You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (8 page)

In his book
Big Weather,
tornado chaser Mark Svenvold wrote about how contagious normalcy bias can be
.
He recalled how people often tried to convince him to chill out while fleeing from impending doom. He said even when tornado warnings were issued, people assumed it was someone else’s problem. Stake-holding peers, he said, would try to shame him into denial so they could remain calm. They didn’t want him deflating their attempts at feeling normal.

Normalcy bias flows into the brain no matter the scale of the problem. It will appear whether you have days and plenty of warning or are blindsided with only seconds between life and death.

Imagine you are in a Boeing 747 airplane as it touches down after a long flight. You hide a sigh of relief once the ground ceases to rush closer and you hear the landing gear chirp against the runway. You release the hand rests as the engines power down. You sense the bustle of four hundred people preparing to leave. The tedious process of taxiing to the terminal begins. You play back some of the moments on the giant plane, thinking how it was a pleasant flight with few bumps and nice people all around. You are already collecting your things and getting ready to remove your seat belt. You look out the window and try to make out something familiar in the fog. Without warning, shock waves of heat and pressure tear into your flesh. A terrible blast rattles your organs and tears at all corners of the plane. A noise like two trains colliding under your chin bursts eardrums up and down the aisles. An explosion tunnels through the spaces around you, filling every gap and crevice with streamers of flame surging down the aisles and over your head, under your feet. They recede just as quickly, leaving unbearable heat. Clumps of your hair crumple into ashes. Now all you hear is the crackle of fire.

Imagine you are sitting on this plane now. The top of the craft is gone and you can see the sky above you. Columns of flame are growing. Holes in the sides of the airliner lead to freedom. How would you react?

You probably think you would leap to your feet and yell, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” If not this, then you might assume you would coil into a fetal position and freak out. Statistically, neither of these is likely. What you would probably do is far weirder.

In 1977, on an island in the Canaries called Tenerife, a series of mistakes led to two enormous 747 passenger planes colliding with each other as one attempted takeoff.

A Pan Am aircraft with 496 people on board was taxiing along the runway in dense fog when a Dutch KLM flight with 248 inside asked to be cleared for takeoff on the same airstrip. The fog was so thick the KLM crew couldn’t see the other airplane, and both were invisible to the control tower. The crew misheard their instructions. Thinking they had just been given permission, they began to speed toward the other plane. Air traffic controllers tried to warn them, but radio interference garbled the messages. Too late, the captain of the KLM flight saw the other craft ahead of him. He pulled up hard, dragging the tail along the ground, but couldn’t take flight. He screamed as half of the KLM aircraft smashed into the Pan Am at 160 miles per hour.

The KLM airplane bounced off the Pan Am jet, soared for five hundred feet, and then tumbled in a terrible jet fuel explosion. Everyone on board disintegrated. The fire was so intense it would burn until the next day.

Rescue crews spilled out onto the tarmac, but they didn’t drive out to the Pan Am flight. Instead, they rushed to the flaming wreckage of the KLM plane. For twenty minutes, in the chaos, firefighters and emergency personnel thought they were dealing with only one problem and believed the flames peeking out from the fog in the distance were just more wreckage. The survivors on board the Pan Am flight would not be rescued. The engines were still running at full power because the pilot had attempted to turn at the last second, and the crew couldn’t switch them off because the wires had been severed. The crash sheared away most of the top half of the 747. People lay in pieces from the impact. Flames spread through the carnage. A massive fire began to take over the plane. Smoke filled the fuselage. To live, people had to act quickly. They had to unbuckle, move through the chaos onto the intact wing, and then jump twenty feet onto wreckage. Escape was possible, but not all of the survivors would attempt it. Some bolted into action, unbuckled loved ones and strangers and pushed them out to safety. Others stayed put and were consumed. Soon after, the center fuel tank exploded, killing all but the seventy people who had made their way outside.

