Book summary “Factfulness”: summary

Introduction

You carry a deeply pessimistic view of the world in your head. When asked basic questions about global poverty, population growth, and vaccination rates, you consistently choose the most dramatic and alarming answers available. Even educated professionals, corporate leaders, and Nobel laureates perform worse on these tests than chimpanzees randomly guessing bananas. Your brain is not broken, but it is wired to misunderstand reality.

You struggle with a set of deeply ingrained cognitive biases shaped by human evolution. These instincts distort how you process information, transforming complex progress into simple stories of doom and division. You look at global statistics through an emotional lens that prioritizes dramatic narratives over mundane facts. As a result, you live in a state of persistent anxiety about the future of humanity.

The book argues that you can overcome this distorted worldview. You can replace your dramatic instincts with a fact-based perspective through calm thinking tools. The author dismantles ten mental traps that block your understanding of the world. You will learn to recognize when your mind is playing tricks on you.

Are you dividing the world into rich and poor without seeing the middle? Do you assume things are constantly getting worse despite measurable progress? Are you terrified by dramatic risks while ignoring ordinary dangers? This book gives you the answers you need to see the world as it actually is.

1. The Gap Instinct

Humans possess a strong dramatic instinct to dichotomize everything into two conflicting groups separated by an imagined gap. This gap instinct creates a distorted picture in your mind of a world split into two distinct categories, such as rich versus poor, developing versus developed, or the West versus the rest. It makes observers imagine division where there is actually a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement.

The gap instinct compels you to divide the world into two distinct and conflicting groups separated by an imagined chasm, ignoring the vast middle where most people live.

Surveys reveal that people drastically underestimate basic living standards and progress in low-income countries. When tested on questions regarding basic metrics like primary school completion for girls in low-income countries, respondents consistently guessed much worse outcomes than the actual data, performing even worse than chimpanzees choosing randomly.

When asked what percentage of girls finish primary school in low-income countries, only 7 percent of respondents picked the correct answer of 60 percent, while the majority guessed 20 percent. Chimpanzees at the zoo scored 33 percent correct answers, while only 9 percent of the world population lives in low-income countries.

The Four Income Levels

Dividing the world into four income levels based on daily earnings provides a realistic alternative to the binary rich-poor model. Instead of a binary split, humanity is distributed across four distinct income levels measured in dollars per day, where the vast majority of the global population lives in the middle on levels two and three.

• 1 billion people living on Level 1 with $1 per day
• 3 billion people living on Level 2 with $4 per day
• 2 billion people living on Level 3 with $16 per day
• 1 billion people living on Level 4 with more than $64 per day

While the world has completely changed over recent decades, the worldview of people in wealthy nations has remained stuck in the past. Data regarding family sizes and child survival rates shows that the old binary division of developing and developed countries applied to the world in 1965, but today the vast majority of mankind has moved into the box representing small families and high child survival.

How to Control the Gap Instinct

Comparing averages can mislead observers by hiding the wide spreads and overlapping ranges of data between groups. When two averages are compared, you tend to focus on the gap between the single numbers while missing the overlapping distributions of individuals that prove there is no real gap.

Looking at math scores between men and women or incomes between the United States and Mexico through different graph scales reveals that apparently distinct groups actually share massive overlaps.

Focusing on extreme examples creates distorted impressions of a group because the majority of people are found in the middle. Although extreme conditions and extreme wealth exist, pointing exclusively to the top and bottom extremes ignores the reality of the middle where the vast majority of the population resides.

In Brazil, while the richest 10 percent earns 41 percent of the total income, data broken down across the four income levels shows that the big demographic hump rests on Level 3 rather than in extreme poverty. Living on the highest income level distorts perceptions, making all lower levels look uniformly impoverished from a distance.

2. The Negativity Instinct

The negativity instinct makes you notice bad news much more than good news, creating a persistent illusion that the world is constantly getting worse.

This instinct is driven by selective reporting from activists and journalists who highlight dramatic crises. It is also fueled by the emotional feeling that acknowledging progress is heartless while severe problems remain. When you look back, you tend to misremember the past as idyllic and peaceful.

Lasse Berg observed rural Indian villages in the 1970s with earthen floors and half-naked children. When he returned 25 years later to concrete houses and TVs, the villagers denied they had ever been that poor.

