Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [52]
People need roofs, roads, and health care before quibbles like personality and risk perception count for much. And the effect is geometric. If a large nation raises its GNP from $2,000 to $14,000 per person, it can expect to save 530 lives a year in natural disasters, according to a study by Matthew Kahn at Tufts University. And for those who survive, money is a form of liquid resilience: it can bring treatment, stability, and recovery.
But in rich countries like America, where the GNP is about $42,000 per person, individual traits can make a difference. In fact, your personal makeup can be more important than the facts of the disaster. “What will eventually determine chronic stress in a discrete event is genetics and personality more than the details of the event,” says Ilan Kutz, a trauma expert and psychiatrist in Israel. All other obvious things (like gender, weight, and income) being equal, some people outperform others. They are simply hardier. The grand mystery is why.
The Finer Distinctions
At an upscale restaurant in downtown Portland, Oregon, two women are eating together at a table by the window. In the middle of their conversation, a drunken homeless man stumbles up to the window, unzips his pants, and pulls his penis up to the table. After a short period of gasps and guffaws, the police are called. Officer Loren Christensen arrives at the scene and finds two extremes. One of the women, he says, is “laughing her head off.” The other is slumped on a bench in the lobby with someone fanning her.
In his twenty-five years as a police officer, Christensen noticed this kind of variance often—particularly among female victims of flashers. “One would laugh it off. Another would be enraged. Still another would be emotionally traumatized.” Christensen, who has retired from the police force and now works as an author and martial-arts instructor, has always had trouble discerning what makes one person react so differently from another—even in war, when he was a military policeman. “In Vietnam, I saw people psychologically impacted in the extreme who worked as cooks. Cooks! And I saw infantrymen who had seriously faced the dragon who appeared, at least on the surface, to be fine.”
Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster. Dangers seem more manageable to these people, and they perform better as a result. “Trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder,” says George Everly Jr., at the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness in Baltimore, Maryland.
This makes sense. A healthy, proactive worldview should logically lead to resilience. But it’s the kind of unsatisfying answer that begs another question. If this worldview leads to resilience, well, what leads to the worldview?
The answer is not what we might expect. Resilient people aren’t necessarily yoga-practicing Buddhists. One thing that they have in abundance is confidence. As we saw in the chapter on fear, confidence—that comes from realistic rehearsal or even laughter—soothes the more disruptive effects of extreme fear. A few recent studies