According to Amanda Ripley’s book,
The Unthinkable
, investigators later said the survivors of the initial impact had one minute before the fire took them. In that one minute, several dozen people who could have escaped failed to take action, failed to break free of paralysis.

Why did so many people flounder when seconds mattered?

Psychologist Daniel Johnson has rigorously studied this strange behavior. In his research he interviewed survivors of the Tenerife crash among many other disasters, including skyscraper fires and sinking ships, to better understand why some people flee when others do not.

In Johnson’s interview with Paul and Floy Heck, both passengers on the Pan Am flight, they recalled not only their traveling companions sitting motionless as they hustled to find a way out, but dozens of others who also made no effort to stand as the Hecks raced past them.

In the first moments of the incident, right after the top of the plane was sliced open, Paul Heck looked over to his wife, Floy. She was motionless, frozen in place and unable to process what was happening. He screamed for her to follow him. They unbuckled, clasped hands, and he led her out of the plane as the smoke began to billow. Floy later realized she possibly could have saved those sitting in a stupor just by yelling for them to join her, but she too was in a daze, with no thoughts of escape as she blindly followed her husband. Years later, Floy Heck was interviewed by the
Orange County Register
. She told the reporter she remembered looking back just before leaping out of a gash in the wall. She saw her friend still in the seat next to where they had been sitting with her hands folded in her lap, her eyes glassed over. Her friend did not survive the fire.

In any perilous event, like a sinking ship or a towering inferno, a shooting rampage or a tornado, there is a chance you will become so overwhelmed by the perilous overflow of ambiguous information that you will do nothing at all. You will float away and leave a senseless statue in your place. You may even lie down. If no one comes to your aid, you will die.

John Leach, a psychologist at the University of Lancaster, also studies freezing under stress. He says about 75 percent of people find it impossible to reason during a catastrophic event or impending doom. On the edges, the 15 or so percent on either side of the bell curve react either with unimpaired, heightened awareness or blubbering, confused panic.

According to Johnson and Leach, the sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time. They’ve done the research, or built the shelter, or run the drills. They look for the exits and imagine what they will do. They were in a fire as a child or survived a typhoon. These people don’t deliberate during calamity because they’ve already done the deliberation the other people around them are just now going through.

Normalcy bias is stalling during a crisis and pretending everything will continue to be as fine and predictable as it was before. Those who defeat it act when others don’t. They move when others are considering whether or not they should.

As Johnson points out, the brain must go through a procedure before the body acts—cognition, perception, comprehension, decision, implementation, and
then
movement. There’s no way to overclock this, but you can practice until these steps individually are no longer complex, and thus no longer take up valuable brain computation cycles. Johnson likens it to playing an instrument. If you’ve never played a C chord on a guitar, you have to think your way through it and awkwardly press down on the strings until you make a clumsy twang. With a few minutes of practice, you can strum without as much deliberation and create a more pleasant sound.

To be clear, normalcy bias isn’t freezing at the first signs of danger like a rabbit who confronts a snake, which is a real behavior humans can succumb to. To suddenly stop moving and hope for the best is called fear bradycardia, and it is an automatic and involuntarily instinct. This is sometimes referred to as tonic immobility. Animals like gazelles will become motionless if they sense a predator is nearby in the hopes of tricking its motion-tracking abilities by blending into the background. Some animals go so far as to feign death in what is called thanatosis.

In 2005, researchers at the University of Rio de Janeiro were able to induce fear bradycardia in humans just by showing subjects photos of injured people. The participants’ heart rates plummeted and their muscles stiffened immediately. To be sure, this sort of behavior happens in a disaster, but we are talking about something different with normalcy bias.

Much of your behavior is an attempt to lower anxiety. You know you aren’t in any danger when everything is safe and expected. Normalcy bias is self-soothing through believing everything is just fine. If you can still engage in your normal habits, still see the world as if nothing bad is happening, then your anxiety stays put. Normalcy bias is a state of mind out of which you are attempting to make everything OK by believing it still is.

