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Panic, Sociology of
... Panic has been strongly associated with disasters. For more than half a century, panic has been one of the most commonly assumed reactions to disasters by the general public (Quarantelli, 1954(Quarantelli, , 2001Wenger, Dykes, Sebok, & Neff, 1975). Emergency management personnel and policymakers also believe that the general public is likely to panic following a disaster (Alexander, 2007;Clarke & Chess, 2008;Tierney, Bevc, & Kuligowski, 2006). ...
... Some of these professionals may be aware, however, of the collective resilience that the public and the community can show in emergency situations (Drury, Novelli, & Stott, 2013a. Despite these common assumptions among the general public and disaster response professionals, empirical evidence has consistently demonstrated that panic rarely occurs in disasters (Quarantelli, 1954(Quarantelli, , 2001. Instead, the literature shows that people's initial response to an emergency situation is prosocial and altruistic, in contrast to selfish or irrational flight behaviors often associated with panic (Quarantelli, 2001;Tierney et al., 2006). ...
... Despite these common assumptions among the general public and disaster response professionals, empirical evidence has consistently demonstrated that panic rarely occurs in disasters (Quarantelli, 1954(Quarantelli, , 2001. Instead, the literature shows that people's initial response to an emergency situation is prosocial and altruistic, in contrast to selfish or irrational flight behaviors often associated with panic (Quarantelli, 2001;Tierney et al., 2006). In contrast to the misconception that most people respond to disaster with panic (a phenomenon known as the panic myth), one of the major problems in disasters is to get people to evacuate rather than exhibit mass flight (Quarantelli & Dynes, 1972). ...
The assumption that disasters trigger panic has been widespread among the general public and emergency management personnel. An online convenience sample of 600 Japanese participants, ages 20 to 69 (221 women), responded to a 23-item questionnaire to reveal people’s images of panic during disasters. One goal of the current study was to examine whether lay people’s use of the term “panic” is consistent across various types of emergency situations, ranging from minor everyday events to major disasters. A second goal was to explore the assumed susceptibility to panic across several different emergency situations. Results revealed that participants thought that the term panic was more appropriate for mass emergencies than for personal emergencies. In addition, participants reported that even in mass emergencies the term would include multiple behavioral and emotional responses. Furthermore, participants indicated that others would be more susceptible to panic than they would personally, while the presence of strangers was found to have some unique effects on perceived panic susceptibility. In sum, the findings of the current study imply that it is very likely that whenever and wherever life-threatening mass emergencies occur, people will continue to arbitrarily use the term panic.
... Based on the results, it is obvious that the 0% density case generates the highest fatalities as compared with the other cases. This shows analytical evidence that mass panic may result in a high number of avoidable fatalities (Quarantelli, 2001). Although the concept of mass panic is arguable, it was reasonable to have lower fatalities as people are guided by the system, being less emotionally and mentally panicked, at least to some degree. ...
... A total of 12,500 computer simulations were conducted on six different cases of sensing density coverage, and the obtained data were statistically assessed. The authors found that the results of the 0% density case were consistent with previous studies showing a high fatality rate with avoidable injuries (Quarantelli, 2001), when compared with the other cases. In addition, the simulation results suggest that even low sensing coverage cases (e.g., 20% and 40%) still show potential to save more people than the 0% density case, where people solely rely on a set of behavioral rules for their courses of action. ...
During an emergency, people rely on a few behavioral rules to save themselves. However, these rules may not be reliable, especially in indoor environments, as they are not fully aware of site information and their ability to think properly becomes fragile. Despite the increasing occurrence of mass shootings, there is no advanced systematic mechanism, which leverages recent technological advancements, in place to save people from this terror. To overcome these challenges, this research explores an integrated approach by combining resources (human monitoring; building information; and agent-based modeling). This research is to ameliorate public safety by investigating mass shooting scenarios through integration. Specifically, this study unveils the effect of sensory data on fatalities, along with safety mechanisms offered by systematic action plans. We designed six scenarios by varying spatial sensing coverage (comprehensive visual representation of the situation) from 0% to 100%. Each scenario was tested from 2000 to 2500 times to obtain statistical significance. Results indicate that even low sensing coverages (20% and 40%) show a slight improvement for safe evacuation and clear potential to reduce casualties within the first five minutes. Significant improvements are found in all cases (safe evacuation, casualties, rescuing people, and total survival) when the sensing coverages are high, around 60% to 100%. This study confirms the applicability of an integrated approach to identify a safety mechanism operating in place during a mass shooting incident. The findings could serve as a basis for future studies that can progressively improve emergency safety mechanisms based on available site resources.
... Communication studies have tied analogous connections to how fight-or-flight responses affect interpersonal communication, particularly in conflict (Afifi and Afifi, 2009). Similarly, sociology has examined how fight-or-flight responses manifest in social settings, such as crowd behaviour during emergencies, although this has not been a primary focus (Quarantelli, 2001). Furthermore, military science has researched how soldiers react under combat stress and how to train for optimal responses (Boe and Hagen, 2015;Grossman and Siddle, 2000). ...
