How flaws in the way our brains work will allow prorogation and No Deal Brexit to go ahead
Here’s a tale related to Brexit and the workings of the human brain. Years ago, I lived in student accommodation: a clump of 12-storey tower blocks in northeast London. We were plagued by false fire alarms overnight, as some idiots thought it was funny to set off the alarm roughly every other night. At first we all evacuated, standing around grumpily outside in dressing gowns. Gradually as the months went by and the false alarms continued, the number of people leaving the building shrank. Most people just stayed in bed, waiting for the alarm to be turned off as usual.
Then one night, following an argument, a student piled rubbish in front of the bedroom door of his ex-girlfriend and set light to it. The fire alarm went off, but of course most people did not evacuate. Even when the fire brigade, unusually, turned up a few minutes later with lights and sirens, people stayed in their rooms, watching the spectacle from their windows. Even when they could see the smoke pouring out, they stayed put. But why didn’t they react to what was clearly actually a fire this time, and evacuate?
The human brain does some wonderful things, but it also has some in-built flaws. These affect our ability to think, in fairly consistent and measurable ways, and I’m going to link them to how we’re approaching Brexit as a nation, both Remainers and Leavers.
These flaws are called “cognitive biases”, but they’re not about “bias” in the way we usually use the word. We’re not talking about racism or skewed news coverage; they are more fundamental than that, and mostly operate unconsciously, affecting our judgement without us even noticing.
People have been studying this for decades, and have identified a long list of cognitive biases. “Confirmation bias”, for example, is the tendency of all humans to give more weight to evidence that supports our views, and to ignore evidence that contradicts them.
Cognitive bias is nothing to be embarrassed about, because literally every single human being is affected by these biases. However, it can be difficult for anyone to recognise or accept that it has affected their own decisions. We see ourselves as rational, logical people — and we are, mostly, but with some flaws that can derail that logic at times. These errors can be glaringly obvious from the outside or in hindsight, but not to us in the moment.
So how am I going to relate all this to Brexit? I could write for thousands of words about how confirmation bias and the bandwagon effect led the general public from a position of generalised indifference about Europe before 2016 to the extremely polarised nation we now inhabit. I could write pages on how the in-built need to minimise cognitive dissonance has led people to be completely and perhaps irrevocably entrenched in their “chosen” side, Remain or Leave. But for now I’m just going to highlight one particular bias that I think is going to be our downfall with regard to the present crisis: normalcy bias.
This is a state of denial in the face of a major problem, based on the underlying assumption that things will turn out okay because they always have done so before. It leads us to mentally discount the likelihood of a bad outcome, especially when dealing with rare events.
It’s why some people refuse to evacuate when tsunami or hurricane warnings are issued, for example, and why the majority of survivors in the World Trade Centre on 9/11 had stopped to do things like save their work before leaving the building. And it’s why some people in my university’s tower block stayed in their rooms even when we could all see there was an actual fire happening.
The brain effectively says, “Everything has always worked out fine before, so if I just wait long enough, it’ll work out fine again this time.” Usually this turns out to actually be correct, but this strategy is potentially a fatal mistake if you’re wrong — for example on the very rare occasions when there really is a fire in your tower block and you haven’t evacuated.
So finally I come to Brexit. We are, at time of writing, no more than 1440 hours — 60 days — away from Brexit. Everyone appears to think that No Deal Brexit (leaving without a deal to continue arrangements around trade, travel, and so on) is not just possible but actually very likely. This will be catastrophic for our country, with the supply of food and medicines at risk, travel in chaos, and trade and businesses massively disrupted. This is what the non-political experts who run our supply chains and travel systems say, as well as the Government’s own leaked internal documents on preparation for No Deal. Meanwhile Parliament is going to be prorogued against its will on the say-so of the Prime Minister, and government ministers are talking about potentially ignoring any legislation passed by Parliament that doesn’t suit them.
And yet the general public as a whole seems not to be especially alarmed about the prospect of No Deal or the constitutional crisis we are in. Why? You know the answer now: normalcy bias.
Whatever the merits of leaving the EU, a No Deal Brexit is potentially the biggest disaster to hit Britain in decades, and it’s entirely preventable. While this is happening, the government is doing increasingly unconstitutional things to cement its hold on the levers of power.
The country is in the grip of normalcy bias, and everyone is behaving as though everything will turn out okay, on the basis that it always has been before. We’re quieting our fears as individuals by believing that “we’ll muddle through” or that “someone will do something about it” — but that’s because we’ve not suffered major economic shocks of this potential magnitude before, so we discount the risk. Likewise the constitution has always been unwritten, and has always previously been flexible enough to be able to cope with the stresses that political crises have put on it without the governance of the nation breaking down.
“Britain survived the Blitz,” we’re told by Brexit-supporting commentators and Government ministers, “and we can survive this. Everything will be fine. There will be an adequate food supply.” Meanwhile Remainer politicians from other parties are playing their usual party-political games and point-scoring, as if the usual behaviour were an appropriate response to this situation. But with risks like this, carrying on as though this were a normal situation is woefully inadequate. Normalcy bias is running rampant in our political class at the very time we need them to recognise that unprecedented action may be needed.
When it comes to the general public, there have been some protests in towns and cities around the country (including in some surprising places like Hull), which is heartening, but still the majority of people are behaving as though this were all normal. “They’ll never let it happen,” I was told by a colleague last week; he was unable to tell me who “they” were who were going to sort it all out.
The people of the UK, Leavers and Remainers alike, are in the grip of normalcy bias and are waiting in a kind of daze for things to come right.
This is not normal, and we have to break this spell. Until we do, we will continue on this course towards No Deal and the breakdown of our constitution.
We are weeks away from a major emergency and only a few people are responding to the alarms. How much longer can we afford to let our biased brains offer us false comfort like this?
