"Normalcy bias" and the pandemic

Megan McArdle has an excellent Washington Post column about the different ways our brains try to fit the pandemic (and other disasters) into some idea of "normal." Here's an excerpt, but as always I recommend reading McArdle's whole piece:

From movies, you’d think that when disaster strikes, people trample each other in their panic. But the greater risk is more often the opposite: People can’t quite believe. They ignore the fire alarm, defy the order to evacuate ahead of the hurricane, or pause to grab their luggage when exiting the crashed plane. Too often, they die.

One of 9/11’s most haunting details involves the South Tower, which was struck 17 minutes after the first. It seems likely that if people had started urgently evacuating right after the first plane hit, many of the 600 who died might have lived. But the standard evacuation plans called for emptying affected floors, not the entire 110-story building, and if a plane crashing into the North Tower wasn’t a normal kind of disaster, who could say how different it really was?

So the building’s director did the normal thing, waiting for the fire department or some other authority to order a broader evacuation.…

Calling the quest for normalcy a bias makes it sound bad, but most of the time this tendency is a good thing. The world is full of aberrations, most of them meaningless. If we aimed for maximal reaction to every anomaly we encountered, we’d break down from sheer nervous exhaustion.

But when things go disastrously wrong, our optimal response is at war with the part of our brain that insists things are fine. We try to reoccupy the old normal even if it’s become radioactive and salted with mines. We still resist the new normal — even when it’s staring us in the face.…

Nine months into our current disaster, I now see that our bitter divides over pandemic response were most fundamentally a contest between two ideas of what it meant to get “back to normal.”

One group wanted to feel as safe as they had before a virus invaded our shores; the other wanted to feel as unfettered. The disputes that followed weren’t just a fight to determine whose idea of normal would prevail. They were a battle against an unthinkable reality, which was that neither kind of normalcy was fully possible anymore.…

After a decent interval, we might have the time and perspective to sort out who was right and who was wrong, so we all can try to do better next time. Though I’m sure we’ll never agree on the whole truth of the pandemic, since no one person will ever know what that was.