“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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