To see if we are succeeding we can take the number of deaths this week and divide it with the number for the previous week. If the multiplier is above one: the virus is still winning. If the number is below one: we are winning.

You can download the free video, slides and data, and use them under Creative Common Licence BY 4.0 in any way you like (!) as long as you mention “based on free stuff from Gapminder.org”. Thank you!

— DATA SOURCES These trends shows data that has been slightly cleaned up by Gapminder, based on the daily data from ECDC, downloaded on June 3 2020 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/download-todays-data-geographic-distribution-covid-19-cases-worldwide Gapminder has calculated the 7-day sums and multipliers. On some dates in some countries, there are sudden large increases of reported deaths, which stand out from the regular weekly cycles. This happens when the health-care system brings a pile of records from other parts of their administration, such as deaths outside hospitals or at care-homes for the elderly. This happened in Finland on April 22 and 24, and in Norway between May 4 to 15. We have re-allocated these higher numbers to earlier dates to avoid a false impression of sudden increase of deaths. There are probably many more such artificial impressions of sudden increases left in the data but we can’t remove those because we don’t have access to primary records of patients, but please contact us at [email protected] if you can help improve the data. The way we re-allocated the piles in Finland and Norway is documented in the data file that can be downloaded here.

This video was produced by Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling.

LICENSE : This video, slideshow and data are all free to use, edit and redistribute and even sell, under Creative Common License CC BY 4.0, just remember to mention “based on free stuff from gapminder.org”.

Almost everyone answered this wrongly: “Globally, how many are 65 and older? A.10%, B.30%, C.50%”. We tested 20 thousand people in 32 countries with Ipsos-MORI in 2019: The results were terrible! But we were happy yesterday to see that our Facebook followers scored much better: 66% of you were correct. Please help share this with your friends who are most likely just as wrong as everyone else about the main Corona risk group.

— In this video Anna (co-founder of Gapminder) presents results from surveys in 32 countries and shows what the actual age structure of the world population looks like.
— Gapminder is soon launching a new service for ignorance reduction. Sign up to become an early tester here: http://www.gapm.io/tester
— The source behind the correct answer is UN’s 2019 revision of the World Population Prospects https://population.un.org/wpp/
— The slideshow in this video is free to use under Creative Common License, and can be downloaded here: https://bit.ly/65_slides
– Check out Gapminder´s interactive tools to see how the size of the old population in all countries changes over time in our bubble chart: https://gapm.io/v65plus , and in animating age pyramids https://bit.ly/agepyramids

 
We asked this question to people in the UK and to our followers: — How much of all greenhouse gas emissions comes from airplanes?
In this video Ola Rosling (co-founder of Gapminder) shows that many are probably wrong about this, which can lead to great disappointment for people who are imagining that the Corona pause will significantly slow down global warming. This was strongly inspired by CarbonBrief’s analysis of the ongoing corona emission reduction. Read it here.
— Gapminder is soon launching a new service for ignorance reduction. Sign up to become an early tester here.
— The source behind the correct answer is this article: “Measuring greenhouse gas emissions from international air travel…”, 2018 by Jörgen Larsson, Anneli Kamb, Jonas Nässén and Jonas Åkerman
— The assumptions about CO2 emissions per person on different income levels can be seen as country averages in this bubble chart.
— The slides used in this video are free to use under Creative Common License.

The non-stop flow of information about the new coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by a similar surge in misinformation. While the coronavirus has brought travel and economic activity to a near standstill in large parts of the world, conspiracy theories and misinformation continue to travel and proliferate at high velocity. How common are misconceptions about COVID-19 (the disease caused by the new coronavirus)? And do they matter to efforts to combat the pandemic?

We conducted surveys of 2,608 respondents between March 14-19 2020 across a range of COVID-19 affected countries: the UK, the USA, Italy, Brazil and Japan using the online tool Google Surveys (more info on methods here). We asked respondents 10 questions about the coronavirus, including how the pathogen initially spread to humans, how deadly the coronavirus is compared to the seasonal flu, and what people can do to reduce the risk of infection. The results suggest that belief in misinformation is widespread globally, with some local variation, and that people who have adopted more misinformation are less likely to take actions to keep themselves and others safe.

