Unfortunately, the leaders
of the
large contingency
of the «It Won't Happen to Me»
crowd often achieve great success in marginalizing and discrediting the small subset
of the population that constitute the «It Might Happen to Me»
crowd by disdainfully calling the realists «conspiracy theorists» and «paranoid fear mongers» even when the facts support the preparatory financial
behaviors executed by the «It Might Happen to Me»
crowd.
More broadly, this is how bacteria coordinate their actions in
large groups: When the local concentration
of autoinducers gets high enough, the bacteria know a
crowd is present, and they flip over from solitary mode to group
behavior.