The Psychology of Collapse: A Deep Dive in Human Misbehavior

With an optimistic twist at the end.

This is Fine

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

It’s really happening.

The world is moving backward. I’ll give you two examples: In Arkansas, lawmakers tried to pass a bill to remove fluoride from their drinking water. The bill failed, but the bill’s backers vowed to keep trying. It’s part of a trend now that includes federal judges. They aren’t worried about toxic air or diseases. They aren’t worried about guns or fossil fuels. They’re worried about fluoride.

Last year Delaware, a blue state, voted overwhelmingly to legalize the sale of raw milk after news broke about H5N1 bird flu in dairy cows. Since then, there’s been a major push nationwide in favor of it.

Demand is going up.

One piece attributes the increase, roughly 20 percent in just one year, to a simple case of full-grown adults wanting to defy public health recommendations. They heard raw milk was dangerous. That made them want it.

There’s going to be a lot more of this.

Everywhere you look, a large and growing number of people actively reject the knowledge and tools that would save their lives in favor of habits and behaviors that put them at risk or cause them direct harm. It often looks like society is utterly incapable of responding to threats. Everyone rushes to do the exact opposite of what they should, and it’s getting worse. If you’ve noticed, you’re not alone. Entire disciplines have spent the last 70 years studying human behavior and coming to the same conclusion. I’ve spent the last three years diving into it, and I thought I would collect everything I’ve learned into one post.

We almost like being wrong.

The question is… why?

People regret preparing for disasters.

In 1976, the Ford administration mounted one of the most successful public health campaigns of all time, averting a swine flu pandemic. Instead of congratulations, they earned nothing but ridicule and shame for “overreacting.” Everyone was upset that more people didn’t get sick and die.

This incident illustrates something called the paradox of preparedness. If people prepare for a disaster and things turn out mostly okay, they don’t appreciate the proactive steps they took.

They regret them.

A threat has to cross a threshold for the public to take it seriously. If things don’t get bad enough fast enough, they won’t do anything—even if the threat is real and winds up doing immense damage over a longer period of time. The paradox of preparedness dovetails with another trait, called the region-beta paradox. The public responds better during immediate emergencies and disasters, but they do worse during prolonged threats like pandemics or climate collapse.

A team of psychologists led by Daniel Gilbert at Harvard introduced this term about 20 years ago. As he puts it, people "mistakenly expect more intense states to last longer than less intense states." In other words, really bad disasters motivate people to take action for a little while. If people aren’t dropping dead right in front of them, they regret doing anything at all.

They don’t like being prepared. They like being unprepared, and then saying, “Nobody could’ve predicted this.”

It’s a recurring theme.

People see their future self as a stranger

About ten years ago, Hal Hershfield started hooking people up to machines and asking them questions about their current and future selves. He found something interesting. As he explains, “It turns out that there's part of the brain or region of networks—the cortical midline structures—that show more activity when we're thinking about ourselves right now compared to when we're thinking about another person right now.” When he asked people questions about their future selves, that part of their brains didn’t light up. A different part did. It was the same part that lit up when they were thinking about someone else.

People regard their future self as a stranger.

This research confirms work done by Neil Weinstein in the 1980s, something Nate Bear has written about. Whether it’s a climate disaster or cancer, the average person consistently rates the probability of something bad happening to someone else much higher than it happening to them. As a 2011 study found, it doesn’t even matter if you explain the statistical odds to them. They’ll continue to believe there’s something special about their live that exempts them.

The researchers called this behavior “selective updating,” a “failure to code errors in estimation when those call for pessimistic updates.” In other words, people’s brains simply don’t recognize when they’re wrong about their odds of personal doom. As Nate Bear puts it, “We are wired to ignore the apocalypse.” Two main groups are exempt from this optimism bias—the clinically depressed, and the neurodiverse, especially those of us on the autism spectrum.

You could call all this main character syndrome. Everyone thinks they’re the main character who’s going to survive everything. They’re so obsessed with the first season, they don’t think about season ten.

Everyone else will die.

They won’t.

People generally don’t listen to warnings.

A psychologist at Duke University named Jack Brehm figured out this problem in the 1960s. He called it reactance. Brehm published a handful of articles about it followed by a book titled A Theory of Psychological Reactance. His book inspired 60 years of research on the topic. It even informed the popular psychological trick known as reverse psychology. Brehm discovered something you've seen a lot over the last few years. When you try to influence someone's actions, they resist. When people feel a threat to their perceived independence, they get angry.

They try to restore their freedom.

