Why have so many people made so many bad decisions in dealing with COVID, from the start of the pandemic onwards?
On the one hand, many ignored the information about the pandemic at first, dismissing its importance.
On the other hand, plenty of people have taken aggressive — and unhelpful — actions to address their fears.
Such poor decision making stem from dangerous judgment errors that cognitive neuroscientists like myself call cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health to politics and even shopping. Fortunately, recent research has shown effective and pragmatic strategies to defeat these dangerous judgment errors. We need to be wary of cognitive biases in order to survive and thrive during this pandemic.
The Most Relevant Cognitive Biases for Dealing with COVID
More specifically, you need to watch out for three cognitive biases.
The Normalcy Bias
The normalcy bias refers to the fact that our intuitions cause us to feel that the future, at least in the short and medium term of the next couple of years, will function in roughly the same way as the past: normally. That was a safe assumption in the savanna environment, but not today, when the world is changing at an increasingly rapid pace.
This bias leads us to fail to prepare nearly as well as they should for the likelihood and effects of major disruptions, especially slow-moving train wrecks such as pandemics. As a result, we tend to vastly underestimate both the possibility and impact of a disaster striking us.
Moreover, in the midst of the event itself, people react much more slowly than they ideally should, getting stuck in the mode of gathering information instead of deciding and acting.
While the normalcy bias is the most harmful cognitive bias from which we suffer in the face of the pandemic, it’s far from the only one. In fact, a number of other cognitive biases combined with normalcy bias lead to bad decisions about the pandemic.
The Attentional Bias
One of these, attentional bias, refers to our tendency to pay attention to information that we find most emotionally engaging, and to ignore information that we don’t. Given the intense, in-the-moment nature of threats and opportunities in the ancestral savanna, this bias is understandable. Yet, in the modern environment, sometimes information that doesn’t feel emotionally salient is actually really important.
In the savanna environment, our ancestors had to live in and for the moment since they couldn’t effectively invest resources to improve their future states (it’s not like they could freeze the meat of the mammoths they killed). Right now, we have many ways of investing into our future lives, such as saving money in banks. Yet our instincts always drive us to orient toward short-term rewards and sacrifice our long-term future, a mental blind spot called hyperbolic discounting.
This helps explain why so many people are not focusing sufficiently on the long-term impact of the pandemic. Many are rushing to “get back to normal,” failing to realize that doing so will leave them very vulnerable both to COVID-19 and the disruptions accompanying the impact of the pandemic.
The Planning Fallacy
We tend to feel optimistic about our plans: we made them, and therefore the plans must be good, right? We intuitively feel that our plans will go accordingly, failing to prepare adequately enough for threats and risks. As a result, our initial plans often don’t work out. We either fail to accomplish our goals or require much more time, money, and other resources to get where we wanted to go originally, a cognitive bias known as the planning fallacy. Moreover, we don’t pivot quickly enough when external events require us to change our plans.
Thus, the vast majority of us were unprepared for a major disruption like COVID-19. Moreover, a great many people tried to go ahead with their plans when they should have pivoted, such as holding weddings, going on vacations, and so on.
Conclusion
To address these cognitive biases in relation to the pandemic, you have to adopt a realistic and even pessimistic perspective. Ray Dalio, who leads Bridgewater Associates and manages over $150 billion in investor assets, said early in the pandemic : “As with investing, I hope that you will imagine the worst-case scenario and protect yourself against it”. So what would it mean for you if you plan for the worst while, of course, hoping for the best?
You need to pivot for the long term by revising your plans in a way that accounts for the cognitive bias associated with COVID-19. By doing so, you’ll protect yourself and those you care about from our deeply inadequate gut reactions in the face of such slow-moving train wrecks.
Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on March 30, 2021.