... The WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus explicitly shared this concern in his press conference on 23 February 2020, where he observed that "using the word pandemic [now] does not fit the facts, but it may certainly cause fear" (WHO, 2020). Fear has an adaptive role in preventing people from harm, and researchers have previously noted that apprehensions about mass panic triggered by disasters and emergencies are exaggerated (Quarantelli, 2001;Gantt and Gantt, 2012;Van Bavel et al., 2020). In this light, the present research adds to the evidence base-instead of reacting with heightened anxiety, people in the 16 countries showed an increase in positive emotions and a decline in anxiety, and around the middle of March, anxiety ceased to be the predominant CE in all countries. ...
Using messages posted on Twitter, this study develops a new approach to estimating collective emotions (CEs) within countries. It applies time series methodology to develop and demonstrate a novel application of CEs to identify emotional events that are significant at the societal level. The study analyzes over 200 million words from over 10 million Twitter messages posted in 16 countries during the first 120 days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Daily levels of collective anxiety and positive emotions were estimated using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count's (LIWC) psychologically validated lexicon. The time series estimates of the two collective emotions were analyzed for structural breaks, which mark a significant change in a series due to an external shock. External shocks to collective emotions come from events that are of shared emotional relevance, and this study develops a new approach to identifying them. In the COVID-19 Twitter posts used in the study, analysis of structural breaks showed that in all 16 countries, a reduction in collective anxiety and an increase in positive emotions followed the WHO's declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. Announcements of economic support packages and social restrictions also had similar impacts in some countries. This indicates that the reduction of uncertainty around the evolving COVID-19 situation had a positive emotional impact on people in all the countries in the study. The study contributes to the field of CEs and applied research in collective psychological phenomena.
... are impacted by an attack" (Bada & Nurse, 2020). Quarantelli (2001) and Tierney et al. (2006) find that people's initial response to an emergency is prosocial rather than selfish or irrational flight. Singer (1982) discusses people's reactions and responses to disasters and the need for disaster planning and training. ...
The purpose of this study is to provide insight as to how infrastructure countermeasures awareness training will impact individuals dealing with a nationwide catastrophic cyber-attack. Can this awareness training lessen the psychological effect of an attack? This study showed no value for this type of training. Reading about such an attack, the subjects had lower technical optimism and cyber self-efficacy. Reading about infrastructure countermeasures, before or after reading about a cyber-attack, did not improve or maintain the subjects’ optimism and self-efficacy. A possible explanation is that emotional arousal may override or block rational thinking. Another explanation may be that a nationwide attack is towards the infrastructure and not the personal computer. Here the individual lacks any control. Future research needs to look at personal preparation and response training to see if it will help the psychological effects of a catastrophic cyber-attack.
... 'Mass panic' explanations of 'stampedes' suggest widespread uncontrolled mindless movement of an impulsive crowd (Alluri et al. 2017;Quarantelli 2001). However, we found 'urgent' crowd flight to be rare. ...
Crowd flight incidents from (mis)perceived threats are important social, psychological, and political phenomena that have been neglected in previous research. They are potentially deadly, economically disruptive, and individually distressing incidents that may result in armed police responses. Despite the seriousness of these phenomena, we know little about their occurrence in Britain. We carried out a systematic review using PRISMA principles on the Nexis media database to analyse the nature of these false alarm incidents and the relationship between false alarms and other variables, in particular real terror attacks. ‘Urgent’ crowd flight responses, often called ‘stampedes’, were found to be rare, and resulted in relatively few serious injuries. Diverse public behaviour was recorded, and competitive behaviour was relatively rare. False alarm incidents were mainly reported in locations known to be soft targets for terrorism, and incidents were associated with the National Threat Level in the second half of the decade, peaking in 2017. They were also associated with psychologically-relevant attacks in Europe, particularly indiscriminate Islamist attacks, rather than right-wing terrorism. Implications for developing a social psychological understanding of these events are discussed.
... By the end of 2020, COVID-19 infected 72.4 million people and caused 1.8 million deaths worldwide [5]. The pandemic embodied all characteristics of a disaster and mass emergency [6,7]. But the actual threat to be infected was not from people per se, but rather from the pathogens they potentially harbored. ...
As a first line of defense to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, people reduced social contacts to avoid pathogen exposure. Using a panel of countries, this research suggests that this was amplified in societies characterized by high social support and future orientation. People reacted more strongly in dense environments; government orders had more effect in high power distance societies. Conversely, a focus on accomplishments was associated with lower changes. Understanding people’s actual behaviors in response to health threats across societies is of great importance for epidemiology, public health, international business, and for the functioning of humanity as a whole.
... Emotion is contagious and spreads rapidly among people, which is a natural process and is unconscious and uncontrolled [9]. Recently, studies have shown that emotion is a very important factor that affects individual behavior in an emergency [10][11][12][13]. Emotions can mainly be divided into positive emotions and negative emotions [14]. ...
Emotion plays an important role in decision making. In an emergency, panic can spread among crowds through person-to-person communications and can cause harmful effects on society. The aim of this paper is to propose a new theoretical model in the context of epidemiology to describe the spread of panic under an emergency. First, according to divisions in personality in the context of psychology, groups are divided into a level-headed group and an impatient group. Second, individuals in the two groups have unique personalities. Thus, the level-headed group only infects within the group, while the impatient group considers emotional infection within the group and cross infection between the groups. Then, a nonlinear infection rate is used to describe the probability of infection after an infected person contacts a susceptible person, which is more in line with the real situation. After that, the level-headed group–impatient group nonlinear SIRS panic spreading model is developed. Stable analysis of the model is obtained using the Lyapunov function method to study the stability of the panic-free equilibrium and panic-permanence equilibrium. Finally, simulations are carried out to dynamically describe the spread process of group emotional contagion.
