You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  One of the best ways to see how bad you are at coping with procrastination is to notice how you deal with deadlines. Let’s imagine you are in a class where you must complete three research papers in three weeks, and the instructor is willing to allow you to set your own due dates. You can choose to turn in your papers once a week, or two in the first week and one in the second. You can turn them all in on the last day, or you can spread them out. You could even choose to turn in all three at the end of the first week and be done. It’s up to you, but once you pick you have to stick with your choice. If you miss your deadlines, you get a big fat zero.

  How would you pick? The most rational choice would be the last day for every paper. It gives you plenty of time to work hard on all three and turn in the best possible work. This seems like a wise choice, but you are not so smart.

  The same choice was offered to a selection of students in a 2002 study conducted by Klaus Wertenbroch and Dan Ariely. They set up three classes, and each had three weeks to finish three papers. Class A had to turn in all three papers on the last day of class, Class B had to pick three different deadlines and stick to them, and Class C had to turn in one paper a week. Which class had the better grades? Class C, the one with three specific deadlines, did the best. Class B, which had to pick deadlines ahead of time but had complete freedom, did the second best, and the group whose only deadline was the last day, Class A, did the worst. Students who could pick any three deadlines tended to spread them out at about one week apart on their own. They knew they would procrastinate, so they set up zones in which they would be forced to perform. Still, overly optimistic outliers who either waited until the last minute or chose unrealistic goals pulled down the overall class grade. Students with no guidelines at all tended to put off their work until the last week for all three papers. The ones who had no choice and were forced to spread out their procrastination did the best because the outliers were eliminated. Those people who weren’t honest with themselves about their own tendencies to put off their work or who were too confident didn’t have a chance to fool themselves.

  If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time, you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.

  Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout. Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect someday far away. You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination. You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is the you some time in the future who will be influenced by a different set of ideas and desires; a you for whom an alternate palette of brain functions will be available for painting reality.

  The now-you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game. The trick is to accept that the now-you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future-you—a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties. This is why food plans like Nutrisystem work for many people. Now-you commits to spending a lot of money on a giant box of food that future-you will have to deal with. People who get this concept use programs like Freedom, which disables Internet access on a computer for up to eight hours, a tool allowing now-you to make it impossible for future-you to sabotage your work.

  Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

  7

  Normalcy Bias

  THE MISCONCEPTION: Your fight-or-flight instincts kick in and you panic when disaster strikes.

  THE TRUTH: You often become abnormally calm and pretend everything is normal in a crisis.

  If you knew a horrific mile-wide force of nature was headed toward your home, what would you do? Would you call your loved ones? Would you head outside and look for the oncoming storm? Would you leap into a bathtub and cover yourself with a mattress?

  No matter what you encounter in life, your first analysis of any situation is to see it in the context of what is normal for you and then compare and contrast the new information against what you know usually happens. Because of this, you have a tendency to interpret strange and alarming situations as if they were just part of business as usual.

  For three days in 1999, a series of horrific tornadoes scrubbed clean the Oklahoma countryside. Among them was a monster force of nature later called the Bridge Creek–Moore F5. The F5 part of the name comes from the Enhanced Fujita Scale. It goes from EF1 to EF5 and measures the intensity of a twister. Less than 1 percent of tornadoes ever reach the top level. At 4, cars go airborne and whole houses are leveled. To reach level 5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, a tornado’s winds must exceed 200 miles per hour. The winds in Bridge Creek–Moore reached 320. Warnings were issued thirteen minutes in advance, yet many people did nothing as the monster approached. They milled around and hoped the killer would spare them. They didn’t attempt to run for safety. In the end, the beast destroyed 8,000 homes and killed 36 people. Many more would surely have perished if there had been no warning at all. For instance, a similar twister in 1925 killed 695. So, given there was a warning, why did some people not heed the call to action and seek shelter from the colossus?

  The tendency to flounder in the face of danger is well understood and expected among tornado chasers and meteorologists. Tales of those who choose to ride out hurricanes and tornado-spewing storm clouds are common. Weather experts and emergency management workers know you can become enveloped in a blanket of calm when terror enters your heart. Psychologists refer to it as normalcy bias. First responders call it negative panic. This strange counterproductive tendency to forget self-preservation in the event of an emergency is often factored into fatality predictions in everything from ship sinkings to stadium evacuations. Disaster movies get it all wrong. When you and others are warned of danger, you don’t evacuate immediately while screaming and flailing your arms.

