➡ The 16% chasm is a psychological concept that suggests a social trend needs to reach 16% adoption before it becomes mainstream. If a trend doesn’t reach this point, it remains a fringe idea. The theory of protection motivation explains why people react differently to threats, with some ignoring them and others preparing extensively. This theory suggests that recognizing and processing risks, and then taking personal responsibility to cope with them, can lead to a more resilient and thriving life.
➡ The author, a military veteran, is writing a book to show a different approach to preparedness that isn’t just about fear and doom, but also about thriving and being positive. He believes that while fear can be a starting point for preparedness, it shouldn’t be the only focus. He also discusses how technology, like cell phones, has made us less resilient and more reliant on being saved, using the example of lost hikers who rely on their phones for rescue. He hopes to influence national governments to promote this balanced approach to their citizens.

The 16% chasm is a psychological phenomenon for social contagion. So think iPhones or hula-hoops or whatever social thing is going around. If it’s below 16% in the in the populace of an area, it’s still fringe. Like you’re talking about adoption? Adoption exactly. So if it’s if it’s like whatever people are picking up roller skating or picking people are picking up, you know, pick the latest thing. Freestyle, rap, whatever. Is it really going to catch on to the wider populace? Around 16% because of statistics, you’re still a few deviations away from the norm, from the mean.

And so it’s still considered to be fringe. And so what happens is that it’s very difficult for things to break past that 16%. But once they do, it explodes, or it hits that ceiling and it collapses. So that’s where we’re at right now in America. And I think in the greater world, we’re at that 16% chasm of is preparedness going to catch on? And just do they ignite? Or is it going to hit that ceiling? And then be thought, no, this is just too weird and go back down again? I don’t know.

I think it’s going to explode just based upon the pressures of the world and poly crisis we can get into later. But right now it’s at that gap, that 16% chasm, we’re kind of waiting to see what’s going to happen. It would be very hard for any academic to hear what you’re saying and dismiss it. So why then are people still so reluctant? It seems that we’re so conditioned to not prepare and to not have self-sufficiency. What do you think it’s going to take to get over that 16% hurdle for mass adoption? So this is what I’m seeing.

I wanted to find a psychological and sociological reason for why people do absolutely nothing to people to, you know, they buy their million dollar bunker. What I found is there’s a theory called protection motivation theory. It’s a psychological theory. It’s very easy to understand. And it absolutely explained the entirety of what I saw. Protection motivation theory is very simple. It’s got two parts and only two parts. There is the threat appraisal portion. And then there’s the coping portion of the two. The coping portion is most powerful. So before I explain this, let me just take a step back.

It is not healthy to doom scroll on a regular basis. And our brains were not designed to think about every single peril and every single threat that happens throughout the entire two of the world. It’s overwhelming. It’s psychologically unbearable. You cannot think about all 50 different types of disasters that are happening from wherever, from Mogadishu to Seattle, to whatever, Toronto. You just can’t. And so a lot of folks look at these things and go, okay, I just can’t think of it all. And they just like, they like flush. The government’s going to take care of me.

I’m not going to worry about it. They, you know, kind of an ostrich in the head. And that’s understandable from a psychological perspective. It’s also understandable for people to pick one thing and like truly focus on that. So people might pick, whatever, climate change. Okay. I’m very, very concerned about climate change. We’re going to have more disaster, more natural disasters. We’re going to have hotter weather. We’re going to have more temperature extremes. And so I’m going to move to a place that has less impact of that. I’m going to move to lower, you know, lower Alaska, or I’m going to move to Vancouver, British Columbia, or I’m going to move these other areas that are a bit more safe because of these climate change things.

But that’s the one thing they focus on and they ignore crime. They ignore pandemics. They know these other things because they, again, psychologically, they can’t process every single threat that might happen to them. So protection, motivation theory, very simple. The threat appraisal is just this. It is the recognition and the processing of the risk. We do this intellectually, we do this emotionally, we do this socially, and we do it through P-play. So example, it’s basically the amalgamation of possibilities. It is healthy for us if we’re walking through the forest and we hear a twig snap to think that that’s going to, that’s a bear and react to that rather than think it’s just, oh, the wind and a twig fell down.

Because if it’s a bear and we’re correct, we’re going to take action to save ourselves. If it’s a bear and we don’t take any action because it’s like, ah, it’s just a twig. Well, that bear might come and chase us down and eat us. So psychologically, it’s very healthy for us to process these risks and overreact just a little bit. So we have an intellectual processing. Our brains value this efficiency. We intellectually process these threats. Then we have an emotional processing. So for example, very similar to the intellectual processing. If you’ve ever swam in a freshwater area, a lake in the middle of Canada, the middle of America, nowhere near the ocean, and something brushes against your leg, the first thing you think of is shark.

Even though there’s no possible way it could be a shark, again, that emotional processing kicks into our intellect as well as go, oh my God, let me react to the shark. And then the more powerful of the three in longer term things is the social processing. What are other people doing around me? Toilet paper wasn’t going to save you from COVID, but everyone and their brother went out and bought toilet paper. Why? Because everyone else was buying it. There were stores that were being looted for toilet paper across the world because of this fear, because they saw their friends doing it.

