By Rosemary Smith, Managing Director of Getting Better Foundation As I meet with educators all over the world about their fears for students’ schooling since the pandemic, racial tensions, polarization…
Education Closes the Gap that Legislation Leaves Open
Written by Joe Phelps There’s a lot of talk about legislating more governmental control of the major social media platforms. While there is room for legislation to hold digital services…
Written by Joe Phelps, CEO, Getting Better Foundation Netflix’s documentary, ”The Social Dilemma”, exposed the motivations and technologies of social media platforms as well as the algorithms that drive them.…
Written by Rosemary Smith, Managing Director of Getting Better Foundation Besides being potentially avoidable tragedies, what do the Nashville Bomber, Russian Trolls, Black Lives Matter, Covington Catholic, Pizza Gate, Sandy…
Negativity Bias: “As a Man Thinketh” and Pollyanna
By Rosemary Smith, Getting Better Foundation, Managing Director “When the bad outweighs the good, for many, whether we realize it or not, it erodes our ability to have compassion and…
…as a result of incomplete information. By Joe Phelps, Getting Better Foundation, founder As mentioned in Matt Ridley’s recent blog: The late, Hans Rosling, asked 1000 people: “Has the percentage of…
By Belinha De Abreu, PhD., author, researcher, friend of The Getting Better Foundation We live in troubling times. The news in the past months have shown how conflicted our world…
P. Brown, author & friend of Getting Better Foundation It is only natural that we care mostly about ourselves. Our immediate family. Our friends. Maybe our neighbors. And just maybe…
Some words from our founder, Joe Phelps The lack of media literacy – or “Minding the Gap” – is a critical problem — worldwide. “Minding the Gap” is a term…
Wikipedia says: “The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is…
Media Literacy: We could all use a bit more of it!
WHAT IS THE ISSUE? If you believe everything you read and hear about violent conflict, the environment, human health and poverty, you might think that the world has become a…
Is the world going to starve? The Problem: If you follow the news, the world can seem pretty grim at times. We’re trained by some media to believe things are getting worse. We may extrapolate these…
(Literacy, Intelligence, Technology, Gender, Curriculum) Literacy – One of the moments I’d like to take back was a teenaged argument with my Dad, when I’d called him ignorant and illiterate. Today,…
By Steven Pinker, Time Magazine, January 4, 2018 According to the latest data, people are living longer and becoming healthier, better fed, richer, smarter, safer, more connected–and, at the same time,…
“Accepting that some things can’t be controlled, or might happen anyway, keeps you from having the chronic fear and anxiety of scanning in order to problem solve every single thing.…
“We need to encounter and talk to people who are not exactly like us.” Gregg Easterbrook, author of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, talks about why,…
“The most effective thing that trust does is reduce the frictions between individuals.” In this extended podcast, scientist, author and entrepreneur, Dr. Paul J. Zak, talks about the importance of…
“As journalism gets degraded, disinformation and misinformation becomes more prevalent.” In this Getting Better podcast, snopes.com managing editor, Brooke Binkowski, talks about the challenges facing responsible journalists in sorting out facts from…
“We live in a world not based on return on investment, but a return on trust.” Seth Godin talks about trust and the responsibility that comes with freedom. As Seth…
By HumanProgress.org While most people already know that we live longer and earn higher incomes than our ancestors, many people fail to appreciate that the story of human progress is…
“Isn’t it amazing what we’ve accomplished in the last 50 or 100 years? …A total transformation in human life chances.” The bestselling author of “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves,…
“Most moral progress came about because we proactively tried to something about it to make the world a better place.” Dr. Michael Shermer, author of The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason…
“We’re born with a drive to respond to scary things. Fear gets attention.” In this podcast, we hear from Barry Glassner, PhD, author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid…
By Hans Rosling and the BBC 15 years from now, nobody will still be living in extreme poverty anywhere in the world – that’s the pledge being made by President…
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales creates news service Wikitribune
By BBC News Fake news has dominated the headlines, fuelling the debate about the future of the media and the role of social networks. Tech giants are struggling to combat…
By Rakesh Kochhar The share of the global population that is poor plunged from 29% in 2001 to 15% in 2011, elevating the living standards of 669 million people, according…
Voters’ perceptions of crime continue to conflict with reality
Despite double-digit percentage decreases in U.S. violent and property crime rates since 2008, most voters say crime has gotten worse during that span, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.…
By Lori Robertson President Barack Obama said there have been “huge drops in the murder rates” in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Dallas. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump…
The United States Is Not an Apocalyptic Wasteland, Explains Steven Pinker
By Phil Torres The Harvard cognitive scientist tells us how life is always getting better, despite what Trump has said. Donald Trump’s rise to power was driven in part by…
Are We Fundamentally Good or Evil? Neuroscience Has an Answer
By Nicola Brown What underlies every box office hit, bestselling novel, and most compelling video games? A fight between good and evil, of course. The argument over whether humans are…
What Is Driving the Rise of ‘Fake News’ and News Literacy Lessons to Spot It
By Gene Foreman and the News Literacy Project The “fake news” phenomenon was on vivid display in social media during the bitter 2016 presidential campaign. A typical example of the…
By Steven Pinker NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and…
By Michael Shermer Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In…
By John Gramlich February 21, 2017 Donald Trump made crime-fighting an important focus of his campaign for president, and he cited it again during his inaugural address in January. With the…
by Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina According to these household surveys, 44% of the world population lived in absolute poverty in 1981. Since then, the share of poor people has declined…
Americans’ Fear of Foreign Terrorists Is Overinflated
By Alex Nowrasteh One thing is clear from this presidential campaign: many Americans are scared of terrorists and immigrants. Donald Trump has managed to capitalize on that fear by conflating the two phenomena.…
Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion
23% say they have shared a made-up news story – either knowingly or not BY MICHAEL BARTHEL, AMY MITCHELL AND JESSE HOLCOMB In the wake of the 2016 election, everyone from President Obama to Pope Francis has raised…