Recently, the epidemiologist Hans Rosling gave a thousand people a series of multiple-choice questions on population, literacy, life expectancy, and poverty. He noted, “If for each question I wrote the alternatives on bananas and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, they would have done better than the respondents.” The reason was that the respondents consistently picked answers that were too pessimistic.

From: Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead? The Munk Debates
By: Alain de Botton   Malcolm Gladwell   Matt Ridley   Steven Pinker