Extreme Poverty and Life Expectancy

The proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved over a recent 20-year period. This represents the greatest silent miracle of human progress.

Twenty years ago, 29 percent of the world population lived in extreme poverty. Today, that number has dropped to 9 percent.

Massive economic development has allowed billions of people to escape misery and move up to higher levels. In China and India, the share of the population living in extreme poverty dropped dramatically. In India, 42 percent lived in extreme poverty in 1997, compared to 12 percent in 2017. In China, the share dropped from 42 percent in 1997 to 0.7 percent in 2017.

Global life expectancy has risen to an average of 72 years. In 1800, global life expectancy was roughly 30 years everywhere because half of all children died in childhood.

Bad and Better

Situations can be simultaneously bad and getting better. Recognizing progress does not imply that all problems have been solved.

You can track global improvements across several positive trends:

• legal rights;
• child labor;
• vaccinations;
• smallpox eradication;
• democracy.

Hans Rosling was born in Sweden in 1948 when its health and wealth level corresponded to Egypt's level in 2017. This rapid shift demonstrates how countries progress through income levels over time.

3. The Straight Line Instinct

The straight line instinct traps you in the false assumption that current trends will continue indefinitely along a straight path without changing shape.

While humans evolved to project linear trajectories for physical survival, applying this intuition to complex statistical trends leads to false alarms about overpopulation and resource depletion. Hans Rosling initially assumed the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was increasing linearly until he saw research data proving it was doubling exponentially every three weeks. This mental habit relies on the doubling line.

Peak Child

Global population growth is slowing down because the annual number of births has already stopped increasing, a phenomenon known as peak child. As extreme poverty falls and women get educated, the global average of babies per woman has dropped from five in 1948 to below 2.5, meaning the number of children under 15 will remain flat at around 2 billion.

The current world population stands at 7.6 billion. Experts expect a peak population of 10 to 12 billion by the end of the century.

Saving poor children from dying in extreme poverty actually curbs population growth rather than causing overpopulation. Parents in extreme poverty have many children to compensate for high child mortality and secure child labor. Once child survival is guaranteed and parents escape poverty, they voluntarily choose to have fewer, well-educated children. Women in countries with the highest child mortality like Somalia, Chad, Mali, and Niger still give birth to 5 to 8 babies.

In Bangladesh, child survival increased to 97 percent while the average number of children per woman dropped from seven to two over four decades.

Curve Shapes

To correctly understand world data, you must recognize that curves take many different shapes rather than straight paths. Basic necessities like vaccinations follow S-bends that flatten at higher income levels. Fertility rates follow slide-shaped downward curves. Phenomena like motor vehicle accidents follow hump-shaped curves peaking in middle-income countries.

You can encounter various curve types in global statistics:

• S-bends;
• slides;
• humps;
• doubling lines.

People living on Level 1 earn $1 a day, whereas those on Level 4 earn $64 a day. A 2 percent annual income growth results in income doubling after 35 years.

4. The Fear Instinct

The fear instinct forces your attention onto dramatic and terrifying risks while blinding you to everyday realities and actual statistical dangers.

Information that appeals to your dramatic instincts easily passes your mental attention filter. Everyday positive trends are ignored. Your brain is hardwired with fears of physical harm, captivity, and contamination. The media exploits these instincts to grab attention and create a false impression of an increasingly dangerous world.

Hans Rosling panicked as a young doctor in Sweden when treating a patient in a G suit. He mistook a cold, shivering Swedish pilot for an injured Russian invader and feared World War III had begun.

Natural Disasters and Aviation

Deaths from natural disasters have plummeted over the past century. This decline is thanks to better economic development and preparedness, contrary to public perception.

In Bangladesh, a digital flood-monitoring system and evacuation plans helped protect residents during the 2015 cyclone. This progress contrasts sharply with the 2 million deaths from floods and droughts in 1942.

Global collaboration driven by shared fears has made commercial flying exponentially safer. The media focuses heavily on rare fatal crashes while ignoring safe landings.

In 2016, 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely. Only ten ended in fatal accidents, making it one of the safest years in aviation history.

