Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [84]
The Prerequisites of Panic
One way to solve the panic riddle is to consider when panic does not happen. Before Britain entered World War II, there was a long period of anticipation in London. Evacuations of children began. Sandbags lined the roads. People carried gas masks, and movie theaters closed down. British military planes droned above the populace, day after day. Authorities worried that German attacks on civilians, when they came, would cause widespread panic. In the Lancet, the editor of the British Journal of Medical Psychology wrote: “Since air raids may produce panic in the civilian population it is well to consider the factors that facilitate or diminish panic, and what steps, if any, may be taken against it.”
But when the bombs finally started falling, people behaved unexpectedly. In her captivating dispatches from London to the New Yorker after the war began, Mollie Panter-Downes described the public’s defiant stoicism: “The British are either the calmest or the stupidest people in the world,” she wrote. Appealing to the national sense of humor and identity, the Ministry of Information launched a clever series of advertisements depicting “correct British behavior” under stress: “What do I do in an air raid? I do not panic. I say to myself, ‘Our chaps are dealing with them,’ etc.” (Note the wonderfully blasé use of the word etc.) After the first major raid killed four hundred people, train commuters bragged to one another about the size of the bomb craters in their neighborhoods, Panter-Downes wrote, “as in a more peaceful summer they would have bragged about their roses and squash.”
Forty years later, the expectation of panic consumed U.S. Authorities after a nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. It was an unprecedented event, and good information was slow in coming. It was not even clear who was in charge. If ever a situation was ripe for panic, this would presumably qualify. At first, the governor advised everyone in a ten-mile radius to stay inside with their doors closed. Later, the governor announced that pregnant women and preschool children within a five-mile radius should evacuate. The National Guard was readied. Air-raid sirens sounded in the downtown area of the state capital. But the evacuation turned out to look a lot like any evacuation before a hurricane. The elderly were the least likely to evacuate. And the people who did leave did so in an orderly manner. The predicted anarchy from panicking drivers did not materialize.
What kept people calm? Ed Galea, the evacuation expert in the United Kingdom, had long wondered if culture influenced a public response to an emergency. The English are notoriously self-possessed, after all, and for all the countries’ differences, American culture is closely linked to that of Britain. Perhaps public reasonableness was a matter of nationality.
In January of 2005, Galea ran an experiment to try to find out. Would Brazilians respond the same way as Brits to a surprise fire alarm? Before running the experiment, Galea took bets among his British colleagues about what would happen. Half said the Brazilians would never move as quickly as the Brits. They would sit, finish their coffees, and then consider, just consider, making an exit. The other half of his colleagues had an even less attractive view of Brazilians: they predicted they would break into some kind of Latin American hysteria dance—panicking and running in all directions.
First he tested the Brits. He ran an unannounced drill in the beginning of the school year at the library at the University of Greenwich, which proceeded in a very orderly fashion. Then Galea flew to Brazil. When he got there, he found that the Brazilian authorities had about as little respect for their own people as his colleagues. They were