Three forms of Covid leadership

If the Covid pandemic has made one thing is clear, it is that we are interdependent in terms of risk and safety. So a collective response is required. From distancing, through ventilation, to vaccination programmes, decisions needed to be taken at the level of the whole community, society, and indeed the world. We need a coordinated response that prioritizes and supports the most urgent actions. Leadership is therefore essential. Three forms of leadership have been particularly evident over the course of the pandemic: identity leadership, coercive leadership, and laissez faire leadership. Only one of these is actually effective in enabling the collective response we need.

 

Identity leadership

This is true leadership, in that it leads to active engagement by ‘followers’. It attempts to create unity and a shared perspective on the problem and the solution, and to support effective action by the public. 

Assumptions of this approach: The public have the intention and capacity to do the right thing, if properly informed and supported. Understanding the public as part of the solution, not the problem. Treating the public as a resource and a partner.

Practices: Bring the public with you through engagement, promoting mitigations on the basis of shared identity and values. Embodying those values. Giving clear direction based on ‘who we are’ (shared interests, needs, and values). Regulations and rules (e.g., mask mandates) as a way of promoting norms and shared definitions of seriousness. Explaining the rationale behind measures. Working with community support groups, including mutual aid groups, by listening to them and supporting them materially. 

Examples: Haslam et al. offer several examples including Bonnie Henry, who focused on her connections with her fellow British Columbians get them to listen to and embrace the demanding course of action that she was proposing. But perhaps the most cited example is that of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Adern’s use of identity rhetoric to mobilize her citizens.

Pros and Cons: May require considerable time and effort. Finding the leaders who have the required skills, background and motivation. But over two decades of research on the social psychology of leadership suggests that this approach will get the most active engagement and results.

 

Coercive leadership

The ‘command and control’ approach to managing emergencies has a long history. It occurs where the authorities have given up with, or don’t try, the more painstaking practices of engagement -- which include listening as well as talking. It represents a failure of leadership.

Assumptions of this approach: The public are a problem: they are wilfully obstructive or stupid or passive and ignorant.

Practices: As the public are assumed to be obstructive or stupid, forms of threat and punishment are foregrounded, including fines and imprisonment; and the mechanisms for such coercion are strengthened, such as surveillance and policing.

Examples: £10K fines for failing to self-isolate. Compulsory vaccination.

Pros and Cons: These approaches produce backfire effects among sections of the public, whereby the public health measures are perceived as impositions and become a site of struggle and resistance. Coercion creates long-term damage to the relationship with the authorities. It may lead to compliance in some people in the short-term, but in the longer term these people will be less likely to listen and engage with public health messages and policies.

 

Laissez faire leadership

This approach is the abdication of leadership. Under the guise of relying on public ‘common sense’ and ‘resilience’, it entails abandoning moral and practical support.

Assumptions of this approach: This approach assumes that correct understandings of risk and mitigation already exist in each individual’s ‘common sense’, that each individual is solely responsible for outcomes, and therefore that the public can be blamed (as ‘irresponsible’) when things go badly, providing a rationale for adopting the coercive approach instead.

Practices: Advice to ‘be cautious’, ‘stay alert’, and use ‘common sense’, instead of specific guidance. Emphasis on ‘personal judgement’. Dropping all rules and regulations. Limited material support.

Example: July 19th 2021 so-called ‘freedom day’ in the UK entailed dropping most of the rules and the mask mandate but failing to provide the public with the recommended education on risk and mitigation that would enable informed decisions.

Pros and Cons: ‘Common sense’ is a repository of competing ideas. Without clear guidance, exhortations like ‘be cautious’ are open to multiple interpretations: what does it actually mean in practice? Unlike rules specifying behaviour – such as ‘stay home’ – it’s not clear to do with this advice on ‘how to feel’. By individualizing judgements of risk, there is a danger of people seeing risk simply in personal terms rather than in terms of others (including those more vulnerable than themselves). Worse, insufficient material support (including proper compensation for staying home and support for safe schools) means that, even where people understand how to act safely, they don’t have the resources to do so. Without clear leadership representing the collective will and properly organized support to equip members of the public with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions, this approach risks a chaotic and dangerous individualism.

 

 

 

Responding to People’s Emotional Needs in an Emergency

https://www.festivalinsights.com/2018/07/responding-peoples-emotional-emergency/

A 10-point listicle on journalist accounts of the public responses to events in Oxford Street, November 2017

A brief commentary for journalists and others on the events in Oxford Street, Friday 24th November 2017, when members of the public responded to fears of gunfire or a terrorist attack.

1.    In the footage from Oxford Street, many people are looking where they are going, assessing the situation, or otherwise moving in an orderly way, or standing around etc. Only a few people scream.

2.    Research evidence on emergency evacuations shows that coordination and order is common. Pushing and trampling occurs rarely and tends to be in narrow exits that are unfamiliar. Coordination reduces when people don’t see themselves as a ‘we’ or ‘us’.

3.    It is not clear that the number of injuries reported is particularly high for the number of people involved. 

4.    Research on fires shows that people often underestimate danger and/ or delay their exit (to respond, to stay with others). This, not over-reaction, is a main cause of fatalities.

5.    Research shows that there isn’t indiscriminate ‘contagion’. People attend most to, and follow the example of, those they judge to be relevant for the context, who are often people they define as similar to self.

6.    The word ‘panic’ was common in the news accounts, but researchers reject the term because it is hard to evidence.

7.    What is gained by saying ‘panic’ (rather than 'fleeing') is the implication that the behaviour is an overreaction, is unreasonable. But what should people do when the information they have is that there is a threat? ‘Sudden fear’ or ‘fleeing’ are more neutral terms.

8.    Journalists seemed to describe responses as ‘panic’ because it wasn’t after all a real emergency; but in many real emergencies people don’t know whether it is real or not (including fires and terrorist attacks).

9.    A first irony of the journalists’ use of the term ‘panic’ for the public response is that the government’s advice is to ‘run’ (this is not necessarily an endorsement).

10. A second irony is that the image of a vulnerable panic-prone public, rather than collectively resilient, is precisely what ISIS and others seek to achieve.

What happens after a disaster?

http://discoversociety.org/2017/10/04/what-happens-after-a-disaster/

Emergent social identities in a flood: Implications for community psychosocial resilience

https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/crowdsidentities/2017/07/28/emergent-social-identities-in-a-flood/

In disasters like the Great Fire of London, ordinary people are the best emergency service

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/01/in-disasters-like-the-great-fire-of-london-ordinary-people-are-t/

Impact: From riots to crowd safety - The Psychologist

Impact: From riots to crowd safety - The Psychologist

Bringing Crowd Psychology into Event Safety Management

http://www.festivalinsights.com/2015/07/bringing-crowd-psychology-event-safety-management/

Letter from Santiago: Disaster central

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 7^th 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.

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