Chemophobia

The fear of invisible contamination, such as radiation or chemicals, often causes far more harm and stress than the actual toxic agents. Public anxiety over nuclear contamination is inflated into chemophobia. This fear results in counterproductive panic, unnecessary mass evacuations, and resistance to beneficial tools.

Following the Fukushima nuclear plant flooding, 1,600 elderly evacuees died due to the physical and mental stress of evacuation. Zero people died from the leaking radioactivity.

Terrorists exploit the human fear instinct by targeting primitive fears of harm and captivity. However, everyday dangers pose vastly higher risks.

In the United States over a 20-year span, 3,172 people died from terrorism. Alcohol contributed to the deaths of 1.4 million Americans during the same period.

5. The Size Instinct

The size instinct leads you to misjudge the importance of isolated numbers and visible individual victims by failing to compare them against totals.

Human intuition naturally focuses on dramatic individual instances right in front of your eyes. This instinct makes you ignore invisible background statistics and systemic prevention efforts that save far more lives.

As a doctor in Mozambique, Hans Rosling realized that focusing solely on the 5 percent of sick children dying inside his hospital ignored the 98.7 percent of dying children in the district who never reached medical care. There were 946 children admitted to the Nacala hospital in a year. Out of those, 52 children died in the hospital, representing a 5 percent mortality rate during a time when Mozambique had a 26 percent child mortality rate.

Comparing and Dividing

To prevent misjudging the size or importance of a statistic, you must never rely on lonely numbers. You should always compare or divide them.

Big numbers naturally look impressive and important on their own. UNICEF's reported figure of 4.2 million infant deaths in 2016 sounds horrifyingly massive. Comparing it to historical data shows it has dropped dramatically from 14.4 million in 1950.

Examine these changing figures over time:

• 14.4 million babies died in 1950, representing a 15 percent infant mortality rate;
• 4.2 million babies died in 2016, representing a 3 percent infant mortality rate.

Evaluating metrics like emissions by total national amounts unfairly penalizes populous countries. Dividing large national totals by total population provides comparable per capita measurements. A European environment minister blamed China and India for total carbon dioxide emissions at Davos. An Indian official successfully argued that accountability must be measured per person, unlike nations such as Norway with its 5 million population.

The PIN Code of the World

Understanding global proportions requires knowing where the majority of the human population lives. You can encapsulate this distribution using the demographic PIN code of the world.

Seventy percent of people fail basic demographic questions. Most people incorrectly believe population is evenly distributed or centered in the West.

The global population breaks down into specific regional amounts:

• the current PIN code is 1-1-1-4, representing billions in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia;
• the projected PIN code of the world by 2100 is 1-1-4-5.

When faced with a long list of items, you tend to assume equal importance. The 80/20 rule helps simplify complex datasets and budgets by focusing attention on the few largest items that comprise the vast majority of the total. Sorting them allows you to prioritize effectively, such as noting that 87 percent of the world's energy is generated by oil, coal, and gas combined.

6. The Generalization Instinct

The generalization instinct causes you to mistakenly group diverse people and countries together, assuming everyone in a category shares identical traits.

Categories are necessary for human thought. This instinct distorts your worldview by creating false stereotypes and mind-blockers that prevent proper understanding of markets and human behavior.

Hans Rosling lied to villagers in the Congo, claiming he and his colleague Thorkild came from different tribes from Sweden and Denmark because one culture supposedly eats larvas while the other does not.

A lack of awareness regarding basic global infrastructure leads financial experts and investors to miss massive opportunities in developing regions. Vaccines require cool chains for logistic distribution, which rely on the same basic infrastructure needed for new factories. Investors holding a them category for developing nations severely underestimate vaccination and growth rates.

An annual gathering of global finance managers at a top ten bank featured 71 well-dressed bankers, where 85 percent of bankers believed a minority of children were vaccinated out of 12,596 people tested across 108 lectures.

Dollar Street

Income level, rather than religion, culture, or country, is the primary factor that dictates how people live around the world. The Dollar Street project sorts homes by income along a single street, proving that people on the same income level share striking similarities in their daily lives, regardless of geography. This initiative covered 300 families visited in more than 50 countries, capturing over 40,000 photos.

A family on Level 2 in China and a family on Level 2 in Nigeria use very similar methods to store and prepare food using an iron pot on a tripod over a fire.