... 'Mass panic' explanations of 'stampedes' suggest widespread uncontrolled mindless movement of an impulsive crowd (Alluri et al. 2017;Quarantelli 2001). However, we found 'urgent' crowd flight to be rare. ...
Crowd flight incidents from (mis)perceived threats are important social, psychological, and political phenomena that have been neglected in previous research. They are potentially deadly, economically disruptive, and individually distressing incidents that may result in armed police responses. Despite the seriousness of these phenomena, we know little about their occurrence in the UK. This systematic review applied PRISMA principles to the Nexis media database to analyse the nature of these false alarm incidents and the relationship between false alarms and other variables, in particular real terror attacks. ‘Urgent’ crowd flight responses, often known as ‘stampedes’, were found to be rare, and resulted in relatively few serious injuries. Diverse public behaviour was recorded, and competitive behaviour was relatively rare. False alarm incidents were mainly reported in locations known to be soft targets for terrorism and incidents were associated with the National Threat Level in the second half of the decade, peaking in 2017. They were associated with psychologically-relevant attacks in Europe, particularly indiscriminate Islamist attacks, rather than right-wing, or Northern Ireland-related terrorism. Implications for developing a social psychological understanding of these events are discussed.
... People also tend to think that disaster victims become dazed and helpless due to the sudden occurrence of disasters (Wenger et al., 1975). However, despite this common assumption, empirical evidence has repeatedly indicated that disaster victims can act altruistically even in the aftermath of a disaster (Auf der Heide, 2004;Quarantelli, 2001;Sandin & Wester, 2009;Tierney, 2003;Tierney et al., 2006). In fact, initial life-saving activities are, in many cases, performed by disaster victims themselves (Cocking, 2013;Cole, Walters, & Lynch, 2011). ...
The present study was designed to shed light on the origin of disaster myths, such as panic, looting, crime, and psychological shock in postdisaster situations, by examining effects of secondhand information and the moderating effect of anxiety on such negative misconceptions. It was hypothesized that secondhand information on disaster behaviour, such as media reports and word‐of‐mouth rumours, and trait anxiety would increase the degrees to which people gave credit to four popular disaster myths. Also, trait anxiety was predicted to moderate the association between information sources and disaster myths. Questionnaire data obtained from 1,500 Japanese participants indicated that people relying on secondhand information gave more credit to all the four misconceptions than those relying on firsthand information such as direct disaster experience. However, trait anxiety was not found to significantly affect the degrees of the disaster myths. Furthermore, the moderating effect of trait anxiety on the association between the information sources and the disaster myths was not observed in any of the four myths. The present results imply that although reliance on secondhand information increases the degree of disaster myths to some extent, there should be other causes from which disaster myths originate.
... Second, the term "panic" is not used consistently. The term is common in mass media and lay descriptions of behavioural responses to emergencies (Fahy et al., 2012), and can refer to sudden fear and associated sensations, such as racing heart, sweating, and shaking; and researchers use the term to refer to (uncontrolled) fleeing behaviour, and/or possible feelings underlying this behaviour, and/or outcomes of this behaviour (such as crushes) (Quarantelli, 2001;Sime, 1990). 2 The third problem is that many studies of emergencies that meet all the conditions for crowd panic (threat, a crowd, and only limited escape), find little evidence for it. These include Janis's (1951) study of behavioural reactions to the Hiroshima bombing, and Sheppard et al.'s (2006) analysis of the 1995 Sarin attack in Tokyo, the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, anthrax incidents in the USA in 2001, the July 7th London bombings, and chemical weapons attacks during World War I. Though mass panic has been called a "disaster myth" by sociologists (e.g., Wenger, Dykes, Sebok, & Neff, 1975), these studies reporting an absence of panic do not in themselves falsify the mass panic concept, of course; like Popper's (1959) example of the white swan, there may still be counter-examples. ...
This review provides a new integration of recent research that has formed the basis of a social identity explanation of supportive collective behaviour among survivors in emergencies and disasters. I describe a model in which a sense of common fate is the source of an emergent shared social identity among survivors, which in turn provides the motivation to give social support to others affected. In addition, by drawing on the concept of relational transformation in psychological crowds, I show how an emergent shared social identity can engender a range of further behavioural and cognitive consequences that contribute to collective self-organisation in emergencies, including expected support, coordination of behaviour, and collective efficacy. It will be argued that the model can been applied to explaining how potentially dangerous crowd events avoid disaster: shared social identity operates as the basis of spontaneous self-organisation in these cases, as in many emergencies and disasters.
... They can also facilitate theory testing, not only by confirming the effectiveness of manipulations but also by providing tests of new hypotheses about the processes under investigation. For many years, many held the misconception that people routinely react to emergency situations with panic (Quarantelli, 2001;Smelser, 1962). Drawing on self-categorization theory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987), researchers recently corrected this misconception by providing evidence from field studies indicating that cooperation is more common than panic and that such cooperation often grows out of a shared identity arising from the common experience of the emergency itself (Drury, Cocking, & Reicher, 2008). ...
