In a catastrophic event, most people fail to do
the one thing that would save their life, says
Michael Bond.
At seven o’clock in the evening of 27
September 1994, the cruise ferry MS Estonia
left Tallin with 989 people on board, heading for
Stockholm through the Baltic Sea. It never got
there. Six hours into the journey, pushing
through a force nine gale, the bow door broke
open and the ferry started taking on water.
Within an hour it had sunk, taking with it 852 of
its passengers and crew.
Even given the speed of tragedy, the stormy
sea and the length of time it took rescuers to
arrive (a full-scale emergency was only
declared half an hour after the sinking), survival
experts were astonished at the high death toll.
It appears that many people drowned because
they did nothing to save themselves. “A
number of people… seem to have been
incapable of rational thought or behaviour
because of their fear,” concluded the official
report into the accident. “Others appeared
petrified and could not be forced to move.
Some panicking, apathetic and shocked people
were beyond reach and did not react when
other passengers tried to guide them, not even
when they used force or shouted at them.”
What happened? One person who knows the
answer is John Leach , a military survival
instructor who researches behaviour in extreme
environments at the University of Portsmouth.
He has studied the actions of survivors and
victims from dozens of disasters around the
world over several decades (and as it happens
he was present at one of them, the fire at
King’s Cross underground station on 18
November 1987 which killed 31 people). He has
found that in life-threatening situations, around
75% of people are so bewildered by the
situation that they are unable to think clearly or
plot their escape. They become mentally
paralysed. Just 15% of people on average
manage to remain calm and rational enough to
make decisions that could save their lives.
(The remaining 10% are plain dangerous: they
freak out and hinder the survival chances of
everyone else.)
Stories about survival often focus on the 15%,
and what is so special about them that helps
them stay alive. But Leach thinks this is the
wrong question. Instead, we should be asking,
why do so many people die when they need
not, when they have the physical means to
save themselves? Why do so many give up, or
fail to adjust to the unfolding crisis? In most
disaster scenarios, he says, you don’t need
special skills to survive. You just need to know
what you should do. “My role as a combat
survival instructor is to teach people how to
survive. My role as a psychologist is to teach
people not to die.”
Emergency exit
We haven’t always had a clear picture of what
people really do in emergencies. Engineers
designing evacuation procedures used to
assume that people respond immediately when
they hear an alarm, smell smoke or feel their
building shake or their boat begins to list.
Yet as cases in recent decades began to show,
the real challenge is getting them to move
quickly enough. On 22 August 1985, 55 people
died in a Boeing 737 on the runway at
Manchester Airport in the UK after the plane,
which was bound for Corfu, suffered engine
failure during take-off. The government’s Air
Accident Investigations Branch reported :
“Perhaps the most striking feature of this
accident was the fact that although the aircraft
never became airborne and was brought to a
halt in a position which allowed an extremely
rapid fire-service attack on the external fire, it
resulted in 55 deaths. The major question is
why the passengers did not get off the aircraft
sufficiently quickly.”
Rather than madness, or an animalistic
stampede for the exits, it is often people’s
disinclination to panic that puts them at higher
risk.
One of the most graphic examples of crowd
passivity in recent times occurred in New
York’s Twin Towers after the hijacked planes
hit them on 9/11. You’d have thought those
who survived the initial impact would have
headed for the nearest exit pretty quickly. Most
did the opposite: they prevaricated. Those who
eventually got out waited six minutes on
average before moving to the stairs, and some
hung around for half an hour, according to a
study by the US National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) . Unprepared for what
was happening to them, they either carried on
as normal or hung around to see what would
happen, waiting for others to move first. One
study found that half of those who survived
delayed before trying to escape, making phone
calls, tidying things into drawers, locking their
office door, going to the toilet, completing
emails, shutting down their computer, changing
their shoes. One woman accustomed to
bicycling to work even returned to her office to
change into her tracksuit before trying to leave.
Survival mode
The prevailing psychological explanation for
these kinds of behaviours – passivity, mental
paralysis or simply carrying on as normal in the
face of a crisis – is that they are caused by a
failure to adapt to a sudden change in the
environment. Survival involves goal-directed
behaviour: you feel hungry, you look for food;
you feel isolated, you seek companionship.
Normally, this is straightforward (we know how
to find food or companions). But in a new,
unfamiliar environment, particularly a stressful
one such as a sinking ship or a burning aircraft,
establishing survival goals – where the exit is
and how to get to it – requires a lot more
conscious effort.
