It's Not Cool to Overreact

How wet streets cause rain.

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We think everyone panics during a crisis.

Actually, they do the opposite.

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For a while I became obsessed by a video recorded on the day of the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami. It shows an older white guy, probably a tourist, standing on the beach in Thailand watching as the water recedes and the tsunami comes into view. As people run, as the wave grows, he just stands there. People start shouting at him, desperately pointing to the wave, trying to warn him. The wave grows, rushing closer and closer. Even now when I watch this video I still think he’s going to move. Of course he never moves. He doesn’t move an inch. The wave comes ashore and swallows him.

—Nate Bear, “Staring at The Tsunami”

This disturbing image symbolizes our culture over the last several years, maybe centuries. So many of our friends and family act like that man on the beach. This behavior permeates our politics and news media.

Why?

Like Nate, I’ve grown a deep, somewhat morbid curiosity into the reasons why a majority of seemingly intelligent human beings would stand and stare at an oncoming disaster while doing nothing about it. I’ve spent years researching it, and even though I’ve collected my findings so far into a book, I’ll never be done chronicling the history of human folly because it’s an ongoing story. We face so many global, existential threats now. And yet, their proliferation only seems to inspire more of the same denial and wishful thinking. As climate scientists finally admit our targets are “deader than a doornail” and brunch liberals start to notice the oncoming H5N1 pandemic, we transition to an administration even more incompetent than the outgoing one. Almost everyone we know seems happy to stand and watch.

How did we get here?

All of my research leads back to the same observation. Despite the casual tone of the answer, I promise you a sober discussion:

It’s not cool to overreact.

For starters, we suffer from normalcy bias.

In 1977, two planes collided above a runway on the island of Tenerife. A handful of passengers climbed out of the ruptured hull. Everyone else died. It wasn’t because they were injured or unconscious.

They just couldn’t get moving.

They didn’t want to panic.

There’s a similar story about the 9/11 attacks. One woman remembers being rocked out of her chair by the first explosion. At first, she was going to sit back down and wait to see what everyone else did. She even admits, "What I really wanted was for someone to scream back, 'Everything is O.K.! Don't worry. It's in your head.’” Fortunately, someone yelled, “Get out!”

Even then, she didn’t leave. She spent several minutes walking around in circles, gathering up her purse and a handful of books.

Psychologists have a name for this behavior:

It’s called milling.

Milling is just a symptom of normalcy bias. Amanda Ripley theorizes this bias in Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why. She paints a stark description of it in a related article: “Large groups of people facing death act in surprising ways. Most of us become incredibly docile… Usually, we form groups and move slowly, as if sleepwalking in a nightmare.” In short, we don’t panic.

We chill.

Psychologists have documented this glitch for decades. John Leach has described it as the won't to live. A majority of people just don’t respond during a crisis. They freeze up. Even if they can function, they’ll spend precious time gossiping with each other and speculating instead of acting.

Sometimes, they’ll even distract themselves by calming strangers down and minimizing their concerns.

Normalcy bias also occurs in a similar effect called "diffusion of responsibility.” When you put people into groups, they all tend to wait for someone to tell them what to do, and so nobody ends up doing anything.

In 1968, a team of psychologists conducted what became known as “the smoky room” experiment. They had people sit in a waiting room alone, and then in groups. Then the researchers started pumping smoke into the room. When they were on their own, 75 percent of participants took action to find the source of the smoke or alert someone. When they were in groups, 60 percent of them did absolutely nothing. They all waited for someone else to do something. Nobody wanted to be the first one to act, because they worried about overreacting.

A 2018 study confirmed that during emergencies, humans experience a significant drop in activity in their prefrontal cortex. Another study from 2019 tells us that the average person is 20 times less likely to help a stranger during a crisis. In short, we seem to revert to our primal selves. Apparently, a lot of people are hardwired to either shut down or take care of themselves, rather than band together into larger units and cooperate. That takes a lot of brain power.

In the Journal of Community & Public Health, Carl Ross explains how normalcy bias has hampered our approach to many threats.

As he writes, “we are sensitive to the perception of others viewing us as abnormal. Within social relationships, very few want to be seen as alarmist, overreactive or a fool because if they are wrong about a threat then they will be regarded as less credible in the future.” He goes on to state that “social shaming reinforces our normalcy bias. It’s not cool to overreact.” Let’s say that again:

It’s not cool to overreact.

We’re well into the social shaming stage of collapse. It doesn’t seem to matter how much evidence we have about… anything. People won’t change their behavior. Politicians and public health officials won’t risk backlash. The media continues to present the most sanitized, complacent reporting, riddled with phrases like, “the risk to the public remains low at this time.” Let’s face it, you don’t get invited on many news shows if you tell the blunt truth. You also don’t get invited to many parties. You don’t get considered for many promotions. Our social structures are designed to reinforce normalcy bias at every turn.

Another social tendency reinforces our normalcy bias.

It’s called elite panic.

You see, panic used to be a normal human response to disaster. In the 19th century, even southern towns ripped up railroad tracks and imposed “shotgun quarantines” to stop the spread of diseases like yellow fever. Outbreaks of disease prompted swift and sometimes extreme public response. The rich often fled, leaving everyone else to actually solve these problems.

Then things changed.

An obscure little op-ed from 2013 titled “A Brief History of Panic” helped me understand this shift. Starting in the early 20th century, the rise of modern medicine turned the perception of disease into a class divider. As affluent Americans gained access to antibiotics, antivirals, and vaccines, they started to see germs as threats to poor people and the working class, not them. They also gravitated away from egalitarian, preventative measures.

