Gosh. Did I need this article today. Thank you for this. It does explain a lot. I feel I need to begin SHOUTING. More sick grandchildren today. It never ends. I fear all their immune systems are trashed. I’ve offered to help homeschool. I don’t know what else to do? All their parents are highly educated. But allowing your children to be in public unprotected and continually infected by virus after virus is pretty dumb. So frustrating and heartbreaking watching your beloved family slowly, slowly circle the drain. Thanks for your much needed writing and expertise.
I wonder if there have been studies done that explore whether the sheep change their behavior after learning about normalcy bias; like after reading an article like this. My instinct (I'd be among the first out the door if there was a fire) is to immediately forward this article to friends and family, but I wonder if it would have any effect at all.
I don't challenge the statistics here, but in my recent experience, virtually everyone I know is ignoring climate change and Covid. The other night, my wife and I were at a friend's house (an assoc. dean at a major university) for dinner. When my wife mentioned Extinction Rebellion, our friend asked, "What is that?" Meanwhile, almost all of our friends and family have discarded their masks and are dining in restaurants, attending events, and traveling as if it was December, 2019. (Yes, everyone of them has had Covid at least once.) My wife and I definitely get the vibe that our family and friends think that my we are paranoid. (Doesn't everyone have a 55 gallon barrel of potable water in their basement?)
This is fascinating. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it all and figured there must be confirmation and sunk cost biases baked in but normalcy bias… wow. It seems so obvious to some of us that we’re being exploited and manipulated but we’re gaslit to believe the opposite. It is all so disorienting and dystopian.
And then when the 30 percent who are rightfully concerned finally use rioting tactics - after YEARS of buildup, because that’s the only way to get attention - they’ll be brushed off as hysterical. Uncivil. Stupid. The 50 percent who got us into this damn mess will ignore them. The 10 percent of minimizers will criminalize them for disturbing the peace.
And the history books will say that those minimizes were actually in the right all along, or had a come-to-Jesus moment of enlightenment and fixed everything out of the goodness of their hearts. Because yay American progress.
I did a thought experiment about how a tribe of australopithecenes would have reacted when they came into a new territory and encountered something menacing which they had not seen before.
The first tenth would have alerted the rest that there is something there to be concerned about. The thirty percent would come out and deal with it. The last tenth would act as a break on any rash action.
The half would wait and see what happens. Maybe most of them would eventually join the thirty. Or do nothing, let them take care of it and join in the benefits, if any. Or, run for the trees if it seems to be not going well for the thirty.
Anyway, it is a survival plan for australopithecines. Observations of primate species notice such a pattern. In any contingency, about one third of the pack come out and deal with it, the rest hold back.
It might work in modern societies without the presence of a sociopathic ruling elite. Sociopaths emerged with settled life and accumulation of surplus. Before that, they could not have survived.
It is well understood that normal humans are so unable to deal with them. But it is not clear just how. Somehow a sociopathocracy is able to selectively activate the two “ten percent” wings while keeping the 30% inactivated.
Whatever, what we need is a society with the 30% people, the rational responders, in full control.
Yeah, it seems like elements of the 4th estate will reinforce this normalcy bias by using spinning serious issues for some purpose. With the smaller online outlets, whether podcast, blog, or I guess in the linked case below, talk radio, posits a POV that says, 'No, there is no reason to worry yourselves over events like multi-year pandemics and other viral infectious viruses going around that are loading up hospitals and crushing the medical operations around the country.' Also see how the post uses spin techniques and bogus statistics without any real details to show why public concern is not warranted. IMO. Further, I could conjecture that these kinds of postings online could be referred to as infowars lite.
Go ahead, read this link if you want. I think it's a classic example of leveraging normalcy bias as a kind of weapon for purpose. I mean this conservative-talk-radio post's real reason for beating this don't panic drum in the public's ear could be as simple as earning some advertising pennies by posting this potentially harmful message. IMO.
I'm a social worker and therapist with 7 years of crisis experience. I have been present for hostage situations, serious mental health episodes, and in the moment tragedies as well as having worked at jails and hospitals all through the recognized part of the pandemic as I call it. I am in year three of locking down all winter and have as far as I can tell permanently changed the way I live in response to the changing data. Starting in 2021 I took a huge pay cut to move to an all virtual form of my work. I feel crazy, and I see normalcy bias and its attending paralysis of thought every single day. Normalcy bias is going to become more deadly every year for at least the next decade. By then maybe what is normal will have shifted enough that people can act in ways that are productive toward their own survival again.
