Jessica Wildfire’s OK Doomer Substack is, OK, not exactly cheery, but an interesting look at the psychology behind why everyone is basically acting like everything is fine with the Covid when it’s not, really. For example, It’s Not Cool to Overreact: How Normalcy Bias Will Define Our Future.
I will attempt to summarize (though her style is highly readable, and I do recommend just viewing the original).
Contrary to popular belief, most people don’t panic during a crisis. Even when something clearly bad is happening (a plane collision, 9/11), they don’t want to believe it. And so they don’t act with urgency to protect themselves.
This is called normalcy bias.
In any emergency situation involving a group of people, about half will underreact, and just mill about rather than take productive action.
It’s a reaction that has an evolutionary basis, as it is a useful response in some cases. Stopping to think and staying calm can indeed sometime be preferable to acting in haste. The problem comes when you do this for too long, thus staying in the way of danger.
Society encourages normalcy bias. People don’t want to be seen as alarmist or over-reactive. They don’t want to be wrong about a threat. Thus:
People won’t adopt the simplest measures to protect themselves or anyone else. A disturbingly large portion of the public seems totally unmoved by stories of children dying in hospitals.
Many of us have struggled to understand how tens of millions of decent people could possibly act like this. Normalcy bias explains everything.
Jessica Wildfire
In any crisis, about 30% of the public will respond appropriately. 10% will panic and cause problems. Governments and media tend to worry a lot about that segment. And to confuse the cautious with the panicked.
Another 10% insist everything’s fine and everyone should just calm down. And the remaining 50% stand around and wait for someone else to tell them what to do.
In sum, 70% of people wait until it’s too late to solve a crisis.
To address any threat—Covid, climate change, social inequity—you have to get around this normalcy bias. You have to call it out. Just waiting until the consequences of inaction are clear isn’t enough. Politicians and billionaires will keep exploiting biases to keep everyone believing that everything is fine when it’s not.
The more acute the danger, the greater the pressure to act normal. Resist.
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