The Myopic "Doom & Gloom" Crowd

Science Proves Optimistic People Have a More Realistic Perception of the World Than Negative People

I've been dealing with sustainability issues for close to twenty years now. At first it was various environmental issues that motivated me. Later, I became aware of the ramifications of peak oil and resource scarcity in general. Of late, I am deeply concerned about economic and agricultural issues.

Over the years I've talked to many people about these issues and the need for sustainability. I've been actively discussing these issues on the Internet since 2004, in various chat groups, email groups and so forth.

During that time I have remained positive and upbeat, believing that mankind will eventfully overcome these issues, if we can just avoid destroying our civilization first. My approach to sustainability can best be described as doing whatever it takes (energy & resource efficiency, permaculture, reforestation, renewable energy, etc.) to buy us time to develop and implement scientific and technological solutions (ranging from space based solar energy production to mining the resources of the solar system to eventually becoming a true space-faring civilization.

In promoting my vision, particularly via the Internet, I have run into a variety of people that didn't share my optimism for the future or my enthusiasm for science & technology. Instead, they tend to have a quite negative outlook, something sometimes referred to as "doom and gloom."

For many of these people there simply is no hope for overcoming our problems and the only way to escape disaster is to revert back to some sort of pre-industrial/pre-technological past. Of course, this necessitates greatly reducing the population (without modern technology, there is simply no way to support six to eight billion people on this planet).

Many of these people hope to stabilize and reduce world population in a managed way, while others look towards an inevitable "great die-off" in the not-to-distant future. Most of the later folk look towards the die-off with understandable fear, but a few seem to eagerly embrace the idea as providing a fresh start for mankind.

In talking/debating these negative people, I have always been frustrated by what I considered to be their very narrow world view. They seem to only see the problems and challenges, and are never willing to look at the possibilities and opportunities. Whenever I bring up a reason to be optimistic, they tend to either ignore it or to dismiss it out of hand. They only see the negative, and that is all they want to see (or so it seemed to me). In short, their worldview always seemed quite myopic to me.

Well, science has proved me right. Negative people are myopic. A negative mindset does affect the way the brain functions, diminishing the negative person's ability to take in information about the world around them.

Dr. Adam Anderson, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, has examined brain activation levels with the fMRI scans, comparing brain activity of positive, happy optimistic people with that of pessimistic, unhappy negative people.

His findings: It turns out that people in a positive mood took in more information about the world around them, while people in a negative mood took in less.

In other words, negative people are myopic. They only process a limited amount of information (information that supports their negative view) compared to positive people. Positive people, on the other hand, take in and process more information, therefore have a more complete and realistic view of the world.

My gut feeling that negative people, the "doom and gloom" crowd, do have a narrow world view has now been proven by science to be correct. Negative people do fail to take in and consider all the relevant information, instead processing only that information which reinforces their negativity, which is something I've long suspected.

So today's bit of advice: Be optimistic, it is more realistic!