I think it would be informative to drill down a bit into the deeper psychological causes of this bias. I don’t think it’s a thing just because it’s not cool to freak out.
Tolstoy described how many Muscovites didn’t move or change their behavior at all when they knew Napoleon was at the gates. If I remember correctly, he believed that this phenomenon, which like everything else he depicted pithily and succinctly, was due to simple overload, the thing to be addressed being too much, overwhelming, not capable of comprehension in its radical magnitude and thus susceptible to either being wished away or resulting in the throwing up of one’s hands and “having one’s kicks before the whole shit house goes up in flames”, as Jim Morrison put it more crudely. It makes sense, and doesn’t have to be tinged, like Morrison implied, with nihilism.
I recently moved to an area that is at high risk for wildfires and I saw this explicitly when I had my first encounter with one. I saw a wall of flames coming towards me and my first instinct was grab as much as I can and run. All of my neighbors stood there watching the flames come closer and closer, confident that everything will be alright. Luckily for them, things turned out fine, but that was due to dumb luck. Had any conditions changed the story would’ve been much different.
Last week, we had to attend a number of scheduled indoor events with large groups of people - a screening of our own films, a dinner out (just us) & Broadway play, a book-signing in a tiny bookstore & another dinner out (with large group) and a very large film screening w/long Q&A after. The last event was for a demographic who REALLY should know better - our work is extremely strict about daily testing or you go home. I was shocked that only maybe 10-15% of us were masked.
I’m extremely danger-aware, especially having been through an earthquake that ripped my condo floor open, & surviving a violent crime. I saw normalcy bias up close after the earthquake, when most of the people in our building (not me) lingered after it was red-tagged for danger. Now, I’m seeing it daily, with the very real threats of authoritarianism & COVID. I was warned about how severe & deadly COVID was in December of 2019 by a medical researcher who’d worked on the Ebola virus team. We had a cruise planned in February 2020. I fought w/ my husband about canceling. I remember him saying, “I refuse to live in fear.” We ended up going (me, extremely paranoid & crowd-averse & washing my hands constantly) & dodging a bullet. The nation locked down two weeks after our return.
After that, huz stopped calling me paranoid. Only I was on pins & needles & masked during all the above events except for dinners out…though he did mask during the play & big screening. He onLy just got his bivalent booster yesterday, no flu shot yet. I’m 60, he’s 65 & right now 10-15 lbs over his ideal weight. Yet still succumbs to normalcy bias.
Honestly, I think the government and especially the media are letting us all down here. No, we don’t need a full-out lockdown…but we need a lot more responsible people.warning & reminding the population that it’s not over.
I felt quite under the weather last night; less so today but still not 100%. I had chronic Epstein-Barr kick my ass for over 10-12 years in my mid 20’s-30’s, though I managed to work through most of it just feeling like dirt & taking secret naps whenever I could. I know how debilitating & frustrating a silent chronic affliction can be (one that people don’t believe.) I was fortunate to have a brilliant world famous allergist/epidemiologist as my doctor then, who immediately diagnosed me & helped me mitigate some of the effects. I feel for those who have Long COVID & aren’t believed, many even by doctors. I don’t want to go through that again.
As for the twin threats of fascism & global warming (‘climate change’ is a term focus-grouped by Frank Luntz because it went part-way to acknowledge what most sentient beings can easily observe for themselves, but also downplayed it)…we are all in danger & yes, normalcy bias is deliberately being exploited by those who want to hold on to all the power & remaining resources for themselves.
I am not surprised that i feel I fall into the vanguard of the 30%. I am that person who intervenes when someone is having their head kicked in on a crowded street whilst everyone ignores it. Such unusual behaviour for a woman to get in between violent men that, to date, they seem to stop in pure disbelief.
I've been the only person to attend to an elderly man who got attacked in a crowded train station waiting room after he was brutally assaulted by a young, athletically built man. The only person to show aggression to him and chase him off, the only person to try to stem the bleeding, the only person to call an ambulance. Everyone just sat there, averted their gaze. Even the staff sloped off.
Later, after alighting the train, I was congratulated on my actions by the other passengers who'd been in that waiting room where the assault took place. So they clearly knew that I'd done the right thing. Sitting there, covered in blood that was not mine, I could only glare at them.
