Lessons For the Next Domestic Crisis

Our COVID-19 response was bad because we were terrified and tribalistic. We should reverse these trends before the next crisis hits.

I don't know anyone, from anywhere on the political spectrum, who thinks that the United States' response to COVID-19 was perfect. Lots of rules were silly and contradictory. Ordinary Americans were forced to socially isolate while politicians frequently violated the rules they handed down.  We were told not to gather in groups of more than a handful, but then public health officials abruptly decided that thousands of people protesting in close proximity for Black Lives Matter was acceptable. Restaurants were shut down while big box stores remained open.

The messaging around COVID-19 was also confusing and often contradictory. Even the Huffington Post noted that "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance for isolating is dense and can be somewhat confusing — especially since the rules seem to be in constant flux based on community transmission levels and people’s vaccination status."

The cost of all of this was enormous. Over 1.1 million people died of COVID-19 in the United States. Whole industries were gutted, and economists put the total cost of the pandemic at $14 trillion. While the pandemic would have wreaked havoc regardless of our policy response, it's undeniable that our messy and often broken response made the cost much greater. 

In the past few months, some politicians and scientists have worried about a COVID resurgence. But even if there is no resurgence, one thing is certain: whether next year or next decade, there will be another crisis. With that reality in mind, what lessons can we learn from our botched handling of COVID-19 so that the cost of the next crisis isn't so high?

The main lesson we should learn is that fear leads us to make bad decisions. During the pandemic, our fear levels were ratcheted up to 11. This was understandable; we were facing a novel virus with a high mortality rate, and the combination of uncertainty and danger spiked our collective fear levels. The problem is that fear leads to cognitive distortions. In the past three years, so many people were terrified of getting the virus that they lost any ability to make reasonable trade-offs. When I got dinner with a friend in the summer of 2020, he informed me that if I wasn't wearing my mask then he would have a moral justification to shoot me in the face in retaliation for me putting him at risk. In psychological terms, we were all engaging in the cognitive distortion known as catastrophizing. If smart public policy is made by people soberly weighing the risks and trade-offs of different options, we as a society were doing the opposite: we were destroying jobs and sacrificing our children's education and mental health because all that mattered was the possibility of preventing one additional person from getting infected.

This fear, combined with our high levels of pre-existing affective polarization (our fear and anger towards our political opponents), hampered our response in another way: we didn't seriously engage with ideas and scholarship from people across the aisle. The pandemic was complex and fast-evolving, and we needed all of our brightest minds to come together to address it. What we got instead was tribalism and the silencing of scholars with dissident ideas.

In October 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (professor of public health policy at Stanford University), Dr. Martin Kulldorf (professor of medicine at Harvard University) and Dr. Sunetra Gupta (epidemiologist at the University of Oxford) published the Great Barrington Declaration. In Bhattacharya's words, the Declaration, "called for an end to economic lockdowns, school shutdowns, and similar restrictive policies on the grounds that they disproportionately harm the young and economically disadvantaged while conferring limited benefits to society as a whole." In a less tribalistic world, other leading scientists, including those at the CDC and the White House, would have meaningfully engaged with the Declaration's research and proposals (which turned out to work pretty well in Sweden). In such a world, scientists and policy experts across the political spectrum would have learned from each other and used academic critique to sharpen their ideas, to everyone's benefit. 

In our world, instead, Bhattacharya and his colleagues were censored. Federal agencies from the CDC to the Biden White House pressured social media companies to throttle the reach of Bhattacharya and his colleagues. Google, YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook censored even mentions of the Declaration. Bhattacharya was blacklisted by Twitter. Public policy roundtable videos were taken down because the scientists in them refused to toe the official line. Inasmuch as these experts in public health policy from the world's top universities had anything to contribute to our handling of the pandemic, said handling was worse for their enforced absence.

The same story played out with public officials. Different states tried different approaches to COVID-19, and some of those approaches worked better than others. Florida, for instance, locked down later than most other states and lifted their lockdowns sooner. They also had a very low COVID-19 mortality rate once adjusted for factors like age and health. In a better world, states would have been more willing to learn from each other and adopt policies like Florida's that worked. Instead, Florida governor Ron DeSantis was mocked as "DeathSantis" and "DeSatan" for his supposedly "reckless" policies.

