Why stupid is normal – when smart people make dumb choices

Ashton Bishop and Gary Wilkinson argue how the actions of former BP chief Tony Hayward during the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis should be a wake up call to stressed marketers and those that work with them.

In 2010 after over 455 million litres of oil had already poured into the Gulf off the Louisiana coast and millions of litres more continued to escape every day, Tony Hayward, the CEO of oil giant BP, and the public face of the environmental disaster, decided to take part in an exclusive yacht race off the Isle of Wight. There was outrage. Social media, already heavily critical of BP’s poor response to the catastrophe, got worse.

Hayward’s behaviour was seen as arrogant, stupid and insulting. This is a man with a PhD who had risen to be CEO of one of the world’s largest corporations. But maybe he was also normal. By this we mean he was doing what the vast majority of people do when under extreme stress – reverting to a “normalcy bias”.

Under extreme stress our brain has a tendency to slow down information processing. The suggestion is that this is linked to tonic immobility – a survival instinct of freezing to fool a predator into believing its prey isdead. For the majority of humans in extremely stressful situations this can lead to an abnormal calmness and a pretence that nothing is wrong – even a search for normality rather than appropriate protective behaviour.