Normalcy bias is refusing to believe terrible events will include you even though you have every reason to think otherwise. The first thing you are likely to feel in the event of a disaster is the supreme need to feel safe and secure. When it becomes clear this is impossible, you drift into a daydream where it is.

Survivors of 9/11 say they remember gathering belongings before leaving offices and cubicles. They put on coats and called loved ones. They shut down their computers and had conversations. Even in their descent, most moved at a leisurely pace—no screaming or running. There was no need for anyone to say “Remain calm everyone,” because they weren’t freaking out. They were begging the world to return to normal by engaging in acts of normalcy.

To reduce the anxiety of impending doom, you first cling to what you know. You then mine others for information. You strike up dialogs with coworkers, friends, and family. You become glued to the television and the radio. You gather with others to trade what you know so far. Some believe this is what happened as the Bridge Creek–Moore F5 tornado approached, which caused some people not to seek shelter. All the tools of pattern recognition, all the routines you’ve become accustomed to are rendered useless in a horrific event. The emergency situation is too novel and ambiguous. You have a tendency to freeze not because panic has overwhelmed you but because normalcy has disappeared.

Ripley calls this moment when you freeze “reflexive incredulity.” As your brain attempts to disseminate the data, your deepest desire is for everyone around you to assure you the bad thing isn’t real. You wait for this to happen past the point when it becomes obvious it will not.

The holding pattern of normalcy bias continues until the ship lurches or the building shifts. You may remain placid until the tornado throws a car through your house or the hurricane snaps the power lines. If everyone else is milling around waiting for information, you will too.

Those who are deeply concerned with evacuation procedures—first responders, architects, stadium personnel, the travel industry—are aware of normalcy bias, and write about it in manuals and trade journals. In a 1985 paper published in the
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters,
sociologists Shunji Mikami and Ken’Ichi Ikeda at the University of Tokyo identified the steps you are likely to go through in a disaster. They said you have a tendency to first interpret the situation within the context of what you are familiar with and to greatly underestimate the severity. This is the moment, when seconds count, that normalcy bias costs lives. A predictable order of behaviors, they said, will then unfold. You will seek information from those you trust first and then move on to those nearby. Next, you’ll try to contact your family if possible, and then you’ll begin to prepare to evacuate or seek shelter. Finally, after all of this, you’ll move. Mikami and Ikeda say you are more likely to dawdle if you fail to understand the seriousness of the situation and have never been exposed to advice about what to do or been in a similar circumstance. Even worse, you stall longer if you fall back on the old compare-and-contrast tendencies where you try to convince yourself the encroaching peril is not much different than what you are used to—normalcy bias.

They use a 1982 flood in Nagasaki as an example. Light flooding occurred there every year, and the residents assumed the heavy rainfall was part of a familiar routine. Soon, though, they realized the waters were getting higher and doing so faster than in years past. At 4:55 P.M., the government issued a flood warning. Still, some waited to see just how peculiar the flooding would be, how out of the ordinary. Only 13 percent of residents had evacuated by 9 P.M. In the end, 265 were killed.

When Hurricane Katrina bore down on my home in Mississippi, I remember going to the grocery store for food, water, and supplies and being shocked by the number of people who had only a few loaves of bread and couple of bottles of soda in their carts. I remember their frustration as they waited in line behind me with all my bottled water and canned goods. I told them, “Sorry, but you can never be too prepared.” Their response? “I don’t think it’s going to be a big deal.” I often wonder what those people did for the two weeks we were without electricity and the roads were impassable.

Normalcy bias is a proclivity you can’t be rid of. Everyday life seems prosaic and mundane because you are wired to see it as such. If you weren’t, you would never be able to handle the information overload. Think of moving into a new apartment or home, or buying a new car or cell phone. At first, you notice everything and spend hours adjusting settings or arranging furniture. After a while, you get used to the normalcy and let things go. You may even forget certain aspects of your new home until a visitor points them out to you and you rediscover them. You acclimate to your surroundings so you can notice when things go awry; otherwise life would be all noise and no signal.