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November 18, 2023
Hunter S. Thompson said, “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.”
“If an engineer wants to know about what he’s designing, he puts it under great amounts of stress,” says Peter Hancock, who has been studying human performance for more than twenty years for the U.S. military. “It’s the same with human beings. If you want to find out how things operate under normal conditions, it’s very interesting to find out how we operate under stress.”
The Survival Arc In every kind of disaster, we start in about the same place and travel through three phases. We’ll call the first phase denial. Except in extremely dire cases, we tend to display a surprisingly creative and willful brand of denial.
How long the delay lasts depends in large part on how we calculate risk. Our risk analysis depends less upon facts than upon a shadowy sense of dread,
Once we get through the initial shock of the denial phase, we move into deliberation, the second phase of the survival arc. We know something is terribly wrong, but we don’t know what to do about it.
for every gift the body gives us in a disaster, it takes at least one away—sometimes bladder control, other times vision.
Finally, we reach the third phase of the survival arc: the decisive moment. We’ve accepted that we are in danger; we’ve deliberated our options. Now we take action.
Many—if not most—people tend to shut down entirely in a disaster, quite the opposite of panicking. They go slack and seem to lose all awareness.
“Actual human behavior in fires is somewhat different from the ‘panic’ scenario. What is regularly observed is a lethargic response,” she wrote in a 2002 article in the journal Fire Protection Engineering. “People are often cool during fires, ignoring or delaying their response.”
Laughter—or silence—is a classic manifestation of denial, as is delay.
“Fires only happen to other people.” We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before. Psychologists call this tendency “normalcy bias.” The human brain works by identifying patterns. It uses information from the past to understand what is happening in the present and to anticipate the future. This strategy works elegantly in most situations. But we inevitably see patterns where they don’t exist. In other words, we are slow to recognize exceptions. There is also the peer-pressure factor. All of us have been in situations that looked ominous,
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gathering process is common in life-or-death situations. Facing a void of unknown, we want to be prepared with as many supplies as possible. And, as with normalcy bias, we find comfort in our usual habits. (In a survey of 1,444 survivors after the attacks, 40 percent would say they gathered items before leaving.)
crowds don’t tolerate irrational panic behavior. Most of the time, people remain consistently orderly—and kind, much kinder than they would have been on a normal day.
Disaster victims often oscillate between horrifying realizations and mechanical submission.
powerful presumption that the trouble was limited to her immediate vicinity, which psychologists call the “illusion of centrality”:
Denial is the most insidious fear response of all. It lurks in places we never think to look. The more I learned, the more denial seemed to matter all the time, even long before the disaster, on days that pass by without incident.
(you are twice as likely to kill yourself than you are to be killed by someone else during your lifetime).
people rely on emotional shortcuts, called “heuristics,” to make choices. The more uncertainty, the more shortcuts. And the shortcuts, while very useful, lead to a slew of predictable errors.
Our risk formula, especially when it comes to disasters, almost never looks this rational: Risk = Probability × Consequence No, if we could reduce our risk calculation to a simple formula, it might look more like this: Risk = Probability × Consequence × Dread/Optimism
Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness
Terrorists understand dread. Unpredictable attacks on civilians are an extremely efficient way to create dread. And dread is a good way to get a population agitated. In fact, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism in the past fifty years is fewer than the number killed by food allergies. But terrorism is by nature a mind game.
even after 9/11, driving remained much, much more dangerous than flying. The chance of dying on a major domestic commercial flight from 1992 through 2001 was roughly 8 in 100 million, according to a 2003 analysis in American Scientist. Driving the same distance as the average flight segment is, by comparison, about sixty-five times riskier.
most of the devastation caused by hurricanes is humanmade (due to the overpopulation of the coasts, faulty levees, and depleted wetlands),
we trend toward arrogance. About 90 percent of drivers think they are safer than the average driver. Most people also think they are less likely than others to get divorced, have heart disease, or get fired. And three out of four baby boomers think they look younger than their peers.
In small communities focused on short-term survival, the weather was an excellent indicator of safety. But in complex financial markets—or dense coastal cities—affect works like a broken compass.
Emotions and feelings were not impediments to reason; they were integral. “Reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were,” he wrote. “At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use.”
It’s surprising how rarely warnings explain why you should do something, not just what you should do.
For example, you have heard flight attendants explain how to put on an oxygen mask, should it drop down from the ceiling of the plane. “Secure your own mask before helping others,” the warning goes. But the flight attendant does not tell you why. Imagine if you were told that, in the event of a rapid decompression, you would only have ten to fifteen seconds before you lost consciousness. Aha. Then you might understand why you should put your mask on before you help your child.
