W
hy are people so pessimistic about the prent? My own interest in this topic began when I became aware of histori-cal data on violence and compared
them with the conventional wisdom of respondents in an internet survey. I found that people consistently estimate that the prent is more lethal than the past. Modernity has brought us terrible violence, the thinking goes, while the na-tive peoples of the past lived in a state of harmony, one we have departed from to our peril. But the actual data show that our ancestors were far more violent than we are and that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time.In some comparisons, the past was 40 times more violent than the prent. T oday , we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.
S T E V E N P I N K E R
S TEVEN P INKER IS THE J OHNSTONE F AMILY P ROFESSOR OF P SYCHOLOGY AT H ARVARD U NIVERSITY AND THE AUTHOR OF MANY BOOKS , INCLUDING T HE B LANK S LATE . H E SPOKE AT A C ATO P OLICY F ORUM IN N OVEMBER .
The Psychology
of Pessimism
T his insight led me to write The Better Angels of Our Na-ture: Why Violence
Has Declined. But it was not the end of my encounters with pessimism. After writing a book on war, genocide, rape, torture, and sadism, I thought I would take on some truly controversial issues—namely, split infinitives, dangling par-ticiples, prepositions at the end of ntences, and other issues of style and usage in writing. There, too, I found widespread pessimism. When I told people that I was writing a book on why writing is so bad and how we might improve it, the univer-sal reaction was that writing is get-
ting wor and that the language is degenerating.
There are a number of popular explanations for this alleged fact:“Google is making us stoopid” (as a famous Atlantic cover story put it). T witter is forcing us to write and think in 140 characters. The digital age has produced “the dumbest gen-eration.” When people offer the explanations to me, I ask them to stop and think. If this is really true, it implies that it must have been better before the digital age. And of cour tho of you who are old enough re-member the 1980s will recall that it was an age when teenagers spoke in articulate paragraphs, bureaucrats wrote in plain English, and every aca-demic article was a masterpiece in the art of the essay. (Or was it the 1970s?)
Above and beyond the psycholo-gy of violence and the psychology of language, the findings point toward an interesting question for a psychol-ogist such as mylf. Why are people always convinced that the world is going downhill? What is the psychol-ogy of pessimism? I’m going to sug-gest that it’s a combination of veral elements of human psychol-
ogy interacting with the na-
ture of news. Let’s start with
the psychology.
There are a number of emotional bias toward pes-
simism that have been well
documented by psycholo-
gists and have been summa-
rized by the slogan “Bad is
stronger than good.” This is
the title of a review article
by the psychologist Roy Baumeister in which he reviewed a wide variety of evidence that people are more nsitive to bad things than to good things. If you lo $10, that makes you feel a lot wor than the amount by which you feel better if you gain $10. That is, loss are felt more keenly than gains—as Jimmy Connors once put it, “I hate to lo more than I like to win.” Bad events leave longer traces in mood and memory than good ones. Criticism
Why are people
always convinced
that the world is going
downhill? What is
the psychology of pessimism?““
2•Cato’s Letter WINTER 2015
WINTER 2015Cato’s Letter•3
4•Cato’s Letter WINTER 2015
WINTER 2015Cato’s Letter•5
