Optimism as a Professionalism (English)

Psychology Society English

What I'm studying now in my MA degree is so-called "development studies."

Development studies is a broad academic discipline but its main focus is topics such as poverty, conflict, terrorism, inequality, human rights, climate change and so on.


As I study these themes, I sometimes start feeling depressed, being overwhelmed by how many problems exist in the world and how deep the root of those problems is.



However, I do not think you need to be so depressed because of several reasons.

The first reason is simple. Even if you feel depressed, it does not resolve anything. It is better to stay optimistic and positive and keep tackling the problems that lie in front of you.

But today's focus is not that.

Today's point is that your pessimism might be coming from a skewed view of the world. In other words, maybe you are feeling depressed based on the wrong impression of the world.

What does that mean?

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If you are a person who works and studies hard, you might be exposed too much to the information that focuses on problems of the world. You read everyday and you listen to lectures everyday. And most of those are focusing on serious problems in the world.



Try following psychology test.

"Please think about two types of words: 1. words that start with the letter K (such as King or Kill), 2. words in which the letter K comes to the third place (such as asK or asKnowledge). Which type of words do you think exist more?"

(Cited from Kahneman, 2011, "Thinking Fast and Slow")


Psychological studies show that many people answer 1. (Probably, you thought the same way.)

However, the correct answer is 2. The number of words in which the letter K comes to the third place is about three times larger than the number of words that start with K.


Why do people think so?

The explanation is easy. Because it is easier to come up with words that start with K.

Kahneman (2011) called this phenomenon "Availability Heuristic." This is a type of psychological bias.


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Lesson from this simple test is that people tend to see the world based on their "available" information.


Let's apply this theory to the example above. By studying, reading and listening to materials that talk about world's problem everyday, you keep increasing the amount of available information that focuses on problems (or the dark side) of the world.


And you tend to "conclude" that the world is full of negative things, just as you "concluded" that there are more words that start with K based on the mere fact that you can easily come up with those type of words.




But that negative impression might be wrong, just as your answer was incorrect in the psychology test above.



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I realized this when I started traveling around the world. When I traveled to India, Jordan, Syria, Thailand, Laos, Morocco, Nicaragua and etc, many of my japanese friends were worried about me because they thought that I was going to dangerous places. If you take a look at the HP of Ministry of Foreign affaires of Japan, there are tons of informations about how dangerous those places are and how I should be careful.

(I do not necessarily criticize it because protecting japanese citizens is their job and they are just doing their job properly. Similarly, my friends were just worried about me. Of course, they did not have intention to give me a wrong impression of the world.)

(The situation has drastically changed over the past 5 years in some of those countries. Syria was such a peaceful country when I went there in 2007.)



However, I have never come across something dangerous so far while Im traveling. To be sure, the fact that I did not come across dangerous incidents does not necessarrily justify that those countries are not dangerous. Nevertheless, in my intuitive level, I realized that my perception towards those countries were quiet different from the reality of those countries.






Simply put, the world was a better place than I thought.




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Focusing on the problems of the world is important because that is how we solve the problems.


The role of academia as well as media, journalism, etc is to contribute to the alleviation of problems from which people are suffering. Therefore, there is no problem focusing on problems.




However, don't let those overflowing negative information control your impression towards the world.








There are hundreds of problems in the world. However, there are millions of smiles, laughter and love in the world. You will know it once you start traveling around the world.

People are, generally, nice.






And maybe, correcting this skewed image of the world among people could be one of the roles of academia too.



Once my boss was saying "if you wanna work as a development worker, you need to have optimism as a professionalism."