The dangers of giving in to normalcy bias and not acknowledging the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic
February 2004, riding in the back seat of an up-armored SUV on the “highway of death” from Baghdad airport to the Iraqi capital, I had a strange epiphany about the mortal danger I faced that morning.
Thus, as we headed into the city, instead of staying alert, the soldiers chit-chatted about sports, food in the dining facility, video games,and other “normal” topics of conversation, because to the soldiers, the situation we were in at that moment was “normal.” In one sense, the soldiers were right, because we got to the Green zone 20 minutes later unscathed. But in another sense, their complacency was misplaced, because they had fallen prey to what Israeli psychologists Haim Omer and Nahma Alon of Tel Aviv University call “the normalcyThe normalcy bias, simply put, is people’s tendency to discount the risks of a pending or developing disaster because they interpret their current situation as a continuation of normal life.
Many of my acquaintances, together with several talking heads on TV and a prominent governor or two, have downplayed the threat of the virus, lamenting that our reaction to the virus will do more harm—through economic damage—than the virus itself. This normalcy bias may make it very difficult for our leaders to do the right thing, because many voters, who keep these leaders in office, will think theis panicking when they order a lockdown. And when the lockdown works, and the threat passes with minimal casualties, those same voters will say, “See, I told you it was no big deal. We destroyed our economy for no good reason.”
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