  In his book Big Weather, tornado chaser Mark Svenvold wrote about how contagious normalcy bias can be. He recalled how people often tried to convince him to chill out while fleeing from impending doom. He said 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.

  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.

  Imagine you are in a Boeing 747 airplane as it touches down after a long flight. You hide a sigh of relief once the ground ceases to rush closer and you hear the landing gear chirp against the runway. You release the hand rests as the engines power down. You sense the bustle of four hundred people preparing to leave. The tedious process of taxiing to the terminal begins. You play back some of the moments on the giant plane, thinking how it was a pleasant flight with few bumps and nice people all around. You are already collecting your things and getting ready to remove your seat belt. You look out the window and try to make out something familiar in the fog. Without warning, shock waves of heat and pressure tear into your flesh. A terrible blast rattles your organs and tears at all corners of the plane. A noise like two trains colliding under your chin bursts eardrums up and down the aisles. An explosion tunnels throu
gh the spaces around you, filling every gap and crevice with streamers of flame surging down the aisles and over your head, under your feet. They recede just as quickly, leaving unbearable heat. Clumps of your hair crumple into ashes. Now all you hear is the crackle of fire.

  Imagine you are sitting on this plane now. The top of the craft is gone and you can see the sky above you. Columns of flame are growing. Holes in the sides of the airliner lead to freedom. How would you react?

  You probably think you would leap to your feet and yell, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” If not this, then you might assume you would coil into a fetal position and freak out. Statistically, neither of these is likely. What you would probably do is far weirder.

  In 1977, on an island in the Canaries called Tenerife, a series of mistakes led to two enormous 747 passenger planes colliding with each other as one attempted takeoff.

  A Pan Am aircraft with 496 people on board was taxiing along the runway in dense fog when a Dutch KLM flight with 248 inside asked to be cleared for takeoff on the same airstrip. The fog was so thick the KLM crew couldn’t see the other airplane, and both were invisible to the control tower. The crew misheard their instructions. Thinking they had just been given permission, they began to speed toward the other plane. Air traffic controllers tried to warn them, but radio interference garbled the messages. Too late, the captain of the KLM flight saw the other craft ahead of him. He pulled up hard, dragging the tail along the ground, but couldn’t take flight. He screamed as half of the KLM aircraft smashed into the Pan Am at 160 miles per hour.

  The KLM airplane bounced off the Pan Am jet, soared for five hundred feet, and then tumbled in a terrible jet fuel explosion. Everyone on board disintegrated. The fire was so intense it would burn until the next day.

  Rescue crews spilled out onto the tarmac, but they didn’t drive out to the Pan Am flight. Instead, they rushed to the flaming wreckage of the KLM plane. For twenty minutes, in the chaos, firefighters and emergency personnel thought they were dealing with only one problem and believed the flames peeking out from the fog in the distance were just more wreckage. The survivors on board the Pan Am flight would not be rescued. The engines were still running at full power because the pilot had attempted to turn at the last second, and the crew couldn’t switch them off because the wires had been severed. The crash sheared away most of the top half of the 747. People lay in pieces from the impact. Flames spread through the carnage. A massive fire began to take over the plane. Smoke filled the fuselage. To live, people had to act quickly. They had to unbuckle, move through the chaos onto the intact wing, and then jump twenty feet onto wreckage. Escape was possible, but not all of the survivors would attempt it. Some bolted into action, unbuckled loved ones and strangers and pushed them out to safety. Others stayed put and were consumed. Soon after, the center fuel tank exploded, killing all but the seventy people who had made their way outside.

  According to Amanda Ripley’s book, The Unthinkable, investigators later said the survivors of the initial impact had one minute before the fire took them. In that one minute, several dozen people who could have escaped failed to take action, failed to break free of paralysis.

  Why did so many people flounder when seconds mattered?

  Psychologist Daniel Johnson has rigorously studied this strange behavior. In his research he interviewed survivors of the Tenerife crash among many other disasters, including skyscraper fires and sinking ships, to better understand why some people flee when others do not.

  In Johnson’s interview with Paul and Floy Heck, both passengers on the Pan Am flight, they recalled not only their traveling companions sitting motionless as they hustled to find a way out, but dozens of others who also made no effort to stand as the Hecks raced past them.

  In the first moments of the incident, right after the top of the plane was sliced open, Paul Heck looked over to his wife, Floy. She was motionless, frozen in place and unable to process what was happening. He screamed for her to follow him. They unbuckled, clasped hands, and he led her out of the plane as the smoke began to billow. Floy later realized she possibly could have saved those sitting in a stupor just by yelling for them to join her, but she too was in a daze, with no thoughts of escape as she blindly followed her husband. Years later, Floy Heck was interviewed by the Orange County Register. She told the reporter she remembered looking back just before leaping out of a gash in the wall. She saw her friend still in the seat next to where they had been sitting with her hands folded in her lap, her eyes glassed over. Her friend did not survive the fire.

