Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [85]
The Brazilians, as it turns out, were just as orderly and rational as the Brits. He found no statistically significant difference in their response times. And miraculously, no one bit his or her tongue off in either hemisphere.
In 1954, a young sociology PhD candidate at the University of Chicago named Enrico L. Quarantelli pushed aside all the conventional wisdom and painstakingly mapped out when panic occurred and when it didn’t. His resulting paper, published in the American Journal of Sociology, was dry but groundbreaking. Through 150 interviews following three different disasters, Quarantelli drew up a sort of recipe for panic.
Panic occurs if and only if three other conditions are present, Quarantelli concluded. First, people must feel that they may be trapped. Knowing they are definitely trapped is not the same thing. In fact, in submarine disasters, such as the horrific sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000, humans are not likely to panic. The crew knows there is no way out. At submarine depths, even if they were to swim out of the hatch, they would not survive.
But if people worry that they might be trapped, that is a trigger for panic—even in wide open spaces. “War refugees caught in the open by strafing planes can develop as acute a sense of potential entrapment as individuals in a building during an earthquake who see all exits becoming blocked by debris,” Quarantelli wrote.
Second, panic requires a sensation of great helplessness—which often grows from interaction with others. What starts as an individual sense of impotence escalates when people see their feelings reflected around them. One person caught in explosions in a factory explained it this way to Quarantelli: “I can truthfully say that when I heard the moaning and crying of the others, I did get quite panicky.” Perhaps the Blitz and the Three Mile Island accident, like most disasters, did not cause panic because people did not feel very helpless. They could take shelter or evacuate, after all. And following the Lake Wobegon effect, the psychological phenomenon named after Garrison Keillor’s above-average town, most people probably suspected that they would be among the lucky ones.
The final prerequisite to panic is a sense of profound isolation, Quarantelli found. Surrounded by others, all of whom feel utterly powerless, we realize we are exquisitely alone. We understand that we could be saved—but no one is going to do it. Panic is, in a way, what happens when human beings glimpse their own impending mortality—and know that it didn’t have to be so.
Quarantelli’s analysis is unsatisfying in some ways. “A sense of helplessness” is hard to define or measure. “A sense of isolation” is even more nebulous. As we’ve seen, most people feel a strong sense of solidarity in a disaster. Hajj pilgrims feel an overwhelming sense of unity. So if Quarantelli is correct, what causes a sudden sense of isolation?
Laboratory Panic
To find out, I returned to the aviation experts, people who understand human behavior better than almost anyone else—largely because the government requires them to do so. The crowd crush behavior seen on the hajj is, once in a rare while, seen on planes as well. Remember the Manchester plane disaster from Chapter 5, the mysterious 1985 accident modeled by Galea? A Boeing 737 carrying 131 passengers on a charter flight to Greece began its takeoff out of Manchester. The crew heard a thud and, thinking they had blown a tire or hit a bird, abandoned takeoff immediately. Nine seconds later, as they were cruising down the tarmac, the crew got a warning of a fire in the left