There’s almost nothing you can do to counter someone’s reactance. As the studies show, trying harder just inspires more stubborn refusal and makes them more aggressive. These studies have even found that someone’s own friends and family can’t turn them around. If anything, it makes the whole situation worse—and they start turning on their own communities.

These studies also uncovered a trait called vicarious reactance. Even if someone has no problem following along with certain rules or guidelines, they’ll get worked up and try to defend someone else’s right to ignore them. They seem to care more about other people’s personal freedoms than their own safety.

You don’t even have to try to trigger someone’s reactance. If they simply associate you with something they don’t like, they won’t listen.

Different cultures have different reactance scales. Collectivist cultures live in the lower regions, while highly individualized and narcissistic ones live at the upper end, and it’s harder to get them to cooperate.

They’re too into themselves.

People almost never admit when they’re wrong

A psychologist at Stanford named Leon Festinger in the 1950s noticed something weird about people: When they were wrong, they went out of their way to find reasons they were right. They doubled down on bad ideas. They conducted relentless searches for silver linings and hidden purpose in every negative experience, even when there was none to be had. In Festinger's own words, "Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."

Festinger published two major books on this topic. The first one, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, outlines several experiments. For example: If you pay someone to spend an afternoon doing dull, repetitive tasks, they’ll complain. If you don’t pay them, they’ll tell you how much they enjoyed the experience.

He described this trait as induced compliance.

The second book, When Prophecy Fails, follows a religious cult that believed aliens were coming to save them from the end of the world. The aliens kept failing to show up. Every single time, the cult’s devotion only grew and they worked even harder to convince the public they were right.

Festinger called all this cognitive dissonance.

His work ultimately defined several types of dissonance. The alien doomsday cult was practicing information disconfirmation. In other words, when reality proves someone wrong, they simply double down on the same beliefs. It gets harder and harder for them to admit they were wrong. Carl Sagan commented on this trait as well, when he talked about the sad history of the bamboozle.

Festinger was also among the first to point out selective perception, a phenomenon that happens when people screen out information that contradicts prior beliefs. It doesn’t matter how compelling or convincing the information, they won’t listen. In fact, more persuasive evidence makes them burrow deeper in their denial. He also identified the forbidden behavior paradigm—showing how restrictions and punishments often invite people to defy them, just so they can.

A 1975 study found an especially bad case of cognitive dissonance in a bunch of high school girls. Even when you could get them to agree there was more evidence against the resurrection of Jesus than for, they still didn’t change their minds. In fact, they said talking about it only deepened their faith. Another study in 1979 found that people have no problem lowering the bar for evidence that confirms their own beliefs, but they’ll raise the bar and apply nearly impossible standards to any evidence that contradicts what they already think.

Today, that’s called moving the goalpost.

A Yale Law professor confirmed that most people actually don't care about the credentials of their experts or what kind of research they present. They only trust experts who already agree with them. They go out shopping for experts and sources, and then credential them after the fact.

A 2020 article by researchers in Australia found something similar. After reading about Donald Trump's immoral and illegal acts, his supporters were more likely to focus on the wrongdoings of Trump's opponents. It didn't matter if they believed Trump had done anything wrong.

Education doesn’t make a difference. In fact, the more educated someone becomes, the more immune they think they are to bias. It winds up creating its own bizarre bias. I guess you could call it the college effect. Liberals do it, too. When presented with evidence they don’t like, they work extra hard to reject it, and that includes deflecting more attention toward their opponents.

It happens all the time now.

People care more about harmony than being right

In the 1950s, a psychologist named Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments on conformity. You might’ve heard of them. During the experiments, a large number of participants changed their answer to simple questions to conform with their group, even when they knew the popular answer was wrong.

But here’s the strange part:

Everyone seems to know about the Asch Conformity Experiments. We talk about them all the time, and yet a majority of society continues to disregard plain realities in favor of fitting in and not rocking the boat.

More recently, two social psychologists at Yale proposed a theory to explain why everyone is so content to keep things the same.

It's called systems justification.

According to John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji, we're wired to resist change. Members of a group will go out of their way to defend the status quo. They do it to preserve social harmony and to boost their own self-esteem. Since most of us play varying roles in perpetuating the current systems, we all feel somewhat motivated to justify them to each other. It makes us feel better. Jost published a book about it with Harvard University Press in 2020.

Systems justification theory confirms that people will go to great lengths to explain why the current state of things is the best or only way things can be. They’ll express hostility or even aggression toward anyone who challenges the dominant structures. It doesn’t matter if they agree those systems need overhaul.