So I've long been aware of this bias! This utter inaction on most people's parts.
I've ASD and do have to wonder if the 30% also leans this way. This is a recent revelation and was not something i was aware of when I've waded into the fray in the past.
Locked down for a 3rd Christmas in a row, I feel zero need to let down my guard. I feel more isolated by my mindset than my physical remoteness. The only folks I know who pursue this degree of mitigation are those I've met online. Thank goodness for them!
Thank you for another insightful article. Ironically, I was thinking of Terry Gilliam's film, Brazil, while reading this. In the film, many freakish modern day tragedies, like a terrorist bombing in a restaurant, become normalized with the bias you describe. I've been noodling on this subject for years now, as I watch our society change bit by bit, like the geographic shifts after icebergs break apart from global warming. My chief take away from pondering this for a long time is that we need to get the 30% to band together as a tribe of like minded folk. We survive best in groups. How to find a tribe........
Now I understand what happened to me. I was jammed into an elevator in a church. The elevator began to rise then stopped, shaking a bit. Everyone stood there quietly. I hit the emergency button which makes a very loud noise. Several people said I shouldn't do that because the church service was going on and this would disturb them. Stunned, I said that we should disturb them. We were stuck in a nonfunctioning elevator with no way to get out. The elevator then dropped a few feet and the people from the service were able to open the doors and help us to wiggle out the bottom of the elevator. Thank you for this article.
Meh. What we're facing is a crisis so large and all consuming that its night impossible to stop without near total, global support. Thats a pipe dream. Not without the mass murder of all people who won't get onboard. We aren't gonna stop it before it's too late unless we force people/societies to quit by threat of death. There's no chance we stop climate change at this point, barring somekind of unthinkable, impossible technological revolution that simply won't happen.
So fuck it I guess. Let it burn since its our only real option. Buy a gun. Use it to kill people for supplies or to kill yourself when the going gets unbearble. The oceans will eat the coasts and other islands, the food will shrivel and die, and theres simply nothing to do about it.
Gosh. Did I need this article today. Thank you for this. It does explain a lot. I feel I need to begin SHOUTING. More sick grandchildren today. It never ends. I fear all their immune systems are trashed. I’ve offered to help homeschool. I don’t know what else to do? All their parents are highly educated. But allowing your children to be in public unprotected and continually infected by virus after virus is pretty dumb. So frustrating and heartbreaking watching your beloved family slowly, slowly circle the drain. Thanks for your much needed writing and expertise.
I wonder if there have been studies done that explore whether the sheep change their behavior after learning about normalcy bias; like after reading an article like this. My instinct (I'd be among the first out the door if there was a fire) is to immediately forward this article to friends and family, but I wonder if it would have any effect at all.
I don't challenge the statistics here, but in my recent experience, virtually everyone I know is ignoring climate change and Covid. The other night, my wife and I were at a friend's house (an assoc. dean at a major university) for dinner. When my wife mentioned Extinction Rebellion, our friend asked, "What is that?" Meanwhile, almost all of our friends and family have discarded their masks and are dining in restaurants, attending events, and traveling as if it was December, 2019. (Yes, everyone of them has had Covid at least once.) My wife and I definitely get the vibe that our family and friends think that my we are paranoid. (Doesn't everyone have a 55 gallon barrel of potable water in their basement?)
This is fascinating. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it all and figured there must be confirmation and sunk cost biases baked in but normalcy bias… wow. It seems so obvious to some of us that we’re being exploited and manipulated but we’re gaslit to believe the opposite. It is all so disorienting and dystopian.
And then when the 30 percent who are rightfully concerned finally use rioting tactics - after YEARS of buildup, because that’s the only way to get attention - they’ll be brushed off as hysterical. Uncivil. Stupid. The 50 percent who got us into this damn mess will ignore them. The 10 percent of minimizers will criminalize them for disturbing the peace.
And the history books will say that those minimizes were actually in the right all along, or had a come-to-Jesus moment of enlightenment and fixed everything out of the goodness of their hearts. Because yay American progress.
I did a thought experiment about how a tribe of australopithecenes would have reacted when they came into a new territory and encountered something menacing which they had not seen before.
The first tenth would have alerted the rest that there is something there to be concerned about. The thirty percent would come out and deal with it. The last tenth would act as a break on any rash action.
