Opinion | Two visions of 'normal' collided in our abnormal pandemic year - The Washingt... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...ded-our-abnormal-pandemic-year
pandemic bias normal cognitive bias emergency psychology
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The date was Sept. 17, 2001. The rubble was still smoking. As silly as this sounds, I was hoping it would make me cry.
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That didn’t happen. The truth is, it still looked like something on television, a surreal shot from a disaster movie. I was stunned but unmoved.
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ADLater, trying to understand the difference between those two moments, I told people, “The rubble still didn’t feel real.”
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now, after a year of pandemic, I realize that wasn’t the problem. The rubble was real, all right. It just wasn’t normal.
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it always, somehow, came back to that essential human craving for things to be normal, and our inability to believe that they are not, even when presented with compelling evidence.
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the greater risk is more often the opposite: People can’t quite believe. They ignore the fire alarm, defy the order to evacuate ahead of the hurricane, or pause to grab their luggage when exiting the crashed plane. Too often, they die.
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Calling the quest for normalcy a bias makes it sound bad, but most of the time this tendency is a good thing. The world is full of aberrations, most of them meaningless. If we aimed for maximal reaction to every anomaly we encountered, we’d break down from sheer nervous exhaustion.
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But when things go disastrously wrong, our optimal response is at war with the part of our brain that insists things are fine. We try to reoccupy the old normal even if it’s become radioactive and salted with mines. We still resist the new normal — even when it’s staring us in the face.
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Nine months into our current disaster, I now see that our bitter divides over pandemic response were most fundamentally a contest between two ideas of what it meant to get “back to normal.”
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One group wanted to feel as safe as they had before a virus invaded our shores; the other wanted to feel as unfettered
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he disputes that followed weren’t just a fight to determine whose idea of normal would prevail. They were a battle against an unthinkable reality, which was that neither kind of normalcy was fully possible anymore.
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I suspect we all might have been less willing to make war on our opponents if only we’d believed that we were fighting people not very different from how we were — exhausted by the whole thing and frantic to feel like themselves again
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Some catastrophes are simply too big to be understood except in the smallest way, through their most ordinary human details