Normalcy Bias Dulled Our Response Towards Mitigating Covid-19 Spread

Pew Research, in its 2014 Global Attitude survey, asked over 45,000 people from 44 countries to name which of the following five global threats posed the greatest danger to civilization: religious hatred, inequality, pollution, nuclear weapons, and infectious diseases. And there were only 5 countries among the 44 where people named infectious disease as the top threat. Not surprisingly, all these 5 African nations were in the throes of a raging Ebola outbreak which was wreaking havoc across their society then. In 25 countries – more than half of the countries surveyed – people considered infectious diseases to be the most innocuous and least threatening to civilization. Why?

The answer is relatively straightforward. It’s difficult for people to fathom the potential magnitude of the threat without a first-hand perspective. Local threats almost always supersede global threats, being more eminent and visible. That’s why religious and ethnic hatred is perceived as the top danger by those in the Middle East, Europeans worry more about inequality and Japanese about nuclear weapons, and so on. However, if a similar survey were conducted today, we could certainly say that people from across the globe would name infectious disease as the top threat. But why is it so despite the probability of a contagion remaining unchanged, in all likelihoods, since 2014? What could explain such a phenomenon leading to wide variations in our threat perception?

The answer lies in an often-used term by psychologists and behavioural economists i.e. hindsight bias – the tendency to exaggerate one's ability to have foreseen how something turned out, after learning an outcome. In other words, the tendency to view events as more likely to have occurred, after they occur than before. While we would like to believe that we already knew the destructive nature of the virus, its infectivity, virulence, or potential for chaos and far-reaching consequences of containment measures such as the great Indian migration, the truth is we probably didn’t till we read or witnessed it. Despite being the most advanced species to tread the planet, most of us don’t have a sound mental model in place to deal with such pandemics.

We all have inherent psychological biases and prior beliefs that make it hard to know whether we are responding appropriately to any given situation, especially in fairly unprecedented situations involving viruses that we know relatively little about. It is akin to writing on a scribbled upon slate, the scribbles being our priors and biases, with a chalk that keeps breaking, to finally arrive at a coherent picture. Add to that the self-reinforcement mechanisms, complex and opaque algorithms adopted by search engines and social media platforms, which tend to perpetuate our priors by feeding us content that we have the greatest affinity for. Placing the dots where one would rather have them. All the while compelling us to connect the dots to arrive at the big picture, which though distorted is the most acceptable to our minds.

That explains why many of us fell prey to normalcy bias when the situation started to worsen in the first quarter of 2020. We kept on expecting that things will continue to occur in the future the way they have typically occurred in the past – i.e. things will remain ‘normal’ eventually. That is why despite WHO declaring the outbreak to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and eventually recognizing it as a pandemic, many of us continued to underestimate the likelihood of a crisis occurring and the potential impact of the crisis. This thought process is harmless in most scenarios, as true disasters are relatively rare events. Thus, having a strong sense that things will remain more or less ‘normal’ is helpful when there are small deviations from the daily grind. In those scenarios, normalcy bias stops us from overreacting and thus making the situation worse.

Unfortunately, this pandemic is one of those ‘true disasters’ or ‘extremely low probability events’ to strike us where normalcy bias dulled our response towards mitigating and suppressing the spread. While President Trump’s initial statements of the virus disappearing, into nowhere presumably, and winning the war by Easter were reflective of normalcy bias, the evidence soon got too overwhelming to refute. Prolonged delay shown by heads of leading nations in responding adequately to the pandemic also indicated that confirmation bias was at play. Confirmation bias results in a tendency to search for and weigh the information that confirms one's preconceptions (priors) more strongly than information that challenges them. Another self-reinforcing mechanism hard wired into human psychology which needs to be acknowledged to be corrected. No wonder the final picture looked like an embellished version of the scribbles one had started with.* While, all this time, what was probably needed was wiping the slate clean.

Eventually, that did happen with an increasing number of leaders heeding the advice of the scientific community and taking bold steps to contain the virus. With significant, albeit nascent, research into the origins, genealogy, and traits of the virus and varying projections of infections and casualties, the world seems to have transitioned into a phase of information overload where the premium on sifting through heaps of (mis)information and getting the facts right is enormous. The catch is that not only does one have to get the facts right, but they also have to do it in record time, which seems antithetical to the rigorous, time consuming, and foolproof nature of science to arrive at any conclusion.

Each day throws up new often confounding correlations, which unless filtered through a scientific lens, are more likely to result in distortion of resource allocation and side effects (hydroxychloroquine?) than desirable effects. Luckily, consensus on measures to tackle the spread – if not the extent to which these measures should be enforced – offers some respite.
Here’s also a special mention for the heads of states who initiated effective measures early on; their priors were likely to be more robust due to training in a particular or associated discipline (Angela Merkel in Germany) or previous experience with an epidemic (Moon Jae-in in South Korea and Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan) or foresightedness (Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand) or pure coincidence.

Nevertheless, world leaders face the unenviable task of chalking out a future path during these uncertain times with most of the options resembling a choice between the devil and the deep sea. It doesn’t seem that the choices will become any easier. Nor will the biases disappear anytime soon!

(Anusree Raha is an Indian Economic Service officer and TEDx speaker. Bodhisattwa Biswas is a doctor turned management professional and TEDx speaker. Views expressed are personal)