Social Distancing And Storm Evacuations Save Lives. Here’s Why Some People Complain When They Do

It is fascinating (and scary) to watch the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis play out. As a leader within the U.S. meteorological community, I notice several similarities between public responses to the virus and weather-risk communication challenges. People are struggling to grasp concepts like probability, exponential growth trends, and uncertainty and are hanging on day-to-day fluctuations in virus prediction models. Such models fluctuate daily because of sensitivity to changing initial conditions. The overvaluing of “the next weather model” run is common with high-impact events like hurricanes or snowstorms too.

However, the parallel that concerns me are responses to social distancing. A significant number of people remain defiant or skeptical even as data suggest case rates continue to grow exponentially. Most states have not peaked in case numbers or deaths, but there is evidence that social distancing measures are working in jurisdictions that took early and decisive actions. As “curve flattening” eventually happens, I predict that some people will say, “See the numbers were ______, it wasn’t that bad so why all the overreaction?”

This is common in my weather world too. It’s as if people are annoyed when they shelter or evacuate and return to find their house intact. What’s that all about?

Preventative or safety measures like social distancing, hurricane evacuations, or tornado sheltering are designed to reduce the number of fatalities. Oddly, there is often a tendency for people to question their purpose when they actually do what they were designed to do. Dr. Janet Frick is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia and offers perspective on this strange backlash effect. Professor Frick says the “challenge with determining that social distancing has been successful, of course, is that it will reduce the number of eventual illnesses and deaths.” She explains (below) something called “delay discounting” that seems quite relevant to this discussion.

Well-executed social distancing makes the threat seem like it wasn't that big a deal in the first place. This bears some similarity to the psychological principle of "delay discounting.” Delay discounting is a principle, seen in both psychology and economics, that people prefer a smaller immediate reward to a larger distant reward. With social distancing, we are asking people to sacrifice immediate comfort and even economic security for a later larger reward that we've never seen before — the potential collapse of our medical system in certain parts of the country. It's hard to feel "reinforced" by NOT experiencing something terrible — similarly to how if we evacuate in advance of a major storm and lives AREN'T lost, we think the initial response was an overreaction."

“Delay discounting” is something that I also see in policy responses to the looming threat of climate change.

Normalcy and recency biases are also likely at play. Grant Cardone wrote in The 10X Entrepreneur that normalcy bias is, “the tendency for people to believe that things will always function the way they normally have and therefore to UNDERESTIMATE both the likelihood of a disaster and its possible effects.” It is a great explanation for why people may not evacuate a coastal home as a category 5 hurricane approaches the shoreline. There is logic that “I’ve survived hurricanes before, why is this one different?” Normalcy bias is very dangerous because storms like Hurricane Harvey, Maria, or Michael were not normal. Like COVID-19, they are anomaly events. Most people, by the very definition of anomaly, have not experienced it.

As for optimism bias, we see it all of the time. Some people actually think they are going to win the next Powerball lottery jackpot (Odds: 1 in 292,201,333) but have very little concern about contracting the coronavirus (high-end estimates: 70% of the global population could be infected). Optimism bias is defined by VeryWellMind.com as “a mistaken belief that our chances of experiencing negative events are lower and our chances of experiencing positive events are higher than those of our peers.” It, along with normalcy bias, might explain why a person makes the decision to drive through a flooded roadway even though the weather community screams the slogan, “Turn Around, Don’t Drown” from the highest hilltops.

Professor Darryl Rice is an Assistant Professor of Management at Miami University in Ohio. Rice told me in a message that he thinks something called “Hindsight Bias” is also at play. This so-called “I knew it all along” perspective is something I have witnessed in the consumption of weather information, and it is clearly rearing its ugly head with the coronavirus crisis. Rice said,

Typically, when we as people "feel/believe/perceive" like we have known it all along, then we generally become less inclined to critically examine why the event/incident truly happened. This hindsight bias is a specific type of cognitive bias that entails three dimensions. Memory distortion (misrepresenting or misremembering an earlier judgment, decision, or opinion); inevitability of an event (person holds the belief the event had to happen); foreseeability (person believes he or she knew how the event would play out). .

Rice explained to me that when hindsight bias is present, people tend to significantly minimize the uncertainty and other unknowns during the time of the event.

As the coronavirus crisis continues to play out, see if you observe “delay discounting” or some of the aforementioned biases in the public, social media, and policy narratives. I am cautiously optimistic that we will turn the corner in the coming weeks or months, but only if people stay the course with social distancing. Our fatigue, impatience, despair, and biases must not cause poor and potentially deadly decisions.

Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus