In this free-for-all-Friday Trent explores the problem of “normalcy bias” in life-threatening situations.
Transcript:
TRENT:
We all have biases, but sometimes our biases can get us killed. That’s what I’m going to talk about today here on the Council of Trent. Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology, but Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. That is the essence of free for All Friday. And if you go back through Council of Trent, we’ve done, my goodness, we’ve done at least over 300 free for all Fridays. I’m sure as someone, if they had a lot of time on their hands, could see what kind of moods I was in, what kind of hobbies or issues were peaking my interest at various times over the past eight years. I remember when free for All Friday started, I was really on disaster fix for a while. I was talking about disasters here. There I still have a book on disasters that I would love to write at some point, so maybe we will work on that.
But today I want to talk about a thing called normalcy bias and how it manifests in disasters. And the catalyst for the discussion is a disaster that took place recently took place last month. It took place on New Year’s Day actually in Switzerland. So this was in a town, a ski town called Kranz, Montana, the region of Aice in Switzerland. January 1st, 1:26 AM local time at this bar, there’s a bar called LA Constellation, and you’ve got over a hundred people in there. They’re still celebrating New Year’s, they’re partying and they start passing out the sparklers. They’re really aggressive. Sparklers shooting sparks up, and there’s a waitress coming out with champagne and there’s bottle toppers with the sparkler going off and the band is still playing. You can see all this because there’s people who are recording it on their cell phones. The sparklers go and then they catch light the ceiling because the ceiling is covered in black acoustic foam, which is incredibly dangerous because acoustic foam is highly, highly flammable.
The fire spreads quickly, and when it does burn, it emits a extremely toxic gas within the smoke that can debilitate people very quickly. But what’s interesting about the disaster is you see the fire start spreading at first, though it spread slowly, just the flames start licking around at the foam and going, and people just stand there and they watch this and they’re filming it with their cell phone for a while for at least like 30 seconds. And here’s the thing, it doesn’t take long. It doesn’t take long, 60 seconds or 90 seconds, sometimes even in 60 seconds, a room can be engulfed in flames, especially if it has the right material that is not flame retardant, and suddenly you’re trapped and you can’t believe what’s happened to you. But why is it that people, they’re just standing there and they’re looking at this. I was reading an article about it online saying that most people have never even seen a structural fire, right?
You go back in history, lots of people were familiar with fires because we didn’t have modern safety apparatuses to prevent fires. We have ground fault interrupting circuits, GFCI, that’s the one where you plug in your blender, your Vitamix into the kitchen, and there’s too much power going into the outlet, and suddenly all the power turns off from the outlet and you’re like, Hey, what’s going on? You got to press the red button to click it back on again. That’s to prevent surge overloads. We have all kinds of things, smoke detectors. Now, office buildings, commercial buildings have usually have sprinkler systems in them, so we have a lot of things that are able to prevent fires. Usually. I have several friends who are firefighters, and usually when they go out for fires, it’s for buildings that are under construction or abandoned buildings. Those are the only things where you have structural fires today.
Usually not people’s homes or office buildings or places where they work. So the thing is, we’re not used to them, whereas back in the day, a hundred years ago, you would have fires were a regular occurrence, so people were naturally afraid of them. In fact, they’re afraid so much that you know the phrase, you can’t shout fire in a crowded building as a limit to free speech. That’s not actually what was said. A Supreme Court case where they said, you can’t falsely shout fire in a crowded building because there were disasters happened a hundred years ago. There was, I think it was called the Italian Hall Disaster, where somebody just yelled, fire in this hall, and everybody panicked and ran out. There was no fire. Some people think that these were union strike busters who were trying to start a disturbance, and so people were celebrating.
They were dancing and someone yelled, fire falsely, and everyone rushes for the exits. They get trampled on the stairs, the exit doors swing in instead of out. I believe that was one of the details that might be incorrect actually, but the fact of the matter is there were not enough exits. People were trampled, and a lot of people died as a result. There was no fire, but people were so scared of one, they were rushing out of the building. But nowadays, if you say that, people are like, huh? What? People could see fire? You could see here in Kranz, Montana, just back in January of this year, people are watching, they’re seeing a fire spreading on the ceiling, and they’re like, whoa, crazy. And what do they got to do? They got to pull out their phone and record it. Everything has to be recorded nowadays, and they’re just recording this as it’s happening.
