Journalist David McRaney wrote that "Normalcy bias flows into the brain no matter the scale of the problem. It will appear whether you have days and plenty of warning or are blindsided with only seconds between life and death." It can manifest itself in phenomena such as car crashes. Car crashes occur very frequently, but the average individual experiences them only rarely, if ever. It also manifests itself in connection with events in world history. According to a 2001 study by sociologist Thomas Drabek, when people are asked to leave in anticipation of a disaster, most check with four or more sources of information before deciding what to do. The process of checking in, known as milling, is common in disasters. and why at least 70% of
9/11 survivors spoke with others before evacuating. Similarly, experts connected with the
Fukushima nuclear power plant were strongly convinced that a multiple reactor meltdown could never occur. A website for police officers has noted that members of that profession have "all seen videos of officers who were injured or killed while dealing with an ambiguous situation, like the old one of a father with his young daughter on a traffic stop". In the video referred to, "the officer misses multiple threat cues...because the assailant talks lovingly about his daughter and jokes about how packed his minivan is. The officer only seems to react to the positive interactions, while seeming to ignore the negative signals. It's almost as if the officer is thinking, 'Well I've never been brutally assaulted before so it certainly won't happen now.' No one is surprised at the end of the video when the officer is violently attacked, unable to put up an effective defense." This professional failure, notes the website, is a consequence of normalcy bias. Normalcy bias, David McRaney has written, "is often factored into fatality predictions in everything from ship sinkings to stadium evacuations". Disaster movies, he adds, "get it all wrong. When you and others are warned of danger, you don't evacuate immediately while screaming and flailing your arms." McRaney notes that in the book
Big Weather,
tornado chaser Mark Svenvold discusses "how contagious normalcy bias can be. He recalled how people often tried to convince him to chill out while fleeing from impending doom. Even when tornado warnings were issued, people assumed it was someone else's problem. Stake-holding peers, he said, would try to shame him into denial so they could remain calm. They didn't want him deflating their attempts at feeling normal". == Hypothesized cause ==