The half would wait and see what happens. Maybe most of them would eventually join the thirty. Or do nothing, let them take care of it and join in the benefits, if any. Or, run for the trees if it seems to be not going well for the thirty.
Anyway, it is a survival plan for australopithecines. Observations of primate species notice such a pattern. In any contingency, about one third of the pack come out and deal with it, the rest hold back.
It might work in modern societies without the presence of a sociopathic ruling elite. Sociopaths emerged with settled life and accumulation of surplus. Before that, they could not have survived.
It is well understood that normal humans are so unable to deal with them. But it is not clear just how. Somehow a sociopathocracy is able to selectively activate the two “ten percent” wings while keeping the 30% inactivated.
Whatever, what we need is a society with the 30% people, the rational responders, in full control.
https://timrourke.substack.com/
Yeah, it seems like elements of the 4th estate will reinforce this normalcy bias by using spinning serious issues for some purpose. With the smaller online outlets, whether podcast, blog, or I guess in the linked case below, talk radio, posits a POV that says, 'No, there is no reason to worry yourselves over events like multi-year pandemics and other viral infectious viruses going around that are loading up hospitals and crushing the medical operations around the country.' Also see how the post uses spin techniques and bogus statistics without any real details to show why public concern is not warranted. IMO. Further, I could conjecture that these kinds of postings online could be referred to as infowars lite.
Go ahead, read this link if you want. I think it's a classic example of leveraging normalcy bias as a kind of weapon for purpose. I mean this conservative-talk-radio post's real reason for beating this don't panic drum in the public's ear could be as simple as earning some advertising pennies by posting this potentially harmful message. IMO.
link to post: https://mynorthwest.com/3746029/rantz-seattle-media-restarts-fearmongering-over-covid-flu-and-fake-tridemic/
I'm a social worker and therapist with 7 years of crisis experience. I have been present for hostage situations, serious mental health episodes, and in the moment tragedies as well as having worked at jails and hospitals all through the recognized part of the pandemic as I call it. I am in year three of locking down all winter and have as far as I can tell permanently changed the way I live in response to the changing data. Starting in 2021 I took a huge pay cut to move to an all virtual form of my work. I feel crazy, and I see normalcy bias and its attending paralysis of thought every single day. Normalcy bias is going to become more deadly every year for at least the next decade. By then maybe what is normal will have shifted enough that people can act in ways that are productive toward their own survival again.
This is a great article!
I think it would be informative to drill down a bit into the deeper psychological causes of this bias. I don’t think it’s a thing just because it’s not cool to freak out.
Tolstoy described how many Muscovites didn’t move or change their behavior at all when they knew Napoleon was at the gates. If I remember correctly, he believed that this phenomenon, which like everything else he depicted pithily and succinctly, was due to simple overload, the thing to be addressed being too much, overwhelming, not capable of comprehension in its radical magnitude and thus susceptible to either being wished away or resulting in the throwing up of one’s hands and “having one’s kicks before the whole shit house goes up in flames”, as Jim Morrison put it more crudely. It makes sense, and doesn’t have to be tinged, like Morrison implied, with nihilism.
I recently moved to an area that is at high risk for wildfires and I saw this explicitly when I had my first encounter with one. I saw a wall of flames coming towards me and my first instinct was grab as much as I can and run. All of my neighbors stood there watching the flames come closer and closer, confident that everything will be alright. Luckily for them, things turned out fine, but that was due to dumb luck. Had any conditions changed the story would’ve been much different.
Thus far, huz & I have escaped COVID…up til now.
Last week, we had to attend a number of scheduled indoor events with large groups of people - a screening of our own films, a dinner out (just us) & Broadway play, a book-signing in a tiny bookstore & another dinner out (with large group) and a very large film screening w/long Q&A after. The last event was for a demographic who REALLY should know better - our work is extremely strict about daily testing or you go home. I was shocked that only maybe 10-15% of us were masked.
I’m extremely danger-aware, especially having been through an earthquake that ripped my condo floor open, & surviving a violent crime. I saw normalcy bias up close after the earthquake, when most of the people in our building (not me) lingered after it was red-tagged for danger. Now, I’m seeing it daily, with the very real threats of authoritarianism & COVID. I was warned about how severe & deadly COVID was in December of 2019 by a medical researcher who’d worked on the Ebola virus team. We had a cruise planned in February 2020. I fought w/ my husband about canceling. I remember him saying, “I refuse to live in fear.” We ended up going (me, extremely paranoid & crowd-averse & washing my hands constantly) & dodging a bullet. The nation locked down two weeks after our return.