A cursory read of the social psychological literature suggests that when people find themselves in strong situations, they fail to display agency. The early classic studies of conformity, obedience, and bystander intervention, for example, are renowned for showing that when challenged by strong situational pressures, participants acquiesced—even if it meant abandoning their moral principles or disregarding their own sensory data. Later studies of learned helplessness, ego depletion, and stereotype threat echoed this “power of the situation” theme, demonstrating that exposure to (or the expectation of) a frustrating or unpleasant experience suppressed subsequent efforts to actualize goals and abilities. Although this work has provided many valuable insights into the influence of situational pressures, it has been used to buttress an unbalanced and misleading portrait of human agency. This portrait fails to recognize that situations are not invariably enemies of agency. Instead, strong situational forces often allow for, and may even encourage, expressions of human agency. We examine the nature, causes, and consequences of this phenomenon. We endorse a broader approach that emphasizes how responding to situational pressure can coexist with agency. This new emphasis should create greater convergence between social psychological models and the experience of agency in everyday life.
Collective false alarms can cause significant disruption, costly emergency response, and distress. Yet an adequate psychological explanation for these incidents is lacking. We interviewed 39 participants and analysed multiple secondary data sources from the 2017 false alarm in Oxford Street, UK, to develop a new explanation of this phenomenon. There was evidence that awareness of recent collectively self‐relevant terrorist attacks lowered the threshold for interpreting ambiguous signals as signs of hostile threat. Interviewees also fled and hid after inferring threats from others’ fear and flight responses. Cooperative behaviour was sporadic and was associated with an emergent sense of groupness that occurred in limited locations. The analysis suggests that crowd behaviour in false alarms has more in common with the meaningful behaviour typically found in real emergencies than with the image of uncontrolled ‘mass panic’ portrayed in news media. These findings have implications for policy in preparing the public for terrorist attacks.
The declaration of the COVID pandemic in March 2020 was immediately followed by news media accounts of “panic buying.” However, this term is problematic because it implicitly assumes that people engage in indiscriminate consumer product purchases that are motivated solely by extreme fear. Contrary to the implicit assumptions of “panic buying,” this study's examination of consumer product purchases by 435 households found that respondents drew clear distinctions among four activities (observed shortages, own consumption changes, own stockpiling, and others’ stockpiling) related to six consumer product categories (fresh produce, fresh meat, nonperishable food, cleaning supplies, sanitary supplies, and nonprescription medications). The results show that own stockpiling has moderately positive correlations with own consumption changes and is as strongly related to optimism and anger as to fear. Own stockpiling also has positive correlations with perceptions of others’ stockpiling, reliance on informal information sources, and observed shortages. Unexpectedly, own stockpiling has positive correlations with positive disaster stereotypes rather than negative disaster stereotypes, and is unrelated to expected pandemic duration, authoritative information sources, demographic characteristics, and routine stockpiling. The results suggest that the term “panic buying” should be replaced by “crisis stockpiling,” which avoids unnecessary erroneous inferences about the motivation for that behavior.
The COVID‐19 pandemic has catalyzed debates about how the public and leaders respond to health threats and the role that the media and emotions play in these responses. Predating COVID‐19, the 2014 Ebola outbreak can serve as a case to examine the constructions and pervasiveness of fear discourse and other emotions in news and social media. In this mixed‐method study, we examine fear discourse in web‐based and traditional newspaper headlines and emergent emotions in social media data (Twitter) during the peak of Ebola coverage. Users discuss fear on Twitter in a variety of ways and there was an increase in Tweets following the first Ebola case in the United States. However, it is humor, not fear, that is the most dominant theme in Twitter responses. Claims by health leaders and media scholars, that information technology and social media spread fear, receive limited support. Prevalence of different emotions vary across format (headlines and social media) and have important implications for understanding the myths and realities of public responses to health threats.
A robust field of research has elucidated when and why people are willing to offer help in times of crisis. Yet helping behaviour does not always occur when needed, and the absence of helping during crisis is less well studied. By broadly defining a crisis as an extremely difficult, disruptive and dangerous situation, which may result in possible harm to individuals, groups and societies, this article reviews research focused on the following general question: What factors (psychological, sociological, economic and legal) prevent people from helping others in times of collective crisis? The present work (a) integrates the helping literature, (b) presents new theoretical and empirical perspectives on novel findings concerning failures to help during crises, and (c) suggests recommendations that will enable professionals involved in emergency management to support the public in developing their own capacity to manage and overcome crises. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement .
While mass panic (and/or violence) and self-preservation are often assumed to be the natural response to physical danger and perceived entrapment, the literature indicates that expressions of mutual aid are common and often predominate, and collective flight may be so delayed that survival is threatened. In fact, the typical response to a variety of threats and disasters is not to flee but to seek the proximity of familiar persons and places; moreover, separation from attachment figures is a greater stressor than physical danger. Such observations can be explained by an alternative "social attachment" model that recognizes the fundamentally gregarious nature of human beings and the primacy of attachments. In the relatively rare instances where flight occurs, the latter can be understood as one aspect of a more general affiliative response that involves escaping from certain situations and moving toward other situations that are perceived as familiar but which may not necessarily be objectively safe. The occurrence of flight-and-affiliation depends mainly on the social context and especially the whereabouts of familiar persons (i.e., attachment figures); their physical presence has a calming effect and reduces the probability of flight-and-affiliation, while their absence has the opposite effect. Combining the factors of perceived physical danger and the location of attachment figures results in a four-fold typology that encompasses a wide spectrum of collective responses to threat and disaster. Implications of the model for predicting community responses to terrorist attacks and/or use of weapons of mass destruction are briefly discussed.
