Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [65]
The Beverly Hills employees had received no emergency training, but they performed magnificently anyway. Dammert directed the crowd out through a service hallway into the kitchen. There were too few exits in the club, and they were hard to find. The place was like a maze, actually. He remembers having to repeatedly scream at certain patrons to “get the hell out!” He risked his life because he felt obligated to do so. “My thought was that I’m responsible for these people. I think most of the employees felt that way.”
At the time of the fire, Norris Johnson and William Feinberg were sociology professors nearby at the University of Cincinnati. They were riveted by the news of the fire, like everyone else in the area. As sociologists, they were particularly curious to know how a group of strangers in tuxes and ball gowns had behaved during a sudden and merciless fire. Eventually, they managed to get access to the police interviews with hundreds of survivors—a rare and valuable database. “We were just overwhelmed with what was there,” remembers Feinberg, now retired. People were remarkably loyal to their identities. An estimated 60 percent of the employees tried to help in some way—either by directing guests to safety or fighting the fire. By comparison, only 17 percent of the guests helped. But even among the guests, identity influenced behavior. The doctors who had been dining at the club acted as doctors, administering CPR and dressing wounds on the grounds of the club like battlefield medics. Nurses did the same thing. There was even one hospital administrator there who—naturally—began to organize the doctors and the nurses.
The sociologists expected to see evidence of pushing or selfish behavior. But that’s not what they found. “People kept talking about the orderliness of it all. It was really striking,” says Feinberg. “People used what they had learned in grade school fire drills. ‘Stay in line, don’t push, we’ll all get out.’ People were queuing up! It was just absolutely incredible.”
Safety in Numbers
Life is simpler when lived alone. That may be why far more creatures roam the planet alone than in groups. Male elephants, which have no real predators, do not bother with other elephants except to mate. They stomp across the land unburdened by others.
Humans are not so self-sufficient. We mingle in groups our whole lives, and we cling to one another in disasters. After the terrorist bombings on the London transit system on July 7,2005, which killed fifty-two and wounded hundreds, some victims actually resisted leaving the tube station. “I needed the [others] for comfort,” one victim explained to U.K. psychologist Drury. “I felt better knowing that I was surrounded by people.”
When children are involved, the reason for solidarity is plain. A species’ survival depends upon protecting its young, and human babies are more vulnerable longer than any other animal offspring. But we see the same behavior among adult groups. One study of mining disasters found that miners tended to follow their groups even if they disagreed with the group’s decisions. Grown men trapped underground would rather make a potentially fatal decision than be left alone.
Why is that? Morality aside, is there any practical reason to value camaraderie as much as we do? Why don’t we behave like animals in these situations? Or do we? I called primatologist Frans de Waal to see if other mammals behave the same way in life-or-death situations. Maybe our own behavior is just a by-product of civilization—a charming but unnatural bit of gallantry.
De Waal has written eight books on chimpanzees and spent decades observing them in captivity. Chimps and humans share about 99.5 percent of their evolutionary history, so the comparison can be instructive. When chimpanzees see a possible enemy, de Waal says, they gather close and start to touch each other. They might even embrace. In other words, they act a lot like humans. “A common threat has a unifying effect,