When there is news the most common reaction of most people is to overreact. I’m not sure what the final outcome of swine flu is going to be, but for a disease that so far wouldn’t even qualify as a bad flu season, we have had schools closed, presidential press conferences and tons of media coverage. It seems to be quieting down now, and the typical response to the first overreaction is typically reverse overreaction.
Newton postulated a law in physics that states that for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is conservation of energy. I believe this is still an accepted law, although possibly something is going on in physics that I’m not aware of.
It seems to me that in human behavior we have a similar but somewhat different law the law of overreaction. Given a unexpected event or news, there is a predictable overreaction by most. This is probably related to our evolutionary flight or fight impulse that effectively says when confronted by a large unexpected creature; you either kill it and eat it, or run like the dickens.
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