This paper documents a food panic in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, following the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake. A food panic is defined as a situation in which the general population fears losing access to food supplies, including drinking water, for an unknown length of time and, as a consequence, exhibits at least one of the following abnormal behaviors: panic buying, hoarding, or panic flight, probably aggravated by indiscriminate price hikes. Primary and secondary data, including media reports, official documents, direct observation, semistructured interviews, and an original survey, describe the characteristics of the food panic and suggest the mechanisms behind its occurrence. The reactions of major actors are depicted, highlighting the importance of the private sector in dealing with food panics. Suggestions for preparedness against such panics and challenges in future studies are covered in the last section.
This chapter discusses and reviews studies on the problems of social isolation and loneliness brought on by Covid restrictions involving quarantine, lockdown and movement restrictions which considerably reduced the bonds holding individuals, groups, communities and societies together. The nature of being a human being and possessing identity was under attack. The breakup of shared culture with some persons and groups being granted dispensation from the rules affecting everyone else headed society towards anomie. Fighting a global pandemic requires large-scale community cohesiveness. The role of group identity and community involvement is discussed to combat isolation and loneliness to regenerate society. Ways to reduce loneliness are offered such as Art therapy, and the issue of isolation in aged care homes is raised.KeywordsLonelinessIsolationZero-sum gameIdentity leadershipCommunity cooperationArt therapy
The Bethnal Green tube shelter disaster, in which 173 people died, is a significant event in both history and psychology. While notions of 'panic' and 'stampede' have been discredited in contemporary psychology and disaster research as explanations for crowd crushes, Bethnal Green has been put forward as the exception that proves the rule. Alternative explanations for crushing disasters focus on mismanagement and physical factors, and lack a psychology. We analysed 85 witness statements from the Bethnal Green tragedy to develop a new psychological account of crowd disasters. Contrary to the established view of the Bethnal Green disaster as caused by widespread public overreaction to the sound of rockets, our analysis suggests that public perceptions were contextually calibrated to a situation of genuine threat; that only a small minority misperceived the sound; and that therefore, this cannot account for the surge behaviour in the majority. We develop a new model, in which crowd flight behaviour in response to threat is normatively structured rather than uncontrolled, and in which crowd density combines with both limited information on obstruction and normatively expected ingress behaviour to create a crushing disaster.
CBRNE agents
may pose a potent physical threat but may equally–or even more so–create significant fear and public distress. This
chapter explores how the public can react to CBRNE, how states may handle incidents and how technology may be utilised
to counter adverse societal effects.
Company leaders are frequently confronted with highly uncertain and risky situations for which they are often ill-prepared, and consequently, in which they often panic. Based on an exploratory case study of extreme rock climber Alexander Honnold, we have developed propositions that help decision-makers to learn to avoid panic in crises. Our findings suggest that gradual exposure to incrementally more challenging tasks by adjusting individual learning goals allows decision-makers to leverage existing skills, and to develop their physical, mental and emotional states simultaneously. Deliberate confrontation with the challenges that may trigger panic through real-life simulation and imagination helps decision-makers to retrain and transform triggers for panic responses, and to build systemic confidence. This organic and holistic growth provides decision-makers with the simultaneous preparation and mastery of their physical, mental, and emotional states to ensure the lightness and calmness necessary not to panic when facing a crisis.
The COVID-19 outbreak and its declaration as a pandemic by the WHO on March 11, 2020 resulted in consumer panic buying across the globe. Extant research into panic buying is scant, and its cultural context practically unexplored. This article uses mobility change data provided by Google and draws on reactance theory to establish how perceived scarcity limits freedoms, and ultimately drives individuals to panic buying. It hypothesizes and analyzes the influence of cultural factors; the findings show that individualism and uncertainty avoidance both exert a positive effect on the extent of panic buying, whereas power distance has a negative effect.
The role that culture plays in the way different groups experience, respond to, and recover from disasters has been widely discussed. Yet, while there is a considerable (and growing) literature of case study evidence for the need to account for culture in disasters, comparatively few studies take a long-term perspective on cultural interactions with disasters, resulting in a lack of exploration into the diachronic nature of these cultural responses, both past and present. The literature that does exist tends also to focus either on western cultures or on groups that pursue highly traditional livelihoods. Communities that call on elements of both local or vernacular knowledge and scientific or external knowledge are underrepresented.
This article presents an examination of cultural responses to tropical cyclones on Mauritius Island in the South West Indian Ocean over the long-term. We combine historical archive and contemporary interview data to uncover an extensive history of cultural responses to cyclones in Mauritius, including revealing the use of local knowledge, early warning signs, and superstitions surrounding cyclones in early Mauritian history and today.
Our research refutes the portrayal of isolated ‘episodes’ of cultural responses to cyclones, such as the reports of ‘mass hysteria’ following tropical cyclone Hollanda in February 1994, when a considerable proportion of Mauritians believed that a werewolf or loup garou was terrorising villagers. Whilst this experience has been portrayed – both at the time and currently – as an embarrassing and one-off incident, we show that this is rather part of a long pattern of cultural responses to tropical cyclones. Our results therefore have implications for how cyclones and disasters are understood and experienced.
