What Is Normalcy Bias?

Normalcy Bias isn’t a phrase that many people including myself hear on a daily basis. To be honest, I really haven’t heard this phrase until recently.

With all that’s be going on around the world recently,  uprisings in the Middle East, large earthquakes, and super storms,  one would think this is the reason this phrase popped into my mind. As horrible as these events are, it was an approaching ice storm, an ice storm the local meteorologists told us would be catastrophic that jump-started my mind.

I noticed people scrambling about to get ready for an ice storm that had the potential to leave us without power for several days.  Folks run here and there to get the basics supplies they should already have such as flashlights, batteries, basic food stores, and so on.  Milk, bread, and eggs flew off the shelves (I reckon folks in the Midwest like French toast when snowed in) firewood, canned goods, and snow shovels were in short supply.

Why didn’t folks have basic stuff on hand, why did they wait until nearly the last minute to get prepared?  Plain and simple too many people do not prep because they don’t believe anything can happen to disrupt their everyday life. What’s the point in prepping if you’ll never need emergency supplies

Normalcy Bias Defined

“A mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of the government to include the populace in its disaster preparations.”

 

The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred that it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have never experienced before such as an earthquake or a tornado ripping through their neighborhood.

 

“People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation. Concepts such as emergency preparedness are alien to these folks”

What I get from this is normalcy bias is a process in which people despite the evidence refuse to or is unable to plan on a worst-case scenario. Prior to 9-11-01, how many people do know gave serious thought to evacuating a high-rise office building in case of an emergency?

Shortly after the September attacks, many businesses regardless of their locations came up with evacuation plans. They also came up with plans to continue business in the event of a catastrophic event. Why wasn’t this planning in place before? Simple, no one thought it could happen. Granted not many people would have thought a group of crazies would fly planes into an office building making planning for such an event unlikely.

 

 However, planning for a fire is something that should have been in place beyond a placard on a wall. No one really thought a high-rise office building could burn much less fall down, not here, not in the United States.

 

Hurricane Katrina & Normalcy Bias

A common web example of the normalcy bias is the tragedy in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina’s landfall. It is reported that many residents didn’t evacuate because they simply couldn’t envision the levees failing.

 

Folks waited until it was too late to evacuate. They found themselves stranded without the most basic of supplies.

 

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Normalcy Bias It’s All In Your Head 

The Survival Mom

Human bodies don’t normally fly through the air, and I didn’t expect a real-life lesson in normalcy bias, but last year that’s exactly what I witnessed while waiting for a red light to turn green. I was sitting in my Tahoe at an intersection not far from home when I heard the loud rumble of a truck engine. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes when a green pick-up veered around me

It’s time we plan for other worst-case scenarios now! Whether it’s a blizzard, earthquake, flood, tornado or mass casualty attack, we need to think out the possibilities and have a basic plan and supplies in place. It’s time to understand “it” CAN happen here. It’s time to be prepared not scared….Read More Here

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America Has Fallen Victim To The Normalcy Bias

Before It’s News.com

Trying to warn people to be prepared because of a probable crisis can bring you grief and frustration because of the human condition called normalcy bias. Just as people in Pompeii watched for hours as the volcano erupted without evacuation, many people do not react until it is too late. Although you may try to warn others, the reality is some people will never take preventative action even when they are starting a crisis… Read Full Post Here

Normalcy Bias and Bible Prophecy

Prophezine.com 

The normalcy bias has a strong relationship to Bible prophecy. Because we’ve never had famine, nuclear emergencies, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions on a global scale, people assume these disasters will never happen. Most of the same people believe that there is a God, yet they refuse to believe the dire predictions made by Him…. Click Here To Read The Full Post

We have conditioned ourselves to not believe a major disaster or catastrophic event could take place where we live. As an example, I live in tornado alley and notice folks refusing to believe a tornado could rip through their place with little or no warning.