Ignoring scholars across the aisle didn't just happen on the left. Many Republican voters refused to get vaccinated. According to a New York Times analysis, the least vaccinated counties in the United States all had a high concentration of Trump supporters. While the COVID-19 vaccines ultimately proved to be less effective than advertised, Republicans' refusal to get the jab was often driven more by politics and a refusal to listen to a Democratic White House than by any serious consideration of the science.

Studies confirm that we are better able to respond to complex questions when we cooperate with people who see things differently than us. In Two Heads: A Graphic Exploration of How Our Brains Work with Other Brains, psychologists Chris Frith and Uta Frith describe a study in which a series of dots flashes on the screen, and participants are asked whether more blue dots or yellow dots appeared. When people were given the test in isolation, they often failed. When they were given the test in groups of two, though, they were much more likely to succeed. The reason was that each participant had a different perspective and noticed different things. Additionally, participants could discuss the problem with each other and assess each others' confidence levels, which could be a proxy for ability; and determine whose perspective was more trustworthy. Or as the Friths summarized it, "Two people working together will be able to complete a task better than either person working alone." 

What we got in the United States over the last three years was more like a series of individuals trying to complete the task alone—each team settled into their existing group-think and refused to admit the possibility that a different perspective might have value.

These two phenomena—our fear and our unwillingness to listen to those who disagreed with us—reinforced each other to create a vicious cycle. During the pandemic, our fear drove us into tribalistic us-vs-them thinking and led us to ostracize the other side. When we ostracized them, we actually started to fear them more. The reason is that fear and avoidant behavior can form a positive feedback loop inside of our minds. We fear something, and so we avoid it, and so our avoidance tells our brain that the thing we fear is, in fact, very scary. In his bestselling book 12 Rules for Life, clinical psychologist and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto Jordan Peterson spells out this phenomenon. “Our anxiety systems are very practical,” he notes. “They assume that anything you run away from is dangerous. The proof of that is, of course, the fact you ran away.”

So what can we do next time we have a domestic crisis on our hands, to ensure that this positive feedback loop doesn't activate and derail our response to the crisis?

To begin, we should realize that the right time to prepare for a crisis is not in the middle of the event. Instead, we should work now to develop a robust immune system that can withstand the expected shocks before they happen. This immune system should consist of two parts.

First, we should proactively work to not identify with our fear. The next crisis will spike our fear, which is inevitable. But it is imperative that we recognize the link between fear and bad decision-making. This doesn't mean that we should try to shut off our fear or walk around unafraid all of the time. But we should observe our fear rather than identify with it. By observing it, we can learn what we need to from it without letting it distort our thinking and lead us into unquestioning hatred of the other side. Here's how Dr. Alok Kanojia, psychiatrist and Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, describes the process: "You can separate a part of your mind aside and choose to act independently from it, but you can't do that without the separation."

Secondly, we should recognize that the next crisis will probably spike our tribalism, and proactively ward against this. It's not enough to just go out and talk to our neighbors who disagree with us; this can work well but can also backfire. A 2018 Pew report found that 53 percent of Americans found such conversations "stressful and frustrating." Even worse, such conversations can have a polarizing effect: according to Pew, "Majorities in both parties say they find they usually have less in common politically when discussing politics with those who have differing views."

Instead, what's needed to ward against a spike in tribalism is to change how we approach the other side. We need to do less listening to try to score points, and do more listening in order to understand the perspective of the other side. Organizations such as Braver Angels (which facilitate 1:1 conversations between Reds and Blues) and Tangle (which presents the best takes from left and right on a given topic) can help us to see the complexity in the world, which research suggests makes us less tribal.

Right now, our societal immune system is heavily compromised. As a society, we are terrified: 40 million adults in the United States suffer from an anxiety disorder, and a 2016 Pew poll found that 62 percent of highly engaged Republicans and 70 percent of highly engaged Democrats said that the other party made them feel "afraid." Our refusal to listen to each other is also near all-time highs: a 2018 Axios poll found that over 20% of partisans on both sides described the other party as "evil." The best thing we can do to protect ourselves from the next crisis is to boost our societal immune system by reversing these trends.

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