“In emergencies, quite often events are
happening faster than you can process them,”
explains Leach. The situation outruns our
capacity to think our way out of it. Jerome
Chertkoff , a social psychologist at Indiana
University, puts it another way: “Being in a
situation where your life is in danger increases
your emotional arousal, and high arousal
causes people to limit the number of
alternatives they consider. That can be bad
when trying to determine a course of action,
since you may never consider the option most
likely to result in escaping safely.”
This explains why in emergencies people often
fail to do things that under normal
circumstances would seem obvious. So the
only reliable way to shortcut this kind of
impaired thinking, most survival experts agree,
is by preparing for an emergency in advance.
“Practice makes actions automatic, without
[the need for] detailed thinking,” says Chertkoff.
This means making a mental note of the fire
exits when you go to the cinema (and
imagining yourself using them), reading the
evacuation guidance on the back of the door
when you stay in a hotel, and always listening
to aircraft safety briefings however frequent a
flyer you are. “Every time I go on a boat the
first thing I do is find out where my lifeboat
station is, because then if there is a problem I
just have to respond, I don’t have to start
thinking about it,” says Leach. Typically,
survivors survive not because they are braver
or more heroic than anyone else, but because
they are better prepared.
What about how you deal with other people? No
matter how well-primed you are, one aspect of
emergency situations will always be out of our
control: how those around us behave. Here,
too, the scientific understanding is at odds with
common wisdom or what we are likely to read
in the media.
Commentators often highlight the supposed
stupidity or madness of crowds during disasters
– a stampede of pilgrims, the crush of a
football crowd, the blind scramble for the exits
in a burning nightclub. In reality, this is rarely
what happens. Research shows that in most
scenarios, groups of people are more likely to
help each other than hinder. “In emergencies,
the norm is cooperation,” says Chris Cocking,
who studies crowd behaviour at the University
of Brighton. “Selfish behaviour is very mild and
tends to be policed by the crowd rather than
spreading.”
Take the suicide bombings on London’s
transport system on 7 July 2005, which killed
52 and injured more than 700. For several
hours, hundreds of passengers were trapped in
smoky underground tunnels with no way of
knowing if they would be rescued, nor if further
explosions were imminent. Amid this chaos,
most people were highly cooperative and
helpful, according to survivors interviewed by
Cocking, John Drury at the University of Sussex
and Steve Reicher at the University of St
Andrews. Psychologists call this response
“collective resilience”: an attitude of mutual
helping and unity in the middle of danger.
Stronger together
Drury, Cocking and Reicher have documented
many examples of collective resilience. In
2008, they talked to survivors of 11 mass
tragedies or incidents from the previous four
decades, including the 2001 Ghana football
stadium crush in which 126 people died while
trying to escape through locked exits, and the
sinking of the cruise ship Oceanos off South
Africa in 1991 (when remarkably all 500-odd
passengers survived). In each case, group
solidarity was more prevalent than selfishness.
Cocking thinks that people’s tendency to
cooperate during emergencies increases the
chances of survival for everyone. “Individually,
the best thing tactically is to go along with the
group interest. In situations where everyone
acts individually, which are very rare, that
actually decreases effective group evacuation.”
Still, some emergencies can be so
disorientating that cooperation may be beyond
some people. For a dramatic example of how
differently people behave when their life is on
the line, consider the story of the British-Irish
Atlantic Odyssey rowing team who in January
2012 attempted to cross the ocean east to
west in a record-breaking 30 days. After 28
days, a freak wave capsized their boat while
they were still 500 miles (800 kilometres) from
their destination in Barbados. According to
Mark Beaumont, an adventurer and broadcaster
who was part of the six-strong crew, they
would all have drowned had several of them
not dived repeatedly under the upturned hull to
free the life raft and retrieve the emergency
beacon, GPS tracker, satellite phone, fresh
water and food.
Deep shock
But not all of the crew reacted so rationally. “A
couple of the guys went into pretty deep
shock,” he recalls. “One of them could barely
get a word out. He just shut his eyes and shut
down.” Later, this colleague, who was a strong
rower, explained to Beaumont that he had
become overwhelmed by the situation. “I was
completely out of my league,” he told him. “I
thought the best thing to do was take up as
little room as possible in the life-raft, shut my
eyes and wait for it to pass, whether that was
to die or be rescued.”
The chances are you will never find yourself in
a disaster situation. But it’s a good idea to
imagine that you will: to be aware that there
are threats out there, and that you can prepare
for them, without sliding into paranoia. “All you
have to do is ask yourself one simple question,”
says Leach. “If something happens, what is my
first response? Once you can answer that,
everything else will fall into place. It’s that
simple.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150128-how-to-survive-a-disaster