Natural Hazards Observer
| November 2006 | Volume XXXI | Number 2 |
Disaster Myths...Second in a Series
Panic and the Vision of Collective Incompetence
As is the case with every myth, panic has complex origins and meanings. It is an emotional word that has been used and emphasized in different ways at different times throughout history. Widely used today, it is often associated with social response to a disaster. It is expected by officials and laypeople, and perpetuated by media and popular culture, that when disaster strikes, panic will ensue, and social norms will break down. This, however, is not the case.
In this article, I will comment briefly on the mythological origin of the term and on its frequent use as a descriptor of psychological states before moving to its common use as a predictor of collective irrationality and incompetence. (For those who wish to examine some of the research literature, a list of resources follows.) I will end by discussing how emergency management is often organized to deal with predicted vulnerabilities rather than to mobilize social capital to deal with actual threats.
The Origin of “Panic”
The Longman Dictionary of Psychology and Psychiatry defines panic as “an acute reaction involving terror, confusion, and irrational behavior.”(1) This is the definition that is most often attributed to disaster behavior. The word itself has its origins in Greek mythology and is attributed to Pan, a pipes-playing god with the horns, legs, and ears of a goat, who was known for instilling great and unfounded fear in solitary travelers as well as herds of animals and crowds of people, which sent them fleeing, or stampeding, in panic. He was also considered to be the antithesis of Apollo, the measure of culture and sophistication. Get the picture?
Panic as Emotional Self-Description
In modern societies that emphasize individualism and psychological states, panic is frequently used to describe our personal reaction to problematic situations, which are unexpected and possibly threatening and uncertain. A number of years ago, my wife and I were seated in the next to the last row of an airplane when, shortly after takeoff, we were informed that the plane needed to return to the airport. On landing, we were emphatically told to evacuate the plane; the tail engine was on fire. As the doors opened and the slides deployed, those in front of us moved out and so did we. The hundred or so passengers and the crew got out safely. At the time, I recalled an ancient Chinese proverb that of the 36 ways to escape danger, running away is the best. And so we ran, along with the others, until we regrouped in a field a safe distance from the burning plane. While fear was a factor, the decision to remove ourselves from danger required reasoning and was the rational choice; we did not panic.
In conversations back at the terminal, I was struck by the extensive use of the term panic. I was equally struck by the lack of comment on our very successful evacuation. As one of the last ones out, I noted that passenger behavior during the evacuation was much more rational and courteous than it had been earlier when we loaded the plane for takeoff. I am confident that in retelling their experiences later, most passengers described the panic rather than the successful evacuation.
Panic as Collective Irrationality
As previously mentioned, the more conventional meaning of panic centers on the notion of irrational and rapid physical flight in situations considered dangerous to the persons involved. It is also often believed that panic is contagious (if one person panics and flees, others will follow, which exacerbates the problem). While panic flight is not unheard of, it is extremely rare in disasters and similar kinds of crisis, and the notion that panic behavior spreads through contagion has been widely discredited. There is no empirical evidence that supports the broad application of this definition of panic to disaster behavior. On the contrary, decades of disaster research shows that people behave rationally in the face of danger, acting to protect themselves as well as others. Simply put, people do not regress to stampede behavior.
The assumption that in a disaster people will flee danger without any rational thought and without regard for others has disastrous policy implications. It enforces the misconception that information about potential threats should be withheld from the public to avoid having to control hoards of people fleeing in panic. When officials buy-in to the belief that people are ill-equipped to handle bad news, they fail their citizens by denying them crucial preparedness and warning messages and delaying evacuation orders, often until it is too late.
It is not clear how the mythology of Pan moved so easily into contemporary reality. Researchers have been unable to determine at what point in history the notion emerged that panic undermined society’s ability to deal with threats and danger. Certainly, such themes have been implicit in religious texts and in political histories. There was considerable discussion after World War I about reputed panic among military troops. Charles Fritz once mentioned to me, only partly in jest, that most of the reports that emphasized the occurrence of irrational panic were written by colonels to their commanding generals. These reports explained the rational actions of their troops as they withdrew from impossible situations. Situations created by their colonels’ irrational orders. So, where was the panic?
In other words, imputations of panic are made by those in charge when people behave differently and even more rationally than expected. The theme of the inability and inadequacy of civil society to deal with new emergent threats has been rather consistent. In the beginning of the Atomic Age, Val Peterson, director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration under Dwight D. Eisenhower, published “Panic—The Ultimate Weapon” in Collier’s, a popular U.S. weekly, suggesting that “mass panic—not the A-bomb—may be the easiest way to win a battle, the cheapest way to win a war.”(2) And, more recently, a terrorism expert posited that panic caused by terrorism could lead to the collapse of civil society.(3)
Some have suggested that we have seen an increase in the market for fear in recent times. Almost every profession is now working on worst-case scenarios of biblical proportions—greater earthquakes, worldwide pandemics, global warming, more hurricanes, even asteroids. We have become more inventive in constructing possible combinations; terrorists, for example, might destroy an atomic energy plant in an urban area during an earthquake. And the media and popular culture, especially movies, regularly provide us with visual images of panicky mobs rushing toward the exit of civilization.
Accepting the Panic Myth as Truth
Unfortunately, without the ability to predict the future, and given current attitudes about human behavior, we often build our models of emergency management with an emphasis on controlling panic rather than recognizing our social resources for problem solving and empowering our citizens. We move in the direction of government paternalism and away from developing local self-sufficiency. Instead of increasing knowledge of threats, there is emphasis on controlling and restricting knowledge to official sources.
Emergency response has become the province of experts and therapists. The only role for citizens is as victims. While we may understand our vulnerabilities, we are not so good at recognizing our own capabilities and resilience. Local knowledge and local resources are devalued and the emphasis on external assistance undercuts the importance of local coping skills. In addition, the emphasis on external intervention discounts existing social networks and local social capital in order to create victims to help. Threats and disasters create problems for people, but they do not create problem people. In most disaster situations, people work together and help each other (at times to their own detriment). They likely feel fear, but they rarely panic. I could conclude with the usual advice—do not panic—but that would be gratuitous.
Russell R. Dynes (rdynes@udel.edu)
Disaster Research Center
University of Delaware
References
(1) Goldenson, R.M. 1984. Longman dictionary of psychology and psychiatry. New York: Longman.
(2) Peterson, V. 1953. Panic—The ultimate weapon. Collier’s August 21. p. 100.
(3) Wood, D. 2002. America is dangerously vulnerable to panic in terror attack, experts say. Newhouse News Service. August 22. www.newhousenews.com/archive/story1a082102.html.
Resources
Aguirre, B. 2005. Emergency evacuation, panic and social psychology. Psychiatry 68 (2): 121-29.
Clarke, L. 2002. Panic: Myth and reality. Contexts Fall: 21-26.
Johnson, N. 1987. Panic and the breakdown of social order, popular myth, social theory, empirical evidence. Sociological Focus, 20 (August): 171-83.
Jones, E., R. Woolven, B. Durodie, and S. Wessely. 2006. Public panic and morale: Second World War civilian responses reexamined in light of the current anti-terrorist campaign. Journal of Risk Research 9 (1): 57-73.
Quarantelli, E. 2006. Sociology of panic. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. N. Smelser and P. Bates, 2nd ed. Oxford: Elsevier.