"That's Never Going to Work." How Futility Bias Keeps Us from Even Trying.
When someone tells you to give up, there's a pathology behind it.
My preschool teacher told my parents I wasn't completely hopeless. "The world will always need strippers," she said. She meant that as an insult, and it only showed how little she knew about the world.
Or me.
You hear a lot of this these days:
We can't stop every school shooting, so there's no point in trying. We can't get everyone to quit buying cheap plastic, so just leave everyone alone. We'll never get our carbon emissions down to zero, so just be quiet. We can't stop every single infection, so don't even bother with public health.
We need a name for this kind of thinking.
Let's call it futility bias.
Futility bias masquerades as logic, but it's the opposite. It says if you can't completely solve a problem, you might as well do nothing. Indifference somehow becomes the only viable, rational option. Futility bias convinces us to give up on our own personal goals and dreams, and it tells society to give up on the possibility of a better, fairer world.
According to futility bias, the…