Despite a plethora of news coverage that would suggest otherwise, violence is actually on the decline in the world, according to a new book by one of Canada's leading thinkers.

Steven Pinker, a Montreal-born Harvard psychologist, argues in "The Better Angels of Our Nature," that by focusing on violent news events the media is actually creating a false impression of the true rate of violence in the world.

The reality, he said, is that tribal warfare in times past was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th and 21st century.

The murder rate in medieval Europe was 30 times what it is today, and the threat of war that once existed between developed countries has essentially vanished.

Even the way governments treat their citizens, he said, has changed dramatically. One hundred years ago, for example, the British riot act allowed police to begin killing protesters who didn't immediately disband, and a seven-year-old girl could be hung for stealing a petticoat.

"Literacy and education have allowed people to step back and recognize the futility of cycles of violence and try to treat it as a problem to be solved," Pinker told CTV's Canada AM.

Even the fact that we are now talking about issues such as animal cruelty or schoolyard bullying shows the scale has changed dramatically, due to the growth of commerce and trade and improvements in governance in recent years that have reduced the rate of violence, he said.

Pinker told CTV's Canada AM the media has played a conflicting role. On one hand, journalists have played a major role in convincing people that the world is more violent than it is, simply by giving more column inches or air time to violent news events.

The reality, Pinker said, is that far more people die due to cancer or Alzheimer's than to violent acts, but those stories aren't covered to the same degree.

In contrast to that, the media has also allowed people to be exposed to different cultures, reducing xenophobia and feelings of alienation across different cultures. As a result, cross-cultural violence has also dropped.

"The media do make the experience of other people more immediate to us," Pinker said. "It's harder to be tribal, it's harder to be chauvinistic and jingoistic when you see other people suffering, other people striving, and you realize they're human beings like us. So the media had a positive role in expanding our circle of empathy."

Pinker also goes to great lengths in his 800-page book to dispel the belief that times of economic difficulty automatically lead to a rise in violent crime.

In fact the opposite is true, he said.

"Since the great recession of the last three years, the violent crime rate both in Canada and the U.S. has gone down rather than up. During the 1960s, which were times of great economic boom and much less inequality, that's when crime went through the roof."

Pinker acknowledged that the world's poorest countries have far more violence than the richer nations, but said there's no direct link between shifts in prosperity or inequality, and violence.

Pinker is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and was named one of Time magazine's most influential people.