It's become quite easy amidst our complicated lives to lightly consider planning for the failure of our regular routines. Many would rather trust the government or some third party to do it for them. It's probably a safe bet that the post-Katrina people of New Orleans might think it over twice. Every day we face the potential loss of our personal safety and information, business data, or the ability to maintain the "norm" in our homes and business from an assortment of risks. But often times, our thoughts become quite biased as we take normalcy for granted amongst modern civil and technological safegards.

The normalcy bias refers to a mental state people enter into when facing a risk for crisis or a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a crisis, and on a larger scale, the failure of the government to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred, that it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.

https://americancop.com/life-skills-normalcy-bias/