  In any perilous event, like a sinking ship or a towering inferno, a shooting rampage or a tornado, there is a chance you will become so overwhelmed by the perilous overflow of ambiguous information that you will do nothing at all. You will float away and leave a senseless statue in your place. You may even lie down. If no one comes to your aid, you will die.

  John Leach, a psychologist at the University of Lancaster, also studies freezing under stress. He says about 75 percent of people find it impossible to reason during a catastrophic event or impending doom. On the edges, the 15 or so percent on either side of the bell curve react either with unimpaired, heightened awareness or blubbering, confused panic.

  According to Johnson and Leach, the sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time. They’ve done the research, or built the shelter, or run the drills. They look for the exits and imagine what they will do. They were in a fire as a child or survived a typhoon. These people don’t deliberate during calamity because they’ve already done the deliberation the other people around them are just now going through.

  Normalcy bias is stalling during a crisis and pretending everything will continue to be as fine and predictable as it was before. Those who defeat it act when others don’t. They move when others are considering whether or not they should.

  As Johnson points out, the brain must go through a procedure before the body acts—cognition, perception, comprehension, decision, implementation, and then movement. There’s no way to overclock this, but you can practice until these steps individually are no longer complex, and thus no longer take up valuable brain computation cycles. Johnson likens it to playing an instrument. If you’ve never played a C chord on a guitar, you have to think your way through it and awkwardly press down on the strings until you make a clumsy twang. With a few minutes of practice, you can strum without as much deliberation and create a more pleasant sound.

  To be clear, normalcy bias isn’t freezing at the first signs of danger like a rabbit who confronts a snake, which is a real behavior humans can succumb to. To suddenly stop moving and hope for the best is called fear bradycardia, and it is an automatic and involuntarily instinct. This is sometimes referred to as tonic immobility. Animals like gazelles will become motionless if they sense a predator is nearby in the hopes of tricking its motion-tracking abilities by blending into the background. Some animals go so far as to feign death in what is called thanatosis.

  In 2005, researchers at the University of Rio de Janeiro were able to induce fear bradycardia in humans just by showing subjects photos of injured people. The participants’ heart rates plummeted and their muscles stiffened immediately. To be sure, this sort of behavior happens in a disaster, but we are talking about something different with normalcy bias.

  Much of your behavior is an attempt to lower anxiety. You know you aren’t in any danger when everything is safe and expected. Normalcy bias is self-soothing through believing everything is just fine. If you can still engage in your normal habits, still see the world as if nothing bad is happening, then your anxiety stays put. Normalcy bias is a state of mind out of which you are attempting to make everything OK by believing it still is.

  Normalcy bias is refusing to believe terrible events will include you even though you have every reason to think otherwise. The first thing you are likely to feel in the event of a disaster is the supreme need to feel safe and secure. When it becomes
clear this is impossible, you drift into a daydream where it is.

  Survivors of 9/11 say they remember gathering belongings before leaving offices and cubicles. They put on coats and called loved ones. They shut down their computers and had conversations. Even in their descent, most moved at a leisurely pace—no screaming or running. There was no need for anyone to say “Remain calm everyone,” because they weren’t freaking out. They were begging the world to return to normal by engaging in acts of normalcy.

  To reduce the anxiety of impending doom, you first cling to what you know. You then mine others for information. You strike up dialogs with coworkers, friends, and family. You become glued to the television and the radio. You gather with others to trade what you know so far. Some believe this is what happened as the Bridge Creek–Moore F5 tornado approached, which caused some people not to seek shelter. All the tools of pattern recognition, all the routines you’ve become accustomed to are rendered useless in a horrific event. The emergency situation is too novel and ambiguous. You have a tendency to freeze not because panic has overwhelmed you but because normalcy has disappeared.

  Ripley calls this moment when you freeze “reflexive incredulity.” As your brain attempts to disseminate the data, your deepest desire is for everyone around you to assure you the bad thing isn’t real. You wait for this to happen past the point when it becomes obvious it will not.

  The holding pattern of normalcy bias continues until the ship lurches or the building shifts. You may remain placid until the tornado throws a car through your house or the hurricane snaps the power lines. If everyone else is milling around waiting for information, you will too.