Westneat: Book ‘Psychology of Pandemics’ projected current U.S. landscape

One of the Idahoans wrote back, not to say he may have misjudged the situation, but to instead accuse the hospital of now being part of my conspiracy: “My initial thought on reading this is the hospital may be falsely reporting to get more COVID funding. I will dig into it.”

Is this normal? More than a year and a half into our pandemic odyssey, I find this ongoing behavior to be the most baffling part of the story. It turns out this denial behavior is not only normal, it was totally foreseeable, according to Steven Taylor, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia.

Taylor would know because he predicted it. He wrote a remarkable little book back in 2019 called “The Psychology of Pandemics.” Its premise is that pandemics are “not simply events in which some harmful microbe ‘goes viral,’ ” but rather are mass psychological phenomena about the behaviors, attitudes and emotions of people.

The book came out pre-COVID and yet predicts every trend and trope: the hoarding of supplies like toilet paper at the start; the rapid spread of “unfounded rumors and fake news”; the backlash against masks and vaccines; the rise and acceptance of conspiracy theories; and the division of society into people who “dutifully conform to the advice of health authorities” and those who “engage in seemingly self-defeating behaviors such as refusing to get vaccinated.”

He has no crystal ball, he says; it’s just that all of this has happened before. It’s all based on basic psychology. The denialists and refuseniks today are engaging in what the psychology field calls “psychological reactance.” It’s “a motivational response to rules, regulations, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening one’s autonomy and freedom of choice,” the book describes. Think what happens when someone says “Eat your broccoli.”

The book also gets into “monitoring versus blunting.” Monitoring is when you dive deeply into the details of a health threat, sometimes obsessively. Blunting is avoidance, setting the bad news off to the side or pretending it isn’t happening at all.

“Pandemics bring out all these extremes in behavior,” Taylor told me. “Anxiety, fear, denial, racism, conspiracy theories, the popularity of quack cures, the ‘you’re not the boss of me’ backlash to health directives — these things have all been seen dating back to the medieval plagues.”

This pandemic has probably been worse for behavioral extremes, despite all our modern advancements, Taylor said.

“It’s the first big pandemic in the era of social media, so the disinformation just spreads faster and wider,” he said. “Plus down there you had Donald Trump, who himself engaged in reality denial on a grand scale. I did not account for the possibility of political leadership like that.”

Taylor had the fundamental insight that pandemics are experienced socially, more so than they are medically. He wrote the book to try to ready folks for this, for when the next pandemic happened. That turned out to be only about a month after his book was published.

Are we really this predictable? It seems it was baked into our natures, our essential variety, that we would get owned by any pandemic that came along. And probably will again.

I don’t know if this makes me feel better or worse. But as a monitoring person, not a blunter, at least I feel now like I sort of understand it.