Why don’t the airlines give people better warnings, even when plane-crash survivors tell them how to do it? For one thing, they are in business. They don’t want to scare customers by talking too vividly about crashes. Better to keep the language abstract and forgettable. But there’s another, more insidious reason. Airline employees, like professionals in most fields, don’t particularly trust regular people. “Like police, they think of civilians as a grade below them,”
On the D.C. subway system recently, I heard this taped announcement: “In the event of a fire, remain calm and listen for instructions.” That’s it. Hundreds of conversations and thoughts were interrupted for that announcement. What was the message? That the officials who run the subway system do not trust me. They think I will dissolve into hysterics and ignore instructions in the event of a fire. Consider what the people who created this announcement did not do: they had an excellent opportunity to tell me how many subway fires happen in the D.C. system each year. That would have gotten my
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people think in binary terms: either something will happen or it won’t. Either it will affect me, or it won’t. So when people hear they have a 6 in 100,000 chance of dying from a fall, they shelve that risk under the label “won’t happen to me,” even though falling is in fact the third most common cause of accidental deaths in the United States (after car crashes and poisoning). It would be much more powerful to tell people about Grant Sheal, age three, who fell and cut himself on a vase while playing at home in February 2007. The toddler died from his injuries.
When people imagine good things happening to them, they become more prone to take risks—regardless of the odds. In human brain imaging studies, part of the brain called the “ventral striatum” is highly active in gamblers and drug addicts.
Within this region, something called the “nucleus accumbens” lights up when people just anticipate winning money. When this region is activated, people have a tendency to take more risks. So all a casino has to do is get you to anticipate winning—even if you never actually experience it. This might explain why casinos ply gamblers with minirewards like cheap food, free drinks, bonus points, and surprise gifts. Anticipating those rewards can activate the nucleus accumbens, which in turn can lead to more risk taking.
Another part of the brain lights up when people imagine losing. The “anterior insula” is active when people calculate the risk of bad things happening—like disasters. This region also shows acti...
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there’s a fine line between getting people’s attention and losing them to a sense of futility.
The best warnings are like the best ads: consistent, easily understood, specific, frequently repeated, personal, accurate, and targeted.
Warnings need to tell people what to do. Since people aren’t sure what action they should take in response to an Orange Alert for terrorism, the color codes are unsatisfying—like someone clinking a glass to give a toast and then standing there in silence.
“I tell people that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. The very definition of ‘news’ is ‘something that hardly ever happens,’ ” writes security expert Bruce Schneier. “It’s when something isn’t in the news, when it’s so common that it’s no longer news—car crashes, domestic violence—that you should start worrying.”
Under extreme duress, the body abandons certain nonessential functions like digestion, salivation, and sometimes bladder and sphincter control.
In a study of U.S. soldiers in World War II, 10 to 20 percent admitted they had defecated in their pants. The true percentage is probably much higher, since incontinence is not something most soldiers like to acknowledge.
This curious sense of aloofness, called “dissociation,” can feel subtle. In a study of 115 police officers involved in serious shootings, 90 percent reported having some kind of dissociative symptom—from numbing to a loss of awareness to memory problems. At its most extreme, dissociation can take the form of an out-of-body experience.
Extreme dissociation seems to be the brain’s last line of defense, and it is particularly common among victims of childhood sexual abuse.
A series of studies has found that the more intense the dissociation during the crisis, the harder the recovery will be for the person who survives.
very cold or very hot environments tend to degrade human performance very, very quickly.
One of the most fascinating distortions, reported in more than half of the police-shooting cases, is the strange slowing down of time. Time distortion is so common that scientists have a name for it: tachypsychia, derived from the Greek for “speed of the mind.”
“I’m trying to figure out how the brain represents time,” he says. We don’t think about it, but under normal circumstances, your brain is already “controlling” time. Your sense of touch, vision, and hearing all operate using different architectures. Imagine your brain as a clock store: Data comes in at slightly different times, so no two clocks tick at exactly the same pace. But your brain synchs everything up so you are not confused. How does the brain do this? And what is it doing differently when things seem to move in slow motion?
How did Cirillo perform so well, despite the fear coursing through his body? As an instructor, he had taken training very seriously. He had created subconscious muscle memories for holding his gun in one hand, two hands, every conceivable position, so that he did not need to think when the time came to fire. As he did more stakeouts, Cirillo started to appreciate his subconscious more and more. He realized that it worked best if he got out of its way; in other words, he needed to turn off his conscious mind to avoid distracting thoughts that would sap precious mental resources. So he started
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Cirillo began training other officers with positive visualization exercises. Instead of telling them, “If you jerk the trigger, you will miss the target,” he would say: “As you focus on the sights while compressing the trigger smoothly, you will easily achieve a good shot.”
The body’s first defense is hardwired. The amygdala triggers an ancient survival dance, and it is hard to change. But we have an outstanding second defense: we can learn from experience. Among experts who train police, soldiers, and astronauts, nothing matters as much. “The actual threat is not nearly as important as the level of preparation,” police psychologist Artwohl and her coauthor, Loren W. Christensen, write in their book, Deadly Force Encounters. “The more prepared you are, the more in control you feel, and the less fear you will experience.”