Non-technical summary
More and more people around the globe experience climate hazards. For vulnerable populations, these hazards not only cause significant physical damages, but can also affect the way people interact with each other. How such interactions are affected by climate hazards is particularly important for understanding the vulnerability of communities. Prosocial behavior is key for communities that heavily rely on informal social support to deal with these threats and for cooperative solutions to provide and maintain public goods. To investigate these effects, we talk to people living on the front lines of climate change and measure their prosociality using behavioral tasks. Our results show that both fast- and slow-onset hazards increase prosociality, underscoring the importance of well-functioning social relationships for dealing with hardship and uncertainty in a variety of contexts.
Technical summary
People's willingness to engage in prosocial behavior can affect how vulnerable and resilient populations are to climate hazards. We study how different types of climate hazards, fast-onsetting cyclones and slowly rising sea-levels, might affect peoples' prosociality using incentivized behavioral tasks. We sample people who are at the forefront of climate change and either experienced Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (study 1; n = 378) or are from sea-level rise hotspots (study 2; n = 1047) in Solomon Islands, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. We experimentally manipulate the salience of these hazards through recall or informational videos. Results from study 1 show that increases in prosociality are (i) independent of whether supportive behaviors or conflicts are recalled, (ii) are not only targeted to a narrow in-group, and (iii) do not come with increases in antisocial behaviors. In study 2, we also find that people behave more prosocial when they are informed about the impacts of rising sea-levels. Our survey evidence suggests that people who already perceive the threat of displacement due to rising sea-levels are also more prosocial. Overall, peoples' responses to both types of hazards are geared toward collective action, which could strengthen their adaptive capacity to deal with climate risks.
Social media summary
People severely affected by sea-level rise and rapidly emerging climate hazards are responding with increases in prosocial behaviors to fellow villagers.
How do people behave in the seconds after they become aware they have been caught up in a real-life transport emergency? This paper presents the first micro-behavioral, video-based analysis of the behavior of passengers during a small explosion and subsequent fire on a subway train. We analyzed the behavior of 40 passengers present in the same carriage as the explosion. We documented the first action of the passengers following the onset of the emergency and described evidence of pro- and anti-social behavior. Passengers’ first actions varied widely. Moreover, anti-social behavior was rare and displays of pro-sociality were more common. In a quantitative analysis, we examined spatial clustering of running behavior and patterns in passenger exit choices. We found both homogeneity and heterogeneity in the running behavior and exiting choices of passengers. We discuss the implications of these findings for the mass emergency literature and for evacuation modeling.
Understanding people's behavior when they are under threat is important to both researchers and practitioners. This study investigates the impact of the severity of collective threats on people's donation intention. Through a series of studies, our findings show that the severity of collective threats positively affects people's donation intention. Specifically, when a collective threat becomes more severe, people under threat tend to pay more attention to and feel empathy for others experiencing the same threat, thus increasing their donation intention. Furthermore, the positive effect of collective threat severity on people's donation intention becomes weaker when the degree of threat relief is high (vs. low). It is also found that when donation recipients are experiencing a different threat from that of donors, the positive effect of collective threat severity disappears. This study enriches our understanding of people's behavior under threat and extends the literature on social identity theory. Additionally, our results provide important managerial implications for charity organizations regarding how to increase people's donation intention by selecting appropriate locations and timings for donation activities.
The COVID‐19 pandemic is the greatest global crisis of our lifetimes, and leadership has been critical to societies’ capacity to deal with it. Here effective leadership has brought people together, provided a clear perspective on what is happening and what response is needed, and mobilized the population to act in the most effective ways to bring the pandemic under control. Informed by a model of identity leadership (Haslam, Reicher & Platow, 2020), this review argues that leaders’ ability to do these things is grounded in their ability to represent and advance the shared interests of group members and to create and embed a sense of shared social identity among them (a sense of “us‐ness”). For leaders, then, this sense of us‐ness is the key resource that they need to marshal in order to harness the support and energy of citizens. The review discusses examples of the successes and failures of different leaders during the pandemic and organizes these around five policy priorities related to the 5Rs of identity leadership: readying, reflecting, representing, realizing, and reinforcing. These priorities and associated lessons are relevant not only to the management of COVID‐19 but to crisis management and leadership more generally.
The present chapter discusses to what extent the rise of new risks and dangers, modernity has brought, has causing the end of tourism. The answer to the above formulated questions is not easy, and of course, it exhibits a fertile ground to be explored in other approaches. The ceaseless news about violence, cruelty, wars and deaths have serious negative impacts on audience worldwide. Though policy makers have devoted their time and efforts in looking for new alternative segments where death replaces the allegory of beautiness, giving as a result new products as dark-tourism, slum-tourism, disaster-tourism or doom-tourism, other problems arise. The curiosity for tourists in visiting spaces of mass death or extreme suffering contradicts not only its nature as a mechanism of revitalization and relaxes but may very well lead to narcissism which in fact is the end of tourism.
Background
Personality has been implicated in the development and continuation of mental disorders. One major advance in the personality field came with the reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST). The study of personality can help explicate the pathology of anxiety disorders. To this end, the present study compared the profile of the revised reinforcement sensitivity theory (r-RST) of personality in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety dis-order (SAD), and panic disorder (PD).