As people across the globe are dealing with the sudden reality of life under quarantine, many are seeking answers about the origin of the pandemic. Why did the coronavirus begin to spread among humans? We found that as many as 39% of the 2,608 respondents believed that an (accidental) release of the virus from Chinese labs caused the virus to spread to humans – from 27% in the UK to 45% in Japan. Interestingly, people who believed the rumour were also 60% (95% CI 1.2-2.2) more likely to report that they’re doing nothing to prevent infection with the coronavirus, and less likely to wash their hands more often (Odds Ratio (OR) 0.8 95% CI 0.7-0.9).

While China was struggling to contain the epidemic, some politicians and commentators elsewhere attempted to downplay the public health significance of the novel coronavirus, arguing that the seasonal flu causes more deaths than the coronavirus. At this point in time it is still too early to determine how deadly COVID-19 really is, but so far, data consistently point to the disease being substantially deadlier than the seasonal flu. However, in our sample, 22% of the respondents believed that the seasonal flu was deadlier than the novel coronavirus. This view was most common in the USA (34%) and least common in Italy (14%). Importantly, people who thought that the seasonal flu is deadlier than COVID-19 were also 30% less likely to practice social distancing (OR 0.7 95% CI 0.5-0.8). When asked how many more people they thought would get infected with the coronavirus, the flu-believers thought that additional infections would number in the thousands – a highly optimistic assessment that has already been proven wrong.

There are some common factors uniting believers in seemingly disparate conspiracy theories. Those who believe that Chinese labs caused the pandemic and that the seasonal flu is deadlier are 30% more likely to distrust the news media compared to those who did not believe these misconceptions. And as described above, both beliefs were associated with reduced individual actions that could help curb the pandemic. (Our data is based on cross-sectional surveys, so the associations we see can also be interpreted in the opposite directions, for instance that those not acting to prevent infection are more likely to believe that the virus spread from a Chinese lab.)

On average, 9% of the 2,608 respondents indicated that they did not do anything to prevent infection with the coronavirus. Men were 60% (95% CI 1.2-2.1) more likely than women to say so. Only 3% of the Italian respondents reported taking no actions to reduce infection risk, which is not surprising given that Italy was on nation-wide lockdown during the survey. This presents a stark difference from Brazil, where 17% of respondents said they did not take active measures to prevent infection.

A pandemic presents a strange and discomfiting societal challenge; across large parts of the world, the best action one can take is to follow public health directives such as social distancing. Misconceptions that undermine public health guidance pose real risks, and should be actively targeted. Preventing the spread of rumours can contribute to slowing the spread of the virus. While media companies and social media platforms have a responsibility to help, individual action matters as well. Online social distancing comes down to thinking critically and questioning our assumptions and beliefs before sharing. Digital distancing can also save lives.

Figure 1 Prevalence of misconceptions by country

Table 1 Associations between misconceptions and practices & distrust in news media

	Coronavirus accidentally released by Chinese labs	The seasonal flu is deadlier than coronavirus
	Adjusted* Odds Ratio (95% CI)	Adjusted* Odds Ratio (95% CI)
I don’t do anything	1.60 (1.17-2.20)	1.35 (0.92-1.98)
I avoid close contact with others	0.91 (0.76-1.08)	0.67 (0.55-0.83)
I wash my hands more often	0.79 (0.66-0.94)	0.83 (0.65-1.06)
I distrust news media	1.36 (1.10-1.70)	1.28 (1.04-1.58)

*Adjusted for gender, age and survey weights
CI = Confidence Interval

This study was carried out by the Gapminder Foundation in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet and New York University:

Maike Winters, Ben Oppenheim, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling, Helena Nordenstedt

For more information: [email protected]