They stopped caring.

Of course, the elites have always ignored disease to a certain extent. Woodrow Wilson’s government completely ignored the 1918 pandemic, with the exception of threatening newspapers for reporting on it. Before Wilson, Abraham Lincoln completely ignored a devastating smallpox epidemic that began during the Civil War and lasted through the 1860s, because it was occurring mostly in poor people and freed slaves. Both times, war mattered more.

This response solidified in the 1970s, when the Ford administration mounted one of the most successful public health campaigns of all time, preventing a swine flu pandemic. And yet, it only earned them a badge of shame and public embarrassment. This backlash echoed through the Reagan years, and it partly explains why governments have taken such a nonchalant attitude toward disease since then. If you remember, nobody took the last pandemic seriously either, until it started overflowing morgues. Since then, governments and media outlets have worked overtime to erase that history and replace it with an illusion that things weren’t that bad, and that everyone simply overreacted.

As I’ve written before, they’re spreading memory ignorance.

Governments and their super-rich donors manipulate the public into a sense of calm about impending disasters, even when it costs countless lives. They try to amplify everyone’s existing normalcy bias.

As James Meigs writes, "Disaster literature bulges with examples...in which officials suppressed information, or passed along misinformation, out of concern over an unruly populace." He goes on to state that "Elite panic frequently brings out another unsavory quirk on the part of some authorities: a tendency to believe the worst about their own citizens."

Rebecca Solnit writes about elite panic in her book, Paradise Built in Hell. As she explains, it was Rutgers professors Caron Chess and Lee Clarke who originally developed the term. As they told Sonit, "It's the elites that we see panicking...about the possibility that we will panic. It's a very paternalist orientation to governance. It's how you might treat a child."

We’re seeing a lot of textbook elite panic now. You can feel the paternalistic condescension dripping off every mainstream news piece, except when one political faction tries to blame the other for whichever crisis takes center stage in the public’s attention. Otherwise, they’re working overtime to suppress information or even pass along misinformation about current threats.

As Ira Allen writes, panic isn’t a bad thing.

It can be good for you.

Allen dives into the philosophy and origins of the word panic in his book Panic Now? As he explains, the word panic itself derives from the Greek god Pan, who played a range of roles in ancient western culture. Most of the time, he was a fun-loving playboy. But sometimes he could be more serious. His voice could instill terror in gods and titans. He could send humans scrambling away in senseless fear. So the word panic literally means to run away from the sound of Pan's voice.

Decades of pop culture have framed panic as a particular set of unproductive behaviors the public displays during disasters. It’s not based in reality. It’s based in a misperception of how people behave in a crisis.

Sure, sometimes mass panic happens.

Most of the time, the public underreacts to a crisis until the last second. It’s actually the years, months, weeks, days, or minutes beforehand that put everyone in an unprepared state, ensuring they freak out once a threat becomes unavoidable and often too late to do anything about.

According to actual psychology, you should panic a little when you detect a threat. You need to process your fear. Only then can you take action. Most of the public doesn’t want to do that. Instead, they want to pretend the threat doesn’t exist, because they don’t want to deal with their fears. These days, the super-rich have scooped up all the newspapers and all the broadcasting networks. They’re happy to use the media to reinforce this inherent cognitive bias.

Meanwhile, they sit around and panic. They don’t panic about lost lives. They panic about stock prices and property.

That’s profitable.

It’s profitable to keep everyone working until they die from disasters and diseases. It’s profitable to let them get sick and wind up in the hospital. It’s profitable to let them develop chronic illnesses and then bankrupt them with medicines they otherwise wouldn’t have needed. The super-rich aren’t scared of these threats. They feel insulated from them, via private healthcare and bunkers. They’re vastly overestimating themselves, but it’s what they do.

Centuries ago, when plagues and disasters struck, the rich didn’t have an apparatus to keep everyone else working until they dropped dead. The idea that they could somehow profit off these crises, as Naomi Klein explained in The Shock Doctrine, hadn’t quite occurred to them yet.

Now, they understand it.

They have the tools.

Over the last four years in particular, the rich have tightened up their game. They’re now fully prepared to use media as a tool in service of elite panic, to reinforce everyone’s existing cognitive biases in the pursuit of short-term profits. They’ll eventually tell everyone the truth about any given threat, in order to maintain a shred of credibility, but only after it’s too late.

There’s a final cognitive bias, first noted by Michael Crichton, that explains why everyone keeps turning to these unreliable, corrupted sources of information even when they let everyone down over and over.

It’s called Gell-Mann amnesia.

From Crichton:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well… You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Decades later, nothing has changed. If anything, things have gotten worse. The media machine continues to tell us that wet streets cause rain, and a large portion of the public believes them, even when they know they shouldn’t. On a related note, Crichton also predicted how billionaires would behave in his Jurassic Park novels. Instead of learning their lesson, they continue doubling down on the same failed ideas, until… oops… we just have to live with dinosaurs.

It just keeps happening…

What terrifies the rich more than anything is an informed, educated public who takes threats seriously and knows what to do. That’s not profitable, not in the short run at least, and they can’t see past the next quarterly reports to see the bigger picture. So, that’s how elite panic makes normalcy bias worse.

Just remember, they don’t want you to “overreact.”

It’s not cool.