And I have watched, so in Twin, I’ve watched the National Fire Safety Board do demonstrations where they set similar conditions, start a fire on a roof, and you watch it and at first, oh, it seems it’s going slowly. Then all of a sudden the smoke is filled half the room, then all the room is 60 seconds or the fire flashes over and just immediately explodes out. It goes from a small fire to a big fire in an instant. And that’s something that also witnesses believe may have happened in this fire, and people are caught off guard. And so what ended up happening is that in this Kranz Montana fire, recently, 116 people were injured, 83 with severe burns and 40 people died in this fire. They’re in this resort. You think normally you get people out, but you also underestimate in a crowded room how slow it takes to get people out if people leave at the last second.
Or people will usually, in a disaster situation like a fire, especially when people have to leave a room quickly, they will go towards the exit, the entrance, they’ll go to the entrance, they came in. So even if there are sufficient exits for everybody to get out, most people will naturally default to the entrance where they came in. If it’s the main entrance, there’s going to be a bottleneck, and then you’re not going to be able to get people out. That’s why when I go to event venues, when I go anywhere, even I go to the movies, I always look around and try to pinpoint at least two additional exits where one of my closest exits and have them and commit them to memory. That way I can quickly get out. It reminded me of the station nightclub fire in Rhode Island as February 20th, 2003, a hundred people died.
230 people are injured. People are going to see a band called Great White playing at this nightclub. It was overpacked. People couldn’t find exits. They’re all rushing towards the main exit, which was narrow. But the same thing happens. You have sparklers going off on stage illegally. They were not supposed to be there, ignites acoustic foam, and the musicians are still playing, and they look up and they see the fire and they’re like, oh, man, that’s not good. People are looking and they see the fire start to spread and they don’t do anything. They just watch it. Then the fire alarm starts to go off. There’s no sprinklers. And because there was a grandfather rule, because the building was so old, it wasn’t required to have sprinklers. I think that rule has been changed since then. If anything, the older buildings are the ones that need to be retrofitted with sprinklers, and it’s a heartbreaking video.
Don’t watch it. If you go watch it, it’s very sad that the people are still filming as they’re leaving and you see people trying to get out and the bottleneck forms and they get stuck in there. And then the smoke just starts to fill it up after 30 seconds and people are screaming, the flames are shooting out, and you don’t understand just how fast it can spread. But the problem is also that people operate under a condition called normalcy bias. This is also called analysis paralysis, ostrich effect. First responders call it negative panic. So when you think of a panic, people are screaming, running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Instead, negative panic is when you don’t run around and you act like an ostrich with their head in the sand. You don’t want to do anything. You just stand there and you can’t function.
You can’t operate because your senses are overwhelmed. At the time, Amanda Ripley has written a really great book called The Unthinkable, who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, and she studied several different disasters to see, well, who are the ones who make it out of a disaster, whether it’s like a plane crash or a ship sinking a fire, who makes it out and who doesn’t? And what do they have in common? And so she says that when there is a disaster, people tend to operate. There are three phases of their response, denial, deliberation, and decisive moment. So denial is the first one, and 80% of people freeze up in a disaster or they don’t function. They don’t operate, not maybe for a long time, but in the first instant, they just can’t process what is happening. So they undergo a kind of denial and they will check with other sources to make sure, is this really a disaster?
Is this really that bad? And they’ll ask you, are you leaving? Are you going to leave? 70% of the people, of the survivors of nine 11 who got out of the World Trade Center had asked other people if they were going to leave first before they decided to leave. They checked with other people to see what the situation was. And the problem is that the reason we call it normalcy bias is that our brains are prone to operate thinking that each day will be normal, like the last one, sun rises, suns today will be relatively like yesterday. Our minds are not primed to operate with the assumption that things could be radically different tomorrow than they are today. We like to keep a schedule and a routine, if you will. And so when things dramatically interrupt it like a disaster, our brain can take a long time to try to process the new information.
It takes about eight to 10 seconds for the brain to process radically new information. And if you don’t have the ability to process it during that time, you tend to freeze up. Evolutionary psychologists believe one reason that most people will freeze up in a disaster. There’s fight, flight and freeze. And so people won’t just won’t know what to do. I was watching a documentary about the Estonia. This was a, it wasn’t the Estonia. No, the Zebu Ferry. This was a ferry in the North Sea, one of those car ferries where you drive your car on and it drives off, and they forgot to close the front door so they couldn’t see it from the bridge. And the ship leaves, and then water gets in when they’re out in rough seas and on a ferry, it’s very unstable because of the cars and the open area when water gets in.
