4. The Law of Conservation of Outrage: No matter how much progress the world is achieving, the total amount of outrage remains constant.

As societies become safer and more prosperous, we demand more of them, and gradually raise the bar for what is considered “safe” or “prosperous.” As a result, even though fewer disasters are happening than ever before, people still have the impression that the world is going downhill. Another Roots of Progress fellow, Fin Moorhouse, has compared this effect to an auditory illusion called “Shepard tone,” in which your ears hear a note as a gradually descending tone while, in reality, it remains at the same pitch. Also, the more infrequently we hear bad news, the more shocked we are when we do.

This isn’t a problem, per se. One of the benefits of progress is that you can afford to be more demanding of the world; we don’t have to tolerate the same levels of misery and suffering that we once did. But if you don’t realize that you’ve been raising your own standards, you may get the impression that the world is steadily getting worse and worse. This results in the conservation of outrage: no matter how much progress the world is achieving, the total amount of kvetching and whining will stay roughly constant, as we see when affluent people complain about first world problems like delayed flights or malfunctioning Wi-Fi.

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The conservation principle shows up in other domains as well. It seems to be how our brains are wired. A 2018 study in Science by David Levari et al. showed that what they call “prevalence-induced concept change” even influences basic perception. Subjects were asked how many dots in a consecutive series were a specific color (for instance, blue). As long as the frequency of blue dots remained constant, people accurately reported the number of blue dots. But when the blue dots became less frequent over time, people didn’t count fewer blue dots. Instead, they expanded their definition of “blueness” to include purple dots as well. Researchers have observed the same phenomenon with other stimuli, too. As angry faces become less frequent, people start interpreting neutral faces as angry. And when unethical requests become rare, people start seeing innocuous requests as unethical. The researchers conclude: “The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of [societal] pessimism.”

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