Controlling Generalizations

Architectural or structural habits in developing countries that seem disorganized to outsiders are actually rational financial solutions to local constraints. Without access to reliable banks or loans on Levels 2 and 3, families protect their savings from inflation and theft by buying individual bricks and adding them to their houses as they can afford them.

Mabrouk Salhi, 52 years old, and Jamila Salhi, 44 years old, in Tunis, like many of their neighbors, took 10 or 15 years to build a home with unfinished second floors to store physical bricks instead of vulnerable cash.

Good intentions combined with sweeping generalizations across incomparable groups can lead to disastrous public health outcomes. Medical professionals generalized the successful recovery position used for unconscious soldiers to sleeping infants, recommending they sleep on their tummies, which caused 60,000 lives lost globally for sudden infant death syndrome before the policy was reversed. It took 7 years for Swedish authorities to accept the mistake after the Hong Kong study.

7. The Destiny Instinct

The destiny instinct locks you into the belief that innate characteristics permanently determine the unchanging destinies of cultures and nations.

This instinct blinds people to revolutionary transformations happening in societies. You treat cultures like unchanging rocks rather than dynamic systems in constant motion.

A gray-haired man in a three-piece suit at the Balmoral Hotel told Rosling there was no chance Africa would ever make it because of its supposedly unchangeable culture.

Babies and Religions

Birth rates and family planning are driven by socioeconomic progress rather than religious dogma or cultural permanence.

Iran experienced the fastest drop in babies per woman in world history. The country moved from more than six babies per woman in 1984 down to fewer than three babies 15 years later. This was due to widespread education, healthcare access, and contraception use at Level 1 and Level 2.

An Iranian-Swedish student wept after hearing Rosling present positive health and education data for Iran. She noted that educated Swedes remained completely unaware of these modern changes.

Slow Change

Slow and small annual changes accumulate over long periods into massive structural shifts that people often fail to notice. Small percentage increases compound over decades, transforming environmental protection and societal norms far beyond initial recognition.

Mathematical rules govern this accumulation:

• 1 percent growth doubles in 70 years;
• 2 percent growth doubles in 35 years;
• 3 percent growth doubles in 24 years.

The world's first nature reserve was created in Sri Lanka in the third century BC. Global protected land slowly climbed from 0.03 percent in 1900 to 15 percent today.

As a possibilist, you must recognize that slow changes are still real changes.

8. The Single Perspective Instinct

The single perspective instinct traps you in the habit of viewing all global problems through a single cause or solution, blinding you to reality.

Simple ideas feel attractive and save time. You can easily fall into the trap of blindly supporting or opposing concepts like the free market or equality.

Experts, activists, and ideologues often suffer most from this narrow mindset. They push rigid solutions where case-by-case balancing is required.

In Cuba, the minister of health proudly declared that his country was the healthiest of the poor. He ignored that citizens lacked the wealth and freedom enjoyed on Level 4.

Experts and Activists

Being highly educated, intelligent, or holding specialized expertise does not make someone knowledgeable outside their specific field.

Hans Rosling notes that Nobel laureates, scientists, and numerate individuals score just as poorly on global fact questions as the general public or even chimpanzees. Activists and professionals often exaggerate the specific problems they study because they lack broader perspective.

At the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, only 8 percent of top young scientists and Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine got the child vaccination fact question right.

Numbers Are Not the Single Solution

While numbers and data are essential for understanding the world, they cannot capture every aspect of human development and reality alone.

Data must be tied to real human lives rather than used purely for number crunching. Qualitative observations on the ground can offer critical insights when statistics are weak.

Mozambique Prime Minister Pascoal Mocumbi checked economic progress not just through GDP figures. He observed people's shoes during May Day marches and watched whether new brick foundations were being built.

Compare this holistic approach with macroeconomic measurements:

• 9,400 dollars spent per capita on health care in the United States;
• 3,600 dollars spent per capita in other capitalist countries on Level 4.

You must test your favorite ideas by constantly looking for data that contradicts them.

9. The Blame Instinct

The blame instinct pushes you to find a simple scapegoat when things go wrong, halting critical thinking and blocking systemic solutions.

When negative events occur, you naturally look for a bad guy with malicious intent. Finding a villain feels much more comforting than facing a complex system. This finger-pointing stops deeper investigation into root causes.

