The Blame Instinct

Hans Rosling begins the chapter with a conversation during his lecture at Karolinska Institutet, where a student expressed a desire to physically attack the CEO of Novartis, a major pharmaceutical company, over its research priorities. Rosling used this interaction to illustrate the complexity of assigning blame within systems, such as corporate and shareholder structures. He pointed out that retirees often own shares in big pharma due to stable returns, highlighting a broader, systemic cause rather than individual malevolence.

The chapter explores the blame instinct, our habit to look for a clear and simple reason for bad occurrences. Rosling argues that this instinct distracts us from deeper systemic understanding and hinders actions that could solve or mitigate the actual issues. He uses multiple examples to delve into this, including:

• Personal experiences with the blame instinct, such as mistakenly blaming hotel staff for a shower's water temperature issues.
• The tendency to credit or blame powerful individuals for complex systems failures or successes. For example, blaming CEOs for company policies shaped by market forces and shareholder expectations.
• Journalists and media, illustrating how they often reflect general misconceptions rather than creating them. He stressed that most journalists share the same misconceptions due to their human nature and the dramatic instincts we all have.
• The refugee crisis, where European policy indirectly causes human smuggling by making legal access to asylum excessively difficult, thus increasing the demand for dangerous, illegal pathways to asylum.
• Climate change discussions, where Western narratives often inappropriately shift the burden of emission reductions onto developing countries, despite the historical emissions overwhelmingly originating from wealthy nations.

Rosling advocates for shifting focus from finding individuals to blame to understanding complex systems that contribute to problems or successes. He argues this approach is more productive for creating solutions. In handling problems:

• Seek to identify systems, not villains or heroes.
• Recognize the full range of contributing factors to a situation, understanding that "bad" outcomes can happen without direct intent from individuals.
• Appreciate the role of institutions and technology in societal improvements, acknowledging that good outcomes are often the result of complex interactions within well-functioning systems rather than the actions of a few.

In conclusion, Factfulness involves resisting the urge to find simple explanations and scapegoats. Instead, adopting a broader view helps us understand deeper causative structures and promotes more effective responses to global challenges.