In recent years a number of countries have embarked on enquiries to look back and scrutinise how their governments, institutions and embedded cultures performed under the stresses of lockdowns, vaccine rollouts and mass mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic. The objective of most of these enquiries has been to retrospectively learn lessons and enhance preparations for potential future events of this type, but they have also shone a light on other interesting aspects of this generational event. This article explores one particular phenomenon which received much media attention when the second UK national Covid-19 Inquiry report was published in November 2025, and which could have significant implications for the future.
In February-March 2020 the Covid-19 virus was spreading rapidly around the world, aided by globalised transport systems (particularly aviation, which could scarcely have been better designed to ensure efficient dispersal of infection) and by late February of that year the virus had spread to Europe and its near half a billion citizens. Italy was one of the first countries to be hit hard and in response the government there imposed draconian social lockdowns and ‘shelter in place’ orders as infections rates and deaths rose rapidly in its densely populated northern provinces. This should have provided the clear mandate for preventative lockdowns to be implemented across Europe, given that the Italians implored the rest of the continent to ‘act now or you’re next’.
But what did the enquiry remind us that the executive branch of the UK government, led at the time by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, did with this windfall of time and advance warning? Amongst other things, the PM “shook hands with everybody” during a hospital visit and attended a rugby match at a packed stadium in early March 2020. A national lockdown wasn’t finally announced until near the end of that month and several weeks after these events; a decision the enquiry concluded is likely to have cost thousands of lives through enhanced spreading of the virus across the country. Although this sequence of events in the UK can be in part attributed to some particular personal tendencies of its leader, we may have witnessed a bigger and more profound influence on how things playing out.
Cavalier and dismissive behaviour in the face of overwhelming evidence of impending danger is something which characteristically emerges from ‘normalcy bias’ (defined as the “tendency to underestimate the possibility of disaster and believe that life will continue as normal, even in the face of significant threats or crises“). This particular trait is one of the approximate 200 recognised cognitive biases that are fundamental to the way human minds work at both individual and population levels. These biases likely emerged during deep evolutionary history, providing early humans with survival advantages such as reducing energy-intensive cognitive workloads through mental shortcuts and workarounds, which made information-dense environments more manageable.
Normalcy bias manifests in human behaviour in several different forms, but the central theme is a belief that external conditions will remain steady and predictable. It is the mental software that helps us believe at an emotional level that negative, dangerous or even just unexpected events are not actually going to occur, even if danger or scope for disruption may be clearly seen and grasped at an intellectual level. It drives wishful thinking that benign experiences from the narrow timeframes of the present and recent past can be safely extrapolated into ‘business as usual’ futures; it allows denial and self-assurance that dangers will pass by; or that we can and will act when needed, but just not yet. Overall, normalcy bias tends to act as an inertia on preventative action and response to emerging dangers. The evolutionary advantages this bias provided was likely through conservation of scarce energy by minimising emergency ‘fight-or-flight’ responses (i.e., only when strictly necessary, and by deterring ‘false positives’ in hazard detection) and also in maintaining in-group cohesion and motivation during hard times.
Whilst essential survival tools in the environments in which we first evolved, this and other cognitive biases have in many cases become increasingly maladaptive in the modern context. Normalcy bias may prove particularly hazardous in our contemporary world because the magnitude and complexity of systemic risk means that by the time we acknowledge normality is lost and start acting, it may have become too late. It may also dampen precautionary action against the ‘slow burning’ dangers characteristic of exponential complex system dynamics. It may also have become more prevalent in recent decades as the digital realm has expanded and increasingly saturated our lives with information (aptly put by Steve Bannon as “flooding the zone with sh*t”), which has diluted facts and evidence, and provided distractions which have amplified our pre-existing tendencies to wilfully not see or acknowledge uncomfortable truths.
The Covid-19 pandemic was something of a ‘warning-shot-across-the-bow’ for the world in terms of the various systemic risks we collectively face; it generated a strong shock to multiple systems (e.g., the global economy) yet wasn’t severe enough to fully push them to their limits. What we may have experienced from the often-inadequate global response to the pandemic was an echo of dynamics that collapsed historical societies, and an admonition about the challenges that future nonlinearities and tipping points could generate. Normalcy bias may therefore be a significant latent hazard due to the mismatch it creates between our mental models and an unpredictable, changeable world and volatile future defined by climate breakdown, runaway technologies, great power rivalries, and as we witnessed, emergent pathogens affecting billions of people.