And so it capsized really quickly. But even as it was starting to capsize, one survivor talks about how he was running out and he saw his parents, and I think his sister just kind of staring off and he’s like, come on, let’s go, let’s go. And they just stood there and they were just staring off into the distance. They couldn’t even move. Their brains just could not process the idea that the ship they were on is sinking. It just wasn’t even in their minds. And now with all this dramatic new information, the ship is at a 45 degree angle. Water’s coming in, they can’t function because they hadn’t countenance that something like this could happen to them. That’s why many years ago when I went on the Catholic Answers Cruise, I was there by myself. But during the night, I practiced a drill. I had my clothes laid out with a life jacket, and I got up in the middle of the night, put on my clothes in the darkness, put on my headlamp.
I brought a headlamp, had a life jacket, clothes headlamp, turned it on, and I was able to do that in about 10 seconds, and then I could make it out the door. I have a headlamp on and go on my way. Yeah, I know that’s really nerdy. Yeah, I know, but hey, at least I’m the one who’s going to be, I’ll make it to the lifeboat people. It reminds me of Dwight shrewd on the office when Michael drives the car into the lake and the car sewing of water, and Dwight says, do not panic. I have repaired for this. That’s what I’ll probably doing. Do not panic people. I prepared for this. But the Titanic, when the Titanic was sinking, normalcy bias caused a lot of people to die. They weren’t willing to get into lifeboats. They froze because they just had no thought in their head that this ship could actually sink.
It was unsinkable. How could they have that? How could that possibly happen? And so they weren’t able to operate in that way, and people didn’t get into lifeboats. A lot of lifeboats in the Titanic were lowered half full because people felt more secure on this big ship, even though it’s sinking than on a little tiny boat. But it doesn’t have to be gigantic disasters either. It can be small events that can feel like disasters for us. So one example the researchers give are car crashes. Now, car crashes are a fairly normal thing. We drive a lot. And usually each year you will see, maybe you won’t see the crash itself, but you’ll see the aftermath of a car crash on the side of the road and you’ll say, oh, oh, that’s pretty bad. But the problem is, while we see a lot of car crashes, we’re not usually personally involved in car crashes.
That’s a rare thing to happen to people. And so when we do get in a car crash, especially a serious one, it’s a totally brand new experience for people. And so you’ll have a disassociative moment, not be able to process what’s going on, and you’ll have this kind of normalcy bias will creep in thinking, oh wow, this can’t really be happening. Of denial. Then deliberation and then decisive moment. Like, what am I going to do in big disasters or smaller disasters in our lives? Did I say this before? I’ll have to check, but I can’t remember. I had to start and stop this episode. Evolutionary psychologists believe that normalcy bias could be the result of an instinct to protect prey from predators. That why would you freeze up in a life-threatening situation? Well, thousands of years ago, one of the biggest life-threatening situations we faced as animals and any animal faces is getting eaten by another animal, right?
And if you’re scared, not sure what to do. Research has shown that prey is sometimes less likely to be eaten by a predator if they freeze up and they don’t move, right? Remember the Jurassic Park rule at the T-Rex, Ian freeze. Allen’s telling him not to move because the T-Rex s him and he moves anyway, try to draw him away. And so that could be the case. This is just an evolutionary relic, a relic of our evolutionary past where animals were more likely to survive in situations where they could get eaten, freeze and don’t move, and the predator goes and ignores them. That’s just one proposed solution. Evolutionary psychology, a lot of it’s kind of flimflam because you’re just proposing these theories that can’t really be tested. So it’s interesting in that respect, but otherwise, the normalcy bias is there. So be aware of it.
And if you go out, just try to think yourself, okay, what would I do if the worst happened? You’re in a new place. Wherever you are, count the exits to the seats on a plane. As long as you prime that in your head, it will at least give you a fighting chance to get out of a bad situation because you’ve thought about it, you thought about it in your head, it’s going to be totally brand new to your brain. So the book, if you’re interested, is called Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley. So I would definitely recommend that, and maybe I’ll do a full free for all on that book here in the future, so as it’s the unthinkable, who survives when disaster strikes and why. But thank you guys so much and hope you have a very blessed day.