Participants and procedure
Seventy-eight GAD patients, 76 SAD patients, 72 PD patients, and 85 healthy individuals participated in the present study. All participants were assessed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I disorders (SCID-I), Beck Depression Inventory, Jackson-5 Questionnaire, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Questionnaire, Panic and Agoraphobia Scale, and Social Phobia Inventory. Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the Research Deputy of Kashan University of Medical Sciences. Participants were given information about the study and provided informed consent in writing.
Results
Data were analyzed by chi-square, independent t-test, analysis of variance, and multivariate analysis of vari-ance. All patients were higher on Flight than the control group. Also, all patients and healthy controls differed in the revised reinforcement sensitivity theory.
Conclusions
The more nuanced knowledge from the revised reinforcement sensitivity theory may be helpful in the diagno-sis, etiology, and psychotherapy of anxiety disorders.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.
This paper outlines why a move towards a complex adaptive systems model of behaviour is required if the goal is to generate better understanding of how individuals and groups interact with their environment in a disaster setting. To accomplish this objective, a bridge must be built between the broader social sciences and behavioural economics to incorporate discipline‐specific insights that are needed to move towards complexity. This is only possible through a deeper understanding of behaviour and how the environment in which they occur can influence actions. It is then that one can counteract the poor behavioural predictions, flawed policies based on myth, inefficient design, and suboptimal outcomes that have flourished in the absence of a complex adaptive systems model. This paper provides a conceptual framework that draws on concepts from across the natural and social sciences, such as behavioural economics, endocrinology, psychology, sociobiology, and sociology in order to build an interactive theory of disaster behaviour.
Crisis investigation reports revealed a gap between existing security measures and the actual behaviour of victims, especially related to their emotional states. We propose a new mathematical model of emotion for simulating human behaviours in crisis situations. The model takes into account various environmental situations (static or dynamic) and the profiles of the people involved. It is more close to findings in psycho-physiological studies of emotion and allows to make the evacuation simulation more realistic. The entire theoretical model has been implemented and evaluated in the IDE R-Studio and the agent-based GAMA simulation platform. The obtained results outperform the results presented in the related work.
Due to the non-predictive nature of disasters, there is little first-hand data available which in turn is a serious constraint to conduct research on the implication of disasters on urban population. Computational sociology aims at by-passing this issue by simulating the situation that cannot be observed. This paper attempts to use agent-based simulation models to (i) examine the importance of Durkheim's notion of Social Solidarity on behavioral responses in an emergency situation [1], (ii) observe the influence of this Social Solidarity notion in an emergency situation and (iii) validate the use of simulation in this case. Our team created therefore two simulation models representing two hypothetical scenarios, one where the population exhibits low social solidarity, while in the other the virtual entities show high social solidarity. Our findings conclude that low social solidarity leads to behavioral responses of panic and selfishness while high solidarity leads to an ordered and organized evacuation. With these findings, a theory of how a typical urban population would react to a large-scale disaster is formulated. The validity and effectiveness of agent-based modeling as an epistemological tool is also discussed.
Recently the key role of emotions in decision-making process has been highlighted. In this article, we focus on fear-related emotions and their positive impact on the survival capabilities of human beings in case of crisis situation. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the impact of emotion on agents in the evacuation process; we only focus here on emotions and not on the evacuation process itself. We formalize the influence of three factors (decay, environment, contagion) on agents emotion and explore the influence of each of them. The emotion intensity of agents will be tested in case of moving or without moving. We will make some experiments to estimate the impact of three coefficients of decay, environment, contagion on the emotion intensity of groups such as max, min, mean and standard deviation value. The entire theoretical model has been implemented in the GAMA simulation platform.
Advances in science are being sought in newly available opportunities to collect massive quantities of data about complex systems. While key advances are being made in detailed mapping of systems, how to relate this data to solving many of the challenges facing humanity is unclear. The questions we often wish to address require identifying the impact of interventions on the system and that impact is not apparent in the detailed data that is available. Here we review key concepts and motivate a general framework for building larger scale views of complex systems and for characterizing the importance of information in physical, biological and social systems. We provide examples of its application to evolutionary biology with relevance to ecology, biodiversity, pandemics, and human lifespan, and in the context of social systems with relevance to ethnic violence, global food prices, and stock market panic. Framing scientific inquiry as an effort to determine what is important and unimportant is a means for advancing our understanding and addressing many practical concerns, such as economic development or treating disease.
The purposes of the current study were twofold: (1) to investigate affective and cognitive responses and social-contextual factors related to Ebola and their intercorrelations in a developed country without widespread Ebola transmission; and (2) to examine the relationships among risk perception of Ebola, levels of knowledge about Ebola, and (blatant and subtle) prejudice toward African immigrants. Between January 2015 and March 2015, an anonymous cross-sectional survey was conducted among a convenience sample of 486 Italian adults. Results showed that most participants were not particularly concerned about Ebola and did not feel at risk of acquiring the virus. Cognitive dimensions of risk perception of Ebola (i.e., perceived severity of illness, perceived personal impact, perceived coping efficacy, and likelihood of infection), affective response (or worry) to Ebola, and social-contextual factors (i.e., perceived preparedness of institutions, family members' and friends' levels of worry) were interrelated. Prejudice toward African immigrants was positively related to risk perception of Ebola and negatively related to levels of knowledge about Ebola even when controlling for sociodemographic variables including political preference.