After that, huz stopped calling me paranoid. Only I was on pins & needles & masked during all the above events except for dinners out…though he did mask during the play & big screening. He onLy just got his bivalent booster yesterday, no flu shot yet. I’m 60, he’s 65 & right now 10-15 lbs over his ideal weight. Yet still succumbs to normalcy bias.
Honestly, I think the government and especially the media are letting us all down here. No, we don’t need a full-out lockdown…but we need a lot more responsible people.warning & reminding the population that it’s not over.
I felt quite under the weather last night; less so today but still not 100%. I had chronic Epstein-Barr kick my ass for over 10-12 years in my mid 20’s-30’s, though I managed to work through most of it just feeling like dirt & taking secret naps whenever I could. I know how debilitating & frustrating a silent chronic affliction can be (one that people don’t believe.) I was fortunate to have a brilliant world famous allergist/epidemiologist as my doctor then, who immediately diagnosed me & helped me mitigate some of the effects. I feel for those who have Long COVID & aren’t believed, many even by doctors. I don’t want to go through that again.
As for the twin threats of fascism & global warming (‘climate change’ is a term focus-grouped by Frank Luntz because it went part-way to acknowledge what most sentient beings can easily observe for themselves, but also downplayed it)…we are all in danger & yes, normalcy bias is deliberately being exploited by those who want to hold on to all the power & remaining resources for themselves.
What's the connection between delusional thinking and normalcy bias? Is half the population delusional?
I am not surprised that i feel I fall into the vanguard of the 30%. I am that person who intervenes when someone is having their head kicked in on a crowded street whilst everyone ignores it. Such unusual behaviour for a woman to get in between violent men that, to date, they seem to stop in pure disbelief.
I've been the only person to attend to an elderly man who got attacked in a crowded train station waiting room after he was brutally assaulted by a young, athletically built man. The only person to show aggression to him and chase him off, the only person to try to stem the bleeding, the only person to call an ambulance. Everyone just sat there, averted their gaze. Even the staff sloped off.
Later, after alighting the train, I was congratulated on my actions by the other passengers who'd been in that waiting room where the assault took place. So they clearly knew that I'd done the right thing. Sitting there, covered in blood that was not mine, I could only glare at them.
So I've long been aware of this bias! This utter inaction on most people's parts.
I've ASD and do have to wonder if the 30% also leans this way. This is a recent revelation and was not something i was aware of when I've waded into the fray in the past.
Locked down for a 3rd Christmas in a row, I feel zero need to let down my guard. I feel more isolated by my mindset than my physical remoteness. The only folks I know who pursue this degree of mitigation are those I've met online. Thank goodness for them!
Thank you for another insightful article. Ironically, I was thinking of Terry Gilliam's film, Brazil, while reading this. In the film, many freakish modern day tragedies, like a terrorist bombing in a restaurant, become normalized with the bias you describe. I've been noodling on this subject for years now, as I watch our society change bit by bit, like the geographic shifts after icebergs break apart from global warming. My chief take away from pondering this for a long time is that we need to get the 30% to band together as a tribe of like minded folk. We survive best in groups. How to find a tribe........
Now I understand what happened to me. I was jammed into an elevator in a church. The elevator began to rise then stopped, shaking a bit. Everyone stood there quietly. I hit the emergency button which makes a very loud noise. Several people said I shouldn't do that because the church service was going on and this would disturb them. Stunned, I said that we should disturb them. We were stuck in a nonfunctioning elevator with no way to get out. The elevator then dropped a few feet and the people from the service were able to open the doors and help us to wiggle out the bottom of the elevator. Thank you for this article.
Meh. What we're facing is a crisis so large and all consuming that its night impossible to stop without near total, global support. Thats a pipe dream. Not without the mass murder of all people who won't get onboard. We aren't gonna stop it before it's too late unless we force people/societies to quit by threat of death. There's no chance we stop climate change at this point, barring somekind of unthinkable, impossible technological revolution that simply won't happen.
So fuck it I guess. Let it burn since its our only real option. Buy a gun. Use it to kill people for supplies or to kill yourself when the going gets unbearble. The oceans will eat the coasts and other islands, the food will shrivel and die, and theres simply nothing to do about it.