Facts Don’t Convince Audiences. Here’s What Does.

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If you ask most people, they will tell you that human cooperation, from politics to simple daily interactions in the street, has gotten worse in the past 60 years. We blame the rise on various trends, like more social media, more extreme partisanship, the loss of trust, the increase in crime, the decline in civic values — depending on our point of view.

It will probably come as a surprise to learn, then, that social cooperation and trust has actually increased in the last half-century, according to a meta-analysis of thousands of studies and over 60,000 subjects. And we humans were already pretty cooperative to begin with. Ever since cave people had to cooperate in order to bring down the wooly mammoths and fill the dark, cold nights with laughter and song, we humans have been working together to solve our problems — and to create new ones, like global warming.

In fact, the digital devices that are attracting so much blame of late for various kinds of human decline, especially mental, may actually be improving our memories rather than degrading them. One recent study showed that cognitive offloading, as the storage of things to remember on your cell phone is called, increases our memory recall by nearly 30 percent, even if we don’t use the device all the time. Perhaps, if we’re doing all that offloading, we have more space for other…