They’re too scared they’ll lose what they have.

Jost and Banaji’s work aligns with another trait psychologists have identified, called shifting baseline syndrome. This term actually originated in climate science and ecology to describe how one generation grows up with a set of deteriorating conditions and learns to see them as normal. Things get worse from one generation to the next, but each generation simply acclimates.

There’s a vernacular version of this:

Boiling frog syndrome.

So, even when they know they’re wrong, people tend to value their membership in a group more than they do anything else. As I’ve written elsewhere, one study even found that people would rather subject themselves to electric shocks than spend 15 minutes alone with their own thoughts.

It explains a few things…

People hate hearing the truth

Psychology also explains why societies punish their Cassandras instead of listening to them, no matter how many times they’re right.

It’s called spontaneous trait transference.

It happens when people transfer negative traits to anyone and anything they associate with bad news or threats, even if it's just someone trying to warn them about the threat. Their brains can't tell the difference between a threat and someone trying to warn them about the threat. If you describe someone else as dangerous or dishonest, they'll remember it as if you were talking about yourself.

In the 1990s, psychologists John Skowronski and Donal Carlston defined this phenomenon: "communicators are perceived as possessing the very traits they describe in others." The one who smelt it dealt it. As Skowronsky explains, "politicians who allege corruption by their opponents may themselves be perceived as dishonest" and "critics who praise artists may themselves be perceived as talented." If you describe someone as negative, unreliable, or dangerous, people tend to misremember it as a self-description. Later, Rick Brown and John Bassili found that people transfer personality traits to inanimate objects like bananas.

Yep, you can convince someone bananas are evil.

In 2019, a team of psychologists at Harvard led by Leslie John reviewed hundreds of studies and conducted eleven different experiments to explain why people punish someone for giving them bad news. They learned that the human brain often reaches for the quickest, easiest explanations for negative events in their lives, especially ones that preserve their self-image and group harmony.

As Leslie John and her colleagues write, "people are especially prone to attributing agency to others for negative outcomes." They also "attribute agency to those proximal to the event." There's nothing more proximal to an event than the first person to tell you what's going on. Once again, our shared psychology discourages us from warning each other about threats.

Scientists have figured out that we apply fight-or-flight responses not just to physical threats, but to facts themselves. Arthur Lupia’s work on emotion and fear shows how politicians can manipulate the public’s fear to get them to accept policies they would otherwise reject. They just have to make the truth sound scary and complicated, and make the ideas they want look simple and reassuring.

People will hide from facts.

People are easy to fool.

In Mad Men, Don Draper figures out how to get people to keep smoking cigarettes even when they know it’s bad for them.

“It’s toasted,” he says.

That show understood the psychology of lies. There's an architecture to lying. You make up appealing lies that people want to believe. You say them over and over again. It’s called the illusory truth effect. As an article in the Journal of Cognition explains, "Repetition generates the illusion of epistemic weight." If your brain sees something a lot, it's wired to give it more credibility. Decades of research on the illusory truth effect show that it works, time and again. People don't feel bad about spreading lies anymore, since "repeatedly reading misinformation might even reduce how unethical it feels to share that unambiguously false information on social media."

As a clinical psychologist at NYU explains, "We don't truly believe things, so much as provisionally accept information we find useful." People are happy to accept and promote lies if they benefit from them.

Lies are about what people want to be true.

It’s easy to get people to believe they can do whatever they want without consequences, that they’ll be rich one day, and that nothing bad will ever happen to them as long as they work hard and pay their taxes. It’s easy to get them to believe they don’t have to make any big changes to their behavior, and that things will keep going the way they always have.

People want all that to be true.

So they believe it.

People forget their own mistakes

It doesn’t seem to matter how many civilizations collapse, how many times we ignore pandemics, or how many genocides we commit. The lessons never stick. Jared Diamond can spend hundreds of pages chronicling the environmental and ecological reasons behind the collapse of one civilization after another, and countless other writers can narrate history for us.

Why don’t we learn?

In the 1990s, a psychologist named Russell Jacoby introduced the term social amnesia to explain part of the problem. He describes it as the tendency "to ignore history and precedent when responding to the present or informing the future." He goes on to explain how "society remembers less and less faster and faster... it scorns the past as antiquated while touting the present as the best. The forgetfulness itself is driven by an unshakable belief in progress." Once society forgets its actual past, anyone can write a new one in its place.

Jacoby says in the vacuum of authentic history, "Discarded ideas are repackaged." That's something worth remembering. Once you kill history, you can repackage whatever failed ideas and ideologies you want and then sell them like new. Racism. Slavery. White supremacy. Misogyny. Eugenics.