This chapter focuses on the education, information, and mobilization of the public after the 9/11 attacks. It addresses the constructive public response, devising publiccommunication strategies, providing practical information, educating the public to use health services wisely, activating civil-society organizations, and utilizing volunteers. The chapter concludes that the wide range of positive public responses to the consequences of terrorist attacks in 2001 indicates that health and safety professionals need to reassess their assumptions about the public's capacity to respond constructively after a terrorist attack.
Virtual Reality (VR) based training and evacuation drills in disaster preparedness has been increasingly recognized as an alternative to traditional real-life drills and table-top exercises. Immersive collaborative VR evacuation drills offer a unique way for training in emergencies. The participants can enter the collaborative VR environment setup on the cloud and participate in the evacuation drill which leads to considerable cost advantages over large-scale real-life exercises. This paper presents an experimental design approach to gather data on human behavior and emergency response in a subway environment among a set of players in an immersive virtual reality environment. Our proposed multi-user VR-based training subway environment offers flexibility to run multiple scenarios and evacuation drills for disaster preparedness and response. We present three ways for controlling crowd behavior. First by defining rules for computer simulated agents, second by providing controls to the users to navigate in the VR environment as autonomous agents and the third by providing controls to the users with a keyboard/joystick along with an immersive VR head set in real time. Our contribution lies in our approach to combine these three approaches of behavior in order to simulate the crowd behavior in emergencies.
Survivors of disasters commonly provide each other with social support, but the social-psychological processes behind such solidarity behaviours have not been fully explicated. We describe a survey of 1240 adults affected by the 2010 Chile earthquake to examine the importance of two factors: observing others providing social support and social identification with other survivors. As expected, emotional social support was associated with social identification, which in turn was predicted by disaster exposure through common fate. Observing others' supportive behaviour predicted both providing emotional social support and providing coordinated instrumental social support. Expected support was a key mediator of these relationships and also predicted collective efficacy. There was also an interaction: social identification moderated the relationship between observing and providing social support. These findings serve to develop the social identity account of mass emergency behaviour and add value to disaster research by showing the relevance of concepts from collective action.
Purpose
– There is an assumption in emergency planning that the public will “panic” or refuse to comply in the event of mass decontamination. This assumption has serious implications for how the public will be managed. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors carried out semi-structured interviews with 13 emergency responders, six of whom had experience of incidents involving decontamination. The authors asked them, first, about their experiences of these events and, second, about their expectations for decontamination involving a large crowd. The aim was to explore the extent to which responders perceived non-compliance and anxiety as (crowd) problems during decontamination, and if so, how they felt that they could be addressed.
Findings
– Responders with experience of decontamination perceived non-compliance and excessive anxiety to be rare, and suggested that orderly behaviour was more common. However, the majority of emergency responders with no experience of decontamination said they expected panic and non-compliance. They therefore emphasised the importance of “controlling”, rather than communicating with, the public.
Research limitations/implications
– The authors argue that “control”-based emergency management strategies can impact negatively on the relationship between the public and responders, and hence hinder effective management of an incident. It would therefore be beneficial to provide training for emergency responders on likely public behaviour during incidents involving decontamination.
Originality/value
– This research extends previous research by facilitating a detailed understanding of emergency responders’ experiences and perceptions of managing incidents involving decontamination, and showing how these experiences and perceptions can affect the way in which such incidents are managed.
More than 160 people were killed in a fire in the Beverly Hills Supper Club near Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1977, an incident that appeared to be a classic case of panic involving a breakdown of social order and ruthless competition for exits. This paper analyzes transcripts of police interviews with club patrons to describe flight from the show room in which most of the deaths occurred. The descriptive analysis reveals that escape from the building was initially orderly and non-competitive; however, when escape became urgent, competition for the remaining exit possibilities developed. Even then the behavior did not appear to be in total disregard of social order; social norms and structural ties continued to constrain behavior.
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Past and present analyses of panic are summarized with respect to theories of causation and methods of prophylaxis. The disagreement in emphasis upon various physiological, psychological, and sociological factors indicates that the specific causes of panic are not yet known. The usual methods of social psychology are not well adapted to a direct study of panic. Better methods must be developed. 18-item bibliography. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
There is no need to document the fact that there is a substantial amount of popular and scientific interest in the behavior of human beings in relatively small scale emergencies ranging from fires in hotels, night clubs and high rise buildings to massive catastrophes such as the earthquake-fire situation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the 1923 Great Kwanto earthquake in Japan. There are, of course, many reasons for this interest, but a major one is undoubtedly the concern as well as the fascination with the idea that people in such extreme stress situations may “panic.” It seems to be also generally assumed that the panic behavior which may occur is basically maladaptive, i.e., adds to the loss of life and injuries which the physically destructive agent could have caused by itself. In short, panic is a focus of attention because it is thought to be a major potential human problem in most sudden extreme stress situations, including many fire emergencies.
Some observations on the nature of panic behavior: A normative orientation
- Wenger
The behavior of panic participants
- Quarantelli
The Barseback ‘panic’: A case of media deviance
- Rosengren