Kerolin Motram and Fernando Duarte
Feature, BBC World Service
Do you think the world is getting better or worse? If your answer is the latter, you are not alone.
In the last two decades, there has been an increase in negative feelings around the world, according to data from the research institute Gallup (Gallup), whose 2022 survey found that four out of 10 adults worldwide experienced a lot of worry or stress.
This may not be a surprise, because our problems are often real and serious.
Due to the ongoing wars, the effects of climate change and the rising cost of living, it can seem like the world is on its knees.
But that's only one side of the story, says Sol Perlmator.
He is an American astrophysicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 as a member of a team of scientists who provided evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
"I just don't think people realize that they live in a time where we've improved so many aspects of life," he says.
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We sure have come a long way as a species.
The average life expectancy of a newborn baby in 1900 was 32 years, according to data from the website Our World in Data (Our World in Numbers) based at the University of Oxford in England.
By 2021, life expectancy has more than doubled to 71 years.
Child mortality has dropped significantly, and we have made enormous progress in reducing poverty.
There are many statistics that show the progress of the world - from the prevention of the spread of infectious diseases to the increasing literacy of the population.
But Perlmater, who designed a course on critical thinking at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States (USA), says the prevailing view is that "everything is somehow scary and dangerous."
And believe it or not, part of the blame may lie with our ancestors.
Negative cognitive biases
It's not that we're unaware of the good things happening in our lives, but that people deal with a cognitive condition known as negative cognitive biases.
This means that bad experiences have a more lasting psychological effect than positive ones.
To understand why, we need to go back to the time when we lived in caves.
For our very distant ancestors, remembering negative information could have been a matter of life and death.
A wrong move could lead to a dangerous encounter with predators, and the wrong food could poison or even kill them.
"Our ancestors lived in a world where the dangers of death were frequent," says Paul Rozin, professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University in the US.
"Things are much better now, but that primordial is still in us."
In 2001, Rozin discovered with his colleague Professor Edvard Rojzman that there is a "tendency for the effects of the negative to dominate (or even completely overcome) what is positive."
"One of the reasons why negative events are so important is that they are relatively rare in our lives," he says.
He argues that technological advances, such as television and the Internet, have made things worse because these advances have given us greater access to information, both good and bad news, and we already know which ones are easier to remember.
"Most of the news is negative," he points out.
"No one is reporting that 480 planes took off safely today in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
"But if one plane has a problem, then you find out about it, because it's a rare event.
"A plane that takes off safely is not news".
In some cases, our brains know to overreact to possible threats, and Rozin believes that these primal drives may be lost in future generations.
But he also warns that recent events, such as the corona virus pandemic, can remain etched in the memory of certain people for a long time.
"I know some people who, after the pandemic, still wear masks when they go out to dinner," he says.
Sol Perlmacher says we need to try to change these negative views because he believes we can solve the world's problems.
"The situation is not so desperate that we can do absolutely nothing," he says.
He emphasizes this in the new book he co-authored Thinking in the Third Millennium: Making Sense in a World of Nonsense.
"It is clear that we are the first species likely to be able to prevent the next mass extinction that occurs approximately every 26 million years when a large comet or asteroid collides with Earth," he writes.
"We've built telescopes that can detect approaching comets and asteroids long before they arrive, and we've practiced sending a spacecraft to nudge an asteroid enough to miss us."
Although many of us see the worst in everything, Perlmacher believes the future is brighter than we think.
"This is probably the first time in history that I think it would be fair to say that we can feed, clothe, house, and educate everybody," he says.
He believes that it is possible to provide enough for everyone.
"If people's mindsets could get close enough to be on the same page and work together, this could be an amazing generation to live in."
This text was written in collaboration sa Nobel Prize Outreach, an organization that spreads knowledge of Nobel Prize-winning achievements, and the BBC.
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