It’s like, oh my gosh, part of it’s to do with this hygiene fear we have during pandemics. We naturally just want to be a lot cleaner. And so that was part of the reason why there was an actual psychological reason for this as well. But this is the social processing. And we see these things over and over. So that’s the first part, threat appraisal, recognize and process the risk. And a lot of folks kind of just stop there because they don’t seize their agency of, well, I’m going to be able to do something about it.

So part two to protection motivation theory is the coping appraisal. This is hands down the more powerful of the two, because it’s the one that’s recursive. It happens over and over again. You can train it. You can make it better. So what coping appraisal does is this, it says, I’m going to personalize this risk or risks plural, and then I’m going to own my agency. Agency is the ability and will to take control of your life. I’m going to be responsible for me. I’m going to be responsible for my family.

I’m being responsible for my household, my community, my neighborhood, etc. And so the way that we’re raised is a part of this. The way that we were taught about agency is a part of this. Do we have an internal locus of control? We believe that we control our destiny. Do we have an outer locus of control? We believe others are in control of our destiny and think life is just what happens to us. We have our Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, etc. But the great thing about preparedness folks is this. I have not met a resilient citizen that wasn’t just like, these people were not timid and scared of all these bad things happening.

These folks were thriving and they’re right here and they’re right now. They just felt alive to me because they took these agency, they took these threats, and they just put it in its proper place. They didn’t obsess about it, but they were prepared for it. And they believed in their own abilities to be able to say, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z when this bad thing happens. And it became something that, hey, I prepared for this one thing, but this other thing happened, but I was prepared for it because I prepared for this first thing.

So it’s like physical fitness. I went out and I was very physically fit and running, but then I had to do this other thing that wasn’t running. It was whatever, bucking hay or something like that. And I could go much longer because I was just physically fit. The same kind of generalization happens in this coping appraisal, in this agency where it just kind of goes and just spreads throughout all facets of your life and you thrive, not just live. It is quite concerning that conformity plays such a role in this because you know the majority of people aren’t going to do this until they’re told.

But to do it when it’s not normal takes kind of a special person, usually insanity, ingenious, our cousins. That’s one of the things I want to do with my book here because I’ve read the majority of prepper books out there and unfortunately, I know why they wrote them the way they did, but a lot of them, they start out on page one and it’s fear and gear. Here’s the fear, here’s the apocalypse, here’s the whatever, and then here’s some gear to do things with it. And then it ends on fear as well.

And just the whole book is fear. And I don’t want to live that way. I have enough of that in my career with the military. I’ve seen plenty of things. I’ve rehearsed plenty of things. I’ve been exercised with plenty of things that are very apocalyptic, very negative, very bad. And I don’t want to dwell on that for my entire life. I want to be able to think about the other end of the coin. There’s the doomerism and there’s the optimism as well. What can I do to thrive? What can I do to be attractive? And that’s what I’m trying to do with my book here is show that there is a different way of preparedness that not just, you know, handy penny, the sky is falling all the time, but I’m going to live in local.

I’m going to win local. I’m going to make the best of things. I’m going to live life to the fullest, et cetera. I’m going to have the best now that I can have and still also prepare. Those things can go together. And I’d love to have some impact on national governments as well. And I’m talking to folks that they’re at those upper echelons across the world to try to tell them how they can sell this to their populace in a non-crazy, non-stupid way, a non-fearing gearway that just increases the agency of their, of their populace, other citizens writ large.

I do believe though, that people, that there has to be an element of fear initially. Like that kind of has to be part of the impetus because we’ve had that condition out of us. People don’t have to look both ways when they’re crossing the road. They just look at the light. Everything is kind of a binary decision, which is basically given an instruction manual for, and therefore you don’t have to be fearful of anything. You can just kind of walk through the forest and, and not worry about the tree branch breaking or not even think about it, block it out altogether.

But there’s, I think initially people almost have to be reminded of how vulnerable they are in the universe. And that does require an element of, you realize that if the lights go out, nobody’s coming to save you or your family, right? And the only people who are coming to you are probably going to be bad guys. People have to understand that they’re alive first before they can take that next step in their preparedness evolution, which yeah, you don’t want to stay in that fear state, but that’s kind of the impetus I find.

It is, it’s a catalyst. And we find this interaction between like efficiency or technology and resiliency. So as cell phone adaptation increased in the world, so did the number of phone calls for lost hikers, because they’re like, Oh, I got my cell phone. I can go hike, you know, pick them out and I go pick them out and I can go hike it. And if I get into trouble, I’ve got my eight ounce bottle of water. Okay. I’ve ran out of that. Now the weather’s coming in. It’s bad. Let me make a phone call and have the helicopter coming to rescue me.

Well, yes, that is, yes, we’ve lost some of our resiliency because our technology has made it so that we can be saved a lot easier. [tr:trw].

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