We just walked through a model of how human beings build mental models of other people: layered, lagged, coherence‑driven, and stubbornly resistant to updating. That same cognitive architecture governs how we perceive situations – especially slow‑moving, complex, or psychologically distant crises.

Let me give you a concrete scenario. It is early March 2026. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since February 28th. U.S. and Israeli air strikes targeted Iranian political and military leadership. Iran retaliated in kind, plus its own air strikes, plus the closure of the strait. The energy crisis that many analysts warned about for decades has arrived – and it is hitting eastern Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia first. But it is spreading. Within months, it becomes a global, multi‑year crisis with no obvious off‑ramp.

Now meet Normalcy Norman.

Norman heats his home with a wood‑fired fireplace and oil backup. He drives a diesel car. He locked in a long‑term fixed‑tariff electricity deal two years ago and feels clever about it. He has heard about solar panels, home batteries, heat pumps, and electric cars – but he stands in disbelief. “They don’t pay back,” he says. “Too expensive. Too complicated. The grid is fine.”

Meanwhile, the managerial elite – the people who run logistics firms, energy trading desks, large farming operations, and data centers – are in full prepping mode. They are installing solar, buying battery containers, securing heat pump retrofits, and negotiating flexibility contracts with utilities. They are not panicking. They are updating.

Why the gap? It is not because Norman is stupid. It is because his cognitive model of the world is running on the same layered, lagged, coherence‑first system we described before – applied now to systemic risk rather than to another person.

Layer One: Raw Perception – The Pre‑Signal Layer of Crisis

Norman perceives raw features of the energy situation. He sees a news headline about Hormuz. He notices that diesel at the local station went up by fifteen cents. His neighbor mentions that firewood prices are creeping higher. The utility sends a vague letter about “future tariff restructuring.”

These are raw features – potential signals, not yet interpreted. But crucially, they are not dramatic enough. No mushroom cloud. No blackout yet. No empty gas station forecourts – not in his town. The pre‑signal layer is ambiguous. And ambiguity, as we know, gets amplified in the direction of reassurance, not alarm.

Layer Two: Rapid Affective Appraisal – The Felt Safety

Norman’s limbic system runs a fast emotional valuation: threat or no threat? The answer comes back: no immediate threat. The lights are on. The car starts. The house is warm. The affective appraisal produces that same felt certainty we saw with social impressions: “I feel fine, so things are fine.”

This is normalcy bias in its most primitive form. It is not a rational calculation. It is a somatic marker. The absence of visceral panic signals “safe enough.” And once that affective tag is attached, everything that follows is filtered through it.

Layer Three: Narrative Construction – The “This Is Like Before” Story

Now Norman’s conscious mind builds a coherent story to explain the raw cues and the affective feeling. And the story is: “This is just like the 1970s oil crises. They passed. The market adjusted. Someone will fix it. My fixed‑tariff deal protects me.”

Notice the elements: historical analogy (1970s), role assumption (“someone” – government, market, foreigners), and personal exception (“my deal protects me”). The narrative is coherent. It fits his existing beliefs. It does not require him to change his behavior.

What the narrative excludes is equally telling. It excludes the scale difference – Hormuz is not just a price shock, it is a volume shock. It excludes the multi‑year duration. It excludes the fact that firewood prices are already rising because wood is heavy and diesel for logging trucks is expensive. It excludes the utility’s quiet planning for tehomaksu – an excess consumption charge – and compensation for demand reduction.

The narrative is a masterpiece of motivated coherence. And it stabilizes immediately.

Layer Four: Temporary Stabilization – The Frozen Worldview

Once the story is built, it becomes Norman’s provisional truth model. He uses it to make predictions: “Prices will go back down.” “The government will step in.” “My wood stove will always have fuel.”

This stabilization is the cognitive equivalent of a snapshot identity problem – but applied to the world. Norman’s mental model of the energy system is a snapshot from 2024 or 2025, when diesel was affordable, firewood was plentiful, and solar was a niche hobby. That snapshot has frozen. And every day that the lights stay on reinforces the freeze.

He does not see that the utility is quietly installing smart meters. He does not see that the logistics companies are buying electric trucks not because they are green, but because diesel is becoming an unhedgeable risk. He does not see the managerial elite’s prepping because they do not advertise it.

Layer Five: Delayed Correction – The Lag That Kills

Eventually, correction will come. The fixed tariff will expire. The utility will announce the new flexibility tariff – a low base charge, but a punishing tehomaksu for consumption during peak hours, and a direct payment for reducing load. Firewood will become as expensive as oil. Diesel will hit prices that make his car uneconomical to drive.

At that point, Norman will update. But the update will be delayed, partial, and agonizing. He will complain. He will blame politicians. He will search for someone to have misled him. And only then, months or years after the crisis began, will he consider a heat pump – at a time when heat pump installers are booked out for a year and prices have doubled.

The lag is not a failure of character. It is a failure of cognitive architecture designed for a world where threats were immediate, visible, and local – not systemic, distributed, and cumulative.

The Managerial Elite: Faster Updating, Different Affective Baseline

Why do the managers update faster? Not because they are smarter. Because their affective appraisal is different. Their job is to look at forward curves, supply chain vulnerabilities, and regulatory signals. They feel anticipatory unease – a low‑grade chronic threat appraisal that does not wait for the lights to go out.

That unease licenses narrative construction that includes worst‑case scenarios. Their stories are less coherent (they contain contradiction, uncertainty, multiple futures) but more predictively accurate. They update their mental models weekly, not yearly. They are not immune to lag – but their lag is measured in weeks, not seasons.

And because they move early, they secure solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and flexibility contracts while prices are still sane. By the time Norman is ready to act, the prepping elite are already hedged.

Generalizing the Pattern: Normalcy Bias as Cognitive Inertia

The same layered model explains a thousand other normalcy biases:

• The coastal homeowner who does not evacuate because the last three hurricanes missed.
• The factory that does not automate because “we have always done it this way.”
• The investor who stays in fossil fuels because “the transition will take decades.”
• The commuter who keeps buying diesel because “electric is not ready yet.”

In each case, the raw perception is ambiguous. The affective appraisal says “fine.” The narrative says “this is like before.” Stabilization freezes the model. And correction comes too late.

What This Means for the 2026 Energy Crisis

The Strait of Hormuz closure is not a one‑time shock. It is a regime shift. The alternatives exist – solar, wind, batteries, heat pumps, hydrogen, synthetic fuels, algae biofuels, small modular reactors, electrified transport and heating, district heating, waste‑stream fuels. They are not theoretical. They are deployable. But they require updating before the crisis forces it.

Normalcy Norman will not update until the pain is undeniable. That is human nature. The question is whether the rest of us – the ones reading this, the ones who feel that anticipatory unease – can act on our own partial updates before the lag turns into a catastrophe.

The cognitive model does not offer easy answers. But it does offer one clear insight:

If you feel certain that the world will stay the same, check the date on your mental snapshot. If it is older than six months, assume it is wrong.

The managers are prepping not because they are paranoid, but because they have learned to distrust their own stabilization. Norman trusts his. That is the only difference. And in a multi‑year crisis with a closed strait, that difference will be measured in survival.