On this day 20 years ago, I was with @ChrisCocking and Steve Reicher at the Royal Society summer
exhibition in London, presenting our work on how people behave in emergency evacuations.
As I tried to travel to the exhibition venue, I was part of a crowd of
grumbling commuters ordered off tube trains because of what we later discovered
was a terrorist attack on three trains and a bus. It was surreal to walk across
London during rush hour that morning and see so many others doing the same, as
the tube system was completely closed down.
Later, we spoke to survivors and in the end gathered dozens
of accounts of what people in those bombed trains saw, did and experienced. The
study was important, not only for being a further riposte to the idea of public
‘panic’, but also because it prompted us to think in a new way about resilience.
The Civil Contingencies Act had just come in (2004), and
there was now an official recognition that the public could – indeed had
to – play a role in emergency response. But in the main, this public capacity
for resilience was understood in the guidance as based on social capital or
existing relationships. It was also understood officially as less agentic than that
of the authorities. The new way of thinking about collective resilience was
based on the social identity approach. Those caught up in the London bombings
case were commuters, and so were strangers to each other.
Yet our interviewees described how after the bombs had exploded
there was a sense of ‘we-ness’ with these strangers. They became a psychological
group, based on their common situation. That groupness drove mutually supportive
behaviours – sharing bottles of water, physically lifting others, tying
tourniquets.
It allowed them to coordinate – for example in removing
train doors as well as in filing out in an orderly way as they evacuated. The
survivors were left alone for more than 15 minutes before the professionals
reached them, but they had become the zero responders, providing emotional
support and saving lives.
Read more here:
@ukri.org funded
https://sus-udd.dk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Drury-et-al.-2009-London-bombings-of-2005.pdf