And look, it’s happening.

Alessandra Tanesini describes the violent side of collective amnesia in Socially Extended Epistemology. As she writes, “Communities often respond to traumatic events in their histories by destroying objects that would cue memories of a past they wish to forget.” Dominant members of a group “spread memory ignorance." In other words, our leaders push amnesia in order to erase the mistakes they made and suppress dissent. This memory ignorance serves as “a form of self-deception or wishful thinking in the service of self-flattery." They cook up a story that makes them feel good about themselves.

Remembering less faster and faster…

I love those words.

People don’t want to overreact

Disasters don’t work the way the movies show them. Most of the time, people get really calm and docile during emergencies. They spend a lot of time trying to convince themselves everything is okay.

It’s called normalcy bias.

Psychologists have documented this glitch for decades. John Leach has described it as the won't to live. A majority of people just don’t respond during a crisis. They freeze up. Even if they can function, they’ll spend precious time gossiping with each other and speculating instead of acting.

In 1968, a team of psychologists conducted what became known as “the smoky room” experiment. They had people sit in a waiting room alone, and then in groups. Then the researchers started pumping smoke into the room. When they were on their own, 75 percent of participants took action to find the source of the smoke or alert someone. When they were in groups, 60 percent of them did absolutely nothing. They all waited for someone else to do something. Nobody wanted to be the first one to act, because they worried about overreacting.

A 2018 study confirmed that during emergencies, humans experience a significant drop in activity in their prefrontal cortex. Another study from 2019 tells us that the average person is 20 times less likely to help a stranger during a crisis. In short, we seem to revert to our primal selves. Apparently, a lot of people are hardwired to either shut down or take care of themselves, rather than band together into larger units and cooperate. That takes a lot of brain power.

In the Journal of Community & Public Health, Carl Ross explains how normalcy bias has hampered our approach to many threats.

As he writes, “we are sensitive to the perception of others viewing us as abnormal. Within social relationships, very few want to be seen as alarmist, overreactive or a fool because if they are wrong about a threat then they will be regarded as less credible in the future.” He goes on to state that “social shaming reinforces our normalcy bias. It’s not cool to overreact.” Let’s say that again:

It’s not cool to overreact.

People never know when to quit

An entrepreneur named Harold Staw started one of the first department stores in America. It made him rich. Instead of selling his business and retiring, he started getting angry at Kmart for outcompeting him. He squandered his fortune trying to keep up. His son Barry spent the rest of his life studying entrepreneurs, companies, and governments that didn't know when to quit. Barry Staw ultimately called it entrapment in escalating commitments.

Psychologists Joel Brockner and Jeffrey Rubin developed Staw’s ideas further and applied them to politics in their 1985 book Entrapment in Escalating Conflicts. Around the same time, Richard Thaler first introduced the idea of sunk cost fallacy in 1980, the idea that the time and money you've already committed to a failed project provides a reason to keep going.

The lesson here: We just don’t know when to quit. As Annie Duke writes in her book on failure, "when we are getting strong signals that we're losing...we don't merely refuse to quit. We will double and triple down... and we will strengthen our belief that we are on the right path." Psychologists have observed time and again that most people won't give up when they start to lose. They even know it's a bad idea to keep going, but they can't let go. They try harder.

They lose bigger.

So there you have it

Now you know why the year 2025 is happening, and why every year is likely to see more of this misbehavior going forward. As things get worse, people are going to rely more on their gut feelings, which evolved to handle a vastly different world than the one they’re living in now. Those of us immune to these flaws, the neurodiverse, are going to watch it with rising bewilderment.

We’re going to feel like the aliens Festinger’s cult was waiting on, and we’re going to understand why they never showed up.

Would you save us?

Anyway, it’s time for that optimistic twist I promised you. When you piece all of these studies together and use them to reflect on your own experiences with the world, something becomes so clear:

Yes, it’s kind of depressing to realize you aren’t going to get through to millions of people out there, even if you keep trying—even if you’re compelled to keep trying to matter what. But it’s also reassuring and even liberating to realize how much human evolution itself is working against us.

In some ways, many people aren’t choosing to be nasty or ignorant. Their brains are operating in a way that would’ve served them relatively well a hundred thousand years ago. Our brains evolved to focus on short term threats and group harmony, because that was how you survived back then. So when you feel like a failure for not getting through, or you find yourself struggling to understand why on earth people make the choices they do, remember all this.

Give yourself a break.