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In March of this year, as COVID-19 rapidly overtook the news cycle — and our lives — governments around the world sprang into action to address the pandemic. Offices, borders and schools closed, emergency benefits kicked in and politicians and public health officials across the country scrambled to respond to the crisis at hand.
But as the months drag on, many of the lessons we were ready to take away from the pandemic earlier this year seem to have fallen by the wayside, columnist Andrea Reimer writes.
What’s stopping us? Cognitive bias. We’re not hardwired to handle long-lasting crises like a pandemic or climate change, Reimer writes — but that doesn’t mean we can’t overcome our own shortcomings.
“We know that we have these cognitive biases, and now we know how they sway an emergency response to a planet-wide threat to humanity,” she writes. “This should allow us to design a climate response to account for them.”
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