I am currently in
Santiago, Chile, meeting with colleagues at the Pontificia Universidad Católica
de Chile to discuss disaster research. Chile is an obvious place for such
research, since it regularly suffers from a variety of natural disasters. In
the last year there have been two volcano eruptions, an earthquake, flooding
and landslides as well as a massive fire at Valparaíso which destroyed over two
thousand homes.
I’ve been hearing
about research which is investigating why it is that, in disasters, as well as
many useful contributions people also donate a lot of things that survivors do
not need. Some examples mentioned included a belt buckle, make-up, flags, and a
wedding dress. Sorting through the donations to identify the useful contributions
can be a lot of work for someone, and my colleagues’ research aims to help
understand how to make the best of the inevitable and welcome desire to help
that is associated with emergencies and disasters so it can contribute to more
effective disaster recovery.
While this Chilean
research focuses on help given by people outside the disaster, my own work has focusesd
on the behaviour of survivors themselves. Here are the key points, in a
blogpost-sized summary.
One of the
features of crowd behaviour in mass emergencies that warranted explanation was
the way that people who were strangers only minutes before could display forms
of social support and mutual aid normally associated with groups where there
was a history of solidarity - as took place for example among survivors of the July 7th 2005
London bombings. People took risks to help others. They delayed their exit
to tie tourniquets. They went out of their way to share bottles of water and
provide a word of comfort.
While not
universal, the finding of solidarity among survivors of emergencies is relatively
common. Existing psychological explanations for social behaviour in disasters -
pre-existing social networks (or so-called ‘social capital’) or family ties - did
not apply in many cases. Our analysis suggested that the shift in behaviour towards
solidarity was due to a psychological shift based on the changing social context.
An emergency or disaster can create a sense of common fate - a situation where
people were now grouped together instead of positioned as individuals. In
Gestalt terms, the ‘figure and ground’ shifts from ‘me in relation to other individuals’ to ‘us in relation to the emergency/threat’. In such events, survivors
often describe a new sense of ‘we-ness’, which in our language is a shared social identity. Sharing a social
identity means that the boundaries of concern become more inclusive. People give
support to others because the ‘others’ are now ‘us’.
This
analysis offers an
alternative to previously-dominant understandings of crowd behaviour in
emergencies as irrational ‘mass panic’. Instead, it promotes the idea of
spontaneous self-organization in crowds of survivors, who act as the ‘fourth
emergency service’ in the absence of professional responders – as has been seen
in events as diverse as the World Trade Centre evacuation, the Hillsborough disaster and Hurricane Katrina . Our current research, on solidarity at
the 2010 Chile earthquake and on the informal orderliness that maintained crowd safety at an outdoor music event that was almost a disaster, add to this
analysis some details of the underlying process. They each show that shared
social identity leads not only to the motivation to help strangers in
emergencies but also to expectations that others (strangers) will be supportive
of group members. These expectations of support in turn are the basis of collective
efficacy and coordinated action for the group.
Our account also
has some implications for professional emergency responders. If through shared
social identity people in crowds have the psychological capacity to support
each other and thereby contribute to their own coping and survival, then
approaches which treat crowds as ‘problems to be managed’ and attempts to
coerce, control the crowd or withhold information are worse than useless. As we
have argued, such exclusive ‘command and control’ approaches risk creating anxiety and disempowerment. Instead, professional responders and
those working in crowd safety need to build upon the crowd’s capacities by
giving the crowd the information people need to act and organize effectively.
In suggesting
that crowd psychology is the basis of collective resilience, this account also offers a potent
critique of individualism. While the dominant discourse presents individualism
as the highest form of rationality, our research turns this around by showing
that very often it is through understanding oneself as part of the crowd that
safety is enhanced. Examples of doors being blocked in emergency evacuations
suggest that it is acting as an individual in a collective setting risks
turning an emergency into a disaster.
