Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [67]
It’s difficult to know for sure whether humans had enough predators to need to form selfish herds. After all, humans’ greatest predators have always been other humans. But we make formidable predators, and our best chances of survival are usually improved by sticking together. Groupthink, then, is the adaptive strategy of prioritizing group harmony. Dissent is uncomfortable for the group because it can be dangerous to the individual. Sometimes, when we appear to value the group ahead of our own skin, we are actually doing something else altogether.
The Wedding Party
At the Beverly Hills, the waitress told McCollister, the young bride, that her party had to leave. There was a small fire, but they could come back as soon as it was extinguished, she said. Hearing the news, McCollister turned to find her mother. As she turned, she noticed another waitress opening a folding wall in the center of the room. The opened partition revealed a wall behind it, entirely in flames. Then McCollister looked down the hallway and saw smoke flooding in like water. She felt a clarity of purpose, all of a sudden. “‘Everybody out, now,’” she said, ushering the guests out the French doors to the garden. “I put my arms out and was pushing people out the door, kind of like cattle, to show them where to go.” People were obedient and calm, she says, remarkably so. She felt filled with responsibility for her guests. “This is my party. They were there because of me.”
A woman in an adjoining room appeared to be trapped. So one of her guests lifted up a chair to throw it against the glass and rescue the woman. McCollister’s brother-in-law stopped the man. “Don’t throw the chair. They will sue you,” he said. But then another man threw the chair anyway, and the woman ran out.
McCollister was one of the last to leave the room. It seemed like a quarter of an hour had passed since they had learned of the fire, but it was probably just a couple of minutes. She and her guests got about seven feet into the garden when the room exploded behind them. The back of her dress was blackened. She turned around and stared at the inferno. “Most of us just sat there in shock,” she says. “I think this is where the groupthink happened. It looked like a movie. We just stood in disbelief.”
But not everyone stayed with the herd. The band members reached into the room and began throwing instruments out of the fire. McCollister’s cousin ran back in and rescued a wedding gift, a Baccarat crystal jelly jar that McCollister still has. One bridesmaid, Kathy, sprang into action. She was training to be a nurse, so she started helping the medics who arrived. Then she jumped in the ambulance and kept helping, shuttling back and forth between the fire and the hospital. “I remember seeing her carry IV bags back and forth. I was so amazed. She just picked up and went at it,” McCollister says. “Her dress got torn, she lost her shoes, and finally she just took her dress off and wore a hospital smock. She was awesome, absolutely awesome.”
McCollister herself picked up the train of her dress and wrapped it around her waist. She put her aunt and uncle in a jeep that was taking people away from the scene. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of her other friends leave with her husband. They had medical training, but they left. She was appalled. “You just don’t leave.” The women had been close friends, and McCollister was supposed to be in the woman’s wedding shortly after her own. But she never spoke to her again. The woman had abandoned the group.
Along with her new husband, McCollister joined a human chain that had formed to pull people out of the Cabaret Room, just off the garden. This room in particular seemed to have no end of victims.