When a hotel shower suddenly turned scorching hot, the author initially felt furious with the plumber or hotel manager. He later realized no one intentionally caused the issue.

Journalists and documentary filmmakers are not deliberately lying. They produce a distorted worldview because they share the same widespread misconceptions as the public. Blaming the media is pointless. When tested on global development facts at conferences, journalists and documentary producers from outlets like the BBC, PBS, and National Geographic scored worse than random guessing.

Tragic refugee deaths at sea are largely an unintended consequence of government policies. European directives penalizing airlines for carrying undocumented passengers effectively prevent refugees from boarding commercial flights.

You can see the fatal result of this policy in maritime transit:

• 4,000 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015;
• 1,000 euros paid per person for places in inflatable boats;
• under 50 euros for a flight ticket from Turkey to Sweden or Libya to London.

Powerful Leaders?

Political and ideological leaders are frequently credited with far more personal power than they actually possess. Major demographic shifts occur independently of government commands or religious decrees.

Contraceptive use in Catholic-majority countries is 60 percent. This matches the 58 percent contraceptive use in the rest of the world, despite clear papal condemnation.

Institutions

Human progress is driven primarily by prosaic institutional systems and everyday technologies rather than heroic individual leaders. Societal advancement relies on civil servants, public health workers, and infrastructure.

80 percent of people in the world who have some access to electricity benefit from invisible networks. The fight against the lethal Ebola virus in Liberia was won by local health workers who adapted safe burial practices and treated patients.

10. The Urgency Instinct

The urgency instinct drives you to make panicky decisions under perceived imminent danger, shutting down analytical thinking and causing severe consequences.

When you feel afraid and face time pressure, your ability to think things through is overwhelmed. This leads to drastic actions, ignored side effects, and poor decisions that make problems worse rather than better. You must recognize when your dramatic instincts push you toward panic.

In 1981 Mozambique, Hans Rosling urged a mayor to set up a roadblock out of fear of a mysterious paralytic disease. This forced mothers to cross the sea in fragile boats, resulting in the drowning of all the women and children.

Demographic Forecasts

Demographic forecasts are remarkably accurate decades in advance because human life cycles are stable, whereas complex economic systems are extremely difficult to predict. Systems involving birth, aging, and death operate on roughly seventy-year individual cycles, making population trends predictable. In contrast, economic systems involve billions of rapid daily changes, making short-term and long-term financial predictions notoriously unreliable.

Exaggerating data and relying on worst-case scenarios to create artificial urgency destroys long-term credibility and makes people tune out entirely. Activists often use fear and exaggerated claims to galvanize public action on long-term risks like climate change. However, crying wolf too many times leads to numb audiences, compromised trust, and an inability to focus on realistic, data-driven solutions. Hans Rosling refused Al Gore's request to show worst-case animated temperature bubbles beyond scientific expert forecasts during a 2009 TED conference conversation, stating that no numbers mean no bubbles.

During health crises, tracking suspected cases instead of confirmed cases can create misleading upward curves that fail to measure whether interventions are working. As fear increases, health systems become overwhelmed, and non-Ebola deaths and false alarms are lumped into suspected cases. To know if an intervention is actually working, researchers must organize and analyze clean data on confirmed cases. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia, official suspected case curves kept rising due to panic, but when Ola Rosling spent twenty-four hours cleaning and combining Excel spreadsheets in Stockholm, the data revealed that confirmed cases had already peaked two weeks earlier.

Five Global Risks

Rather than reacting to constant imagined crises, you should direct your energy and global collaboration toward five actual mega-killers. The Spanish flu following the First World War killed fifty million people and temporarily dropped global life expectancy from thirty-three to twenty-three years.

• Global pandemic
• Financial collapse
• World war
• Climate change
• Extreme poverty

Controlling the urgency instinct requires taking a breath, demanding accurate and relevant data, being wary of extreme fortune-tellers, and avoiding drastic actions. By recognizing when a decision feels artificially urgent, you can slow down, ask for more time and information, and opt for step-by-step practical improvements instead of falling into stress or apathy.

11. Factfulness in Practice

Factfulness functions as mental therapy, replacing stress and irrational fears with a calm, accurate understanding of global progress.

