Martin Lindstrom
Author of seven New York Times best-selling books, advisor to Fortune 500 brands; ranked #20 most influential management thinker by Thinkers50
can be seen as the first WHAT WE ARE EXPERIENCING WITH COVID-19 global 9/11. That event from 2001 has been studied extensively in terms of its impact on people’s brains. We now know that it was a very powerful ‘somatic marker’ — USC Neuroscientist Antonio Domasio’s term for positive or negative ‘bookmarks’ in our brains that affect our behaviour and decisions for years to come.
When we have such a negative emotional bookmark, it has a profound impact on how we behave, how we interact with other people — and even how we shop, and we are seeing all of this with the pandemic. This is one of the most prominent global negative somatic markers most of us will ever face in our lives, and it is causing a significant amount of fear. The ‘fear centre’ of our brain is called the amygdala, and when it is activated it can lead us to be highly irrational.
Fear is behind a lot of what is going on these days. As humans we are very attached to our tribes, and the pandemic has caused us to be separated from those tribes. When we are around other people, we may find ourselves afraid to sneeze or
show any symptom that could be construed as COVID- 19. That’s because the amygdala is activated and we are terrified of being excluded from the tribe.
In 2009, the World Health Organization announced to the media that two billion people were at risk of being infected by the H1N1 virus. And yet, I do not recall any particular frenzy around this announcement at all. To be clear, I am not disputing what is going on right now. It is indisputibly horrible. But my question, as an analyst of consumer and human behaviour is, why is the reaction so much more extreme this time around?
I believe there are two reasons for this. The first is an accumulation of fear in our brains that has built up over many years, thanks in part to movies like Contagion and Outbreak. As a result, when we hear the word ‘pandemic’ we are almost preconditioned to have an extreme reaction to it. The second causal factor is social media. Facebook, Twitter and other social channels actually amplify people’s fear to an extreme degree. As a result of these two things, consumers have been primed into a certain way of thinking and behaving — which is why we saw people hoarding toilet paper and other products, even though it made absolutely no sense. Collectively, our amygdalas have been running in overdrive.