Taipei Times
Date: May 05, 2020
By: Lo Chi / Staff reporter

As the COVID-19 pandemic affects society and people’s lifestyles, the way people engage in international exchanges might change and disease prevention measures could become the new normal, an academic said on Saturday.

When facing a disaster, such as an earthquake, people tend to adopt a mental state called “normalcy bias” and expect things to continue the way they have in the past, according to their experience, said Ma Shih-yuan (馬士元), an associate professor of urban planning and disaster management at Ming Chuan University.

While this way of thinking generally works for most situations, people have a propensity to use their experience to try to understand even inapplicable future events, including unprecedented disasters, he said.

People might at first believe that “everything is going to be alright, because it always has been,” and take much more time to recognize that the current disaster is an exception from the norm, Ma said.
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