You can apply critical thinking and rationality regardless of formal education. Courageous individuals can use logic to calm mass panic when instincts like fear, generalization, and blame trigger hostility.

In 1989 in remote Zaire, a village mob threatened Hans Rosling with machetes under the belief he was stealing their blood. An illiterate local woman named Makanga stepped forward, argued logically in favor of medical research based on past measles vaccinations, and offered her own arm first to defuse the crowd.

Education and Business

Schools should teach children an up-to-date, fact-based global framework along with rules of thumb to protect them from ignorance and dramatic media manipulation. You can replace traditional folkloric materials with digital platforms like Dollar Street to show actual differences within countries and similarities across them.

Global businesses must update their worldviews to match current economic data, shifting their branding, headquarters, and recruitment strategies toward growing markets in Asia and Africa. Outdated colonial views or America-centric branding can harm modern enterprises.

Multinational tech companies like Google and Microsoft have made their Americanness almost invisible. They successfully appointed chief executive officers such as Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella who were raised and educated in India.

Fact-Based Worldview

Sword swallowing demonstrates that seemingly impossible things can be true. This mirrors how surprising global facts contradict common intuition. Rosling initially tried using a fishing rod before a former sword-swallowing patient advised him that the throat is flat. That advice led him to successfully use an 1809 Swedish army bayonet.

Widespread global ignorance persists because human brains are hard-wired with evolutionary instincts that crave drama and jump to swift conclusions. In tests across 14 countries in 2017 involving nearly 12,000 people, participants scored an average of just two correct answers out of the first 12 questions. Fifteen percent of participants scored zero.

You can maintain a fact-based worldview by remembering specific realities:

• extreme poverty has nearly halved over the past 20 years;
• humans score worse than chimpanzees answering randomly on global development;
• top experts often fail basic tests despite having access to fresh data;
• data serves as therapy to reduce stress and replace irrational fears.

Conclusion

You can overcome your dramatic instincts and replace an overdramatic worldview with a fact-based perspective through calm thinking tools.

The ten instincts combine to trap you in an outdated, frightening view of the world. Each instinct exploits your brain's evolutionary preference for dramatic stories over boring numbers. These mental shortcuts create systemic blind spots that prevent you from seeing actual global progress. You react to the world with stress, fear, and urgency instead of quiet observation.

Factfulness acts as a practical defense against this mental drama. You must practice active resistance against your internal biases whenever you consume news or evaluate data.

1. Recognize when a story triggers extreme emotions and pause to demand better context.
2. Look for the majority in the middle instead of accepting extreme polar opposites.
3. Track slow improvements over generations rather than focusing exclusively on short-term setbacks.
4. Compare absolute numbers against totals to measure true impact rather than reacting to isolated tragedies.
5. Question simple explanations, single perspectives, and convenient scapegoats when complex systemic issues arise.

Applying these habits transforms how you interpret reality. You stop fearing imaginary catastrophes and start recognizing real problems that require targeted action. A fact-based worldview gives you peace of mind and enables you to make better decisions in your personal life and professional choices.

10 Key Ideas

1. The gap instinct compels you to divide the world into two distinct and conflicting groups separated by an imagined chasm, ignoring the vast middle where most people live.
2. The negativity instinct makes you notice bad news much more than good news, creating a persistent illusion that the world is constantly getting worse.
3. The straight line instinct traps you in the false assumption that current trends will continue indefinitely along a straight path without changing shape.
4. The fear instinct forces your attention onto dramatic and terrifying risks while blinding you to everyday realities and actual statistical dangers.
5. The size instinct leads you to misjudge the importance of isolated numbers and visible individual victims by failing to compare them against totals.
6. The generalization instinct causes you to mistakenly group diverse people and countries together, assuming everyone in a category shares identical traits.
7. The destiny instinct locks you into the belief that innate characteristics permanently determine the unchanging destinies of cultures and nations.
8. The single perspective instinct traps you in the habit of viewing all global problems through a single cause or solution, blinding you to reality.
9. The blame instinct pushes you to find a simple scapegoat when things go wrong, halting critical thinking and blocking systemic solutions.
10. The urgency instinct drives you to make panicky decisions under perceived imminent danger, shutting down analytical thinking and causing severe consequences.