What is this response called? I see it in many people. It’s like trying to catch a boiling mug of coffee when it falls — panic and not thinking leads to severe consequences; inaction would be better.
It seems to relate to fight or flight, as opposed to freezing. All three are not great and can significantly escalate a bad situation.
This is a kind of error-cascade, common for lots of systems.
Maybe more specific though, situations where mistakes cause more dire mistakes are sometimes called "incident pits". Not unknown to engineers, but I think we ripped it off the scuba-divers, mountaineers, and other folks that are interested in studying safety-critical situations. https://www.outdoorswimmingsociety.com/the-incident-pit/
Action bias and it seems rather fundamental to human behavior. You don't want to be seen as doing nothing when there are problems, but of course with a complex system, it can be very difficult to diagnose an issue, so you tend to screw things up if you just rush in. I think my favorite saying in that instance is, "don't just do something, stand there".
That’s a good one. I think my driving instructor told me something similar on my first lesson.
I’m talking about the brain fog more than the action itself, though. I no longer have it since I’ve been trained in emergency field medicine. That training course gave me enough exposure to stress to no longer get into this state of confusion. But I want to help others deal with it and it’s hard to find info online.
In my case it wasn't an emergency reflex. More like a strange curiosity to fiddle with something that was already in failure mode. Every attempt was fuzzy, say for a server, something shows a warning, you attempt a live fix, you try to get into a special superadmin UI you don't master, some operations run flaky, but you keep trying more. Before you know it you locked yourself out or bricked the machine.
That's a very common term in stock trading as well! Prices are crashing, and you try to make use of that opportunity to buy stock and make a profit when the stock rebounds. Then the price crashes further, the rebound is not gonna happen in the near future, and your fingers are a bloody mess on the ground...
Another panic reaction is selling off everything at the first sign of trouble. And some people hold on to doomed stocks for way longer than what makes sense (look up "Intel guy" on /r/wallstreetbets)
Day trading requires due diligence and nerves like steel, else you are just making somebody else a little bit richer.
I think calling it a panic response is appropriate. To me, that evokes a person doing irrational things to try and fix a sudden and distressing situation.
It seems to relate to fight or flight, as opposed to freezing. All three are not great and can significantly escalate a bad situation.