Factfulness by Hans Rosling

This is a great book for everyone, and I particularly think educators should all read it. All of us coming from different cultural backgrounds and have different ways of doing things and seeing things. If we are not careful, we end up sharing our opinions and ideas based on our feeling, but not based on facts, not based on our thinking. We need to cite facts and be faithful to the data in order to tell a complete story.

After reading this book, I have a new thought on how we should guide students in doing their service projects. There should be no more horrifying images or terrible news to urge others take actions. If we encourage and actually teach students to do this, we fail them as we are just as misleading as the media. Instead, we should guide students to think critically when evaluating different information before making decisions. We ought to explicitly point out the incremental positive changes made and celebrate human achievement. Young people should be inspired and feel hopeful about the world that they are living in, and feel empowered to galvanize us into actions! ​

To remind myself and use these tools for fact checking and decision-making, I have created this infographic. An individual is placed right in the center. In order for one to truly become international-mindedness, we need to control our instincts when perceiving the world. The ten instincts are outlined below:

• the gap instinct;
• the negative instinct;
• the straight line instinct;
• the fear instinct;
• the size instinct;
• the generalization instinct;
• the destiny instinct;
• the single perspective instinct;
• the blame instinct;
• the urgency instinct.

We should be mindful of our ten instincts and become aware of how these instincts can prevent us from putting events in perspective. “10 factfulness commandments”  is suggested as a framework to overcome our 10 instincts and help us develop a fact-based worldview.  

You can directly download the PDF by clicking the picture below.  ​