Although there are other recent examples where the influence of normalcy bias is clearly apparent (such as the consistent failure across three decades of COP climate conferences to meaningfully reduce emissions despite increasing climatic breakdown; and lack of decisive geopolitical preventative action against outbreaks of major military aggression, despite clear evidence and signals of intent) there are also multiple examples from history of where humans have demonstrated their capabilities for very decisive action and adaptable behaviour, namely in crisis situations.
The common factor in these examples was that external dangers became apparent, severe or proximate enough for a threshold to be crossed and emotional and ‘visceral’ reactions to kick in (likely linked to switching between the different ‘modes’ the brain may operate in) i.e., crisis response took over. A key example is the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; during this event understanding amongst leaders of the extreme consequences of a full thermonuclear exchange evidently helped push normalcy bias aside, allowing this very delicate situation to be navigated effectively and the world to retreat from a potential catastrophe.
Looking further back, the two World Wars also saw normalcy bias fully overcome, in these cases at the scales of national populations. This likely occurred firstly because danger became real and undeniable (in the form of e.g., invasions and aerial bombardments), but also because normality was forcefully overturned through the realities of total war such as mass military mobilisations, loss of life and shortages of everyday essentials. An altogether different occurrence was the ‘English Sweating Sickness’, which appeared in the form of several widespread, mysterious but short-lived epidemics during 15th and 16th century England. The disease was characterised by the rapid onset of severe fever with a high mortality rate, but most significantly, an unsettling early symptom recorded amongst victims was a “sense of apprehension” or “premonition of oncoming horror”, which demonstrated an additional capacity for danger to be instinctively sensed.
Normalcy bias is certainly not the only factor in the global predicament; rather it is one piece in a complex web of other biases and traits, historical and cultural factors, vested interests and systemic momentum, autopoietic systems operating beyond direct human control, and a host of other drivers. This bias is however likely to be a factor at the collective scale of global societies, therefore the question of how we might address it is likely important to whether global society will continue to spiral towards polycrisis and collapse or will find a way to pull back from the cliff edge. The historical examples provide some useful hints, but there is of course no suggestion that all-out wars, nuclear sabre rattling or terrifying diseases (or indeed any severe crisis) would have to be replicated for normalcy bias to be dampened.
The key leverage points for this bias are likely to be around information flows and communications for mass populations, and leadership that is able to recognise this bias and its effects. In the former case, working to improve people’s abilities to distinguish signal from noise, truth from mistruth, and warnings of danger from false denials and distractions must be a focus, especially in light of growing digital ‘brain rot’. This is likely even more crucial for major global hazards such as climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and pollution, which are (for now at least) gradual and persistent in nature and therefore fundamentally different to the immediate, urgent and highly visible things which are often more motivating.
Where leadership is concerned, today’s political, education and cultural systems and institutions are evidently failing to create a collective sense of clarity and urgency as seen in the historical examples. Statistics, graphs and scientific concepts are clearly not stirring motivation and action sufficiently at collective level and may in isolation be unsuited to influencing mass behaviour. Loud and influential voices in responsible roles also tell us that looming crises are ‘con jobs’ or are exaggerated, which serve only to strengthen our collective urges to relax and lower our gaze to the near and trivial. Therefore, relatable, trustworthy and responsible leadership which conveys key ideas through emotionally engaging approaches such as storytelling, may need to be at the heart of this.
Multiple civilisations in the past likely fell in part because their populations and leaderships held wishful notions of permanence, and failed to sufficiently grasp impending dangers, so blithely carried on with business as usual. This is however a trap which modern societies have the tools to avoid. Recent events such as the UK National Emergency Briefing along with the emergence of citizens groups, collectives of creatives, companies looking at future hazards face-on, and the imagining of fantastical new global institutions to tackle the global predicament, all point to the potential to achieve positive breakthrough effects in our ability to act. But we are not there yet; the Covid enquiries highlighted that normalcy bias remains a very real latent hazard. Spreading key messages and spurring action for the dangers ahead will be all-of-society efforts, and there is no time to lose.
