,
12 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Quick thread about this since a few people asked for more info:
Movies, TV shows, etc often suggest mass panic and antisocial behavior after disasters. People believe this and expect their governments to plan for it, or plan for it themselves (by having weapons, etc). But all the data says it's not true.
One of the fundamental papers on this in disaster literature is "Elites and Panic" by Lee Clarke and Caron Chess in 2008 (academic.oup.com/sf/article-abs…). They suggest that elites are far more likely to panic about the possibility of mass panic than the masses are to panic.
(I know that was a ridiculous sentence but take your time and parse it out, it's worth it)
Kathleen Tierney looked at the phenomenon of elite panic in the specific case of Katrina in a 2008 book chapter, "Hurricane Katrina: Catastrophic Impacts and Alarming Lessons" in Risking House and Home: Disasters, Cities, Public Policy, Quigley & Rosenthal, eds.
again, these - along with many other studies - show that mass panic pretty much doesn't happen in disasters, but fear of mass panic on the part of authorities can lead to negative consequences.
I can add my own observation to this. I've been in a fair number of immediate post-disaster situations. I have a particular memory of arriving in West Sumatra ~24 hours after the 2009 earthquake there, seeing long long lines for petrol, thinking "that's not good." No problems.
(at least no big problems, there may well have been small ones that I didn't learn about. but I was at coordination meetings everyday, not to mention my staff were buying petrol for us, would have heard about something big.)
A nuance to this: in their book The Real Disaster is Above Ground, Kroll-Smith and Couch found that while "natural" disasters tended to lead to "therapeutic communities" of people helping each other, technological/industrial disasters could have the opposite effect
That is particularly important as more and more "natural" disasters include elements of techno-industrial disaster as well (eg, levees and contaminated flood water in Katrina, Fukushima Dai-ichi in Japan, etc)
Again, this does not mean panic, it does not mean that people are not going to help you in the immediate aftermath. What they found was that over time, the uncertainty and power imbalances and long-term effects of industrial disasters are corrosive to communities.
I have a book chapter coming out in a few days in which I posit that disaster *response*, even after a "natural" disaster, can create many of the same conditions of uncertainty and blame and division springer.com/la/book/978303…
