Collective resilience
in emergencies and disasters:
What can(‘t) be done
to prepare the public
John Drury
Department of Psychology
University of Sussex
Collective resilience
in emergencies and disasters
Acknowledgements
Steve Reicher (St Andrews University)
Chris Cocking (London Metropolitan University)
Richard Williams (University of Glamorgan)
The research referred to in this presentation was made possible by a grant from
the Economic and Social Research Council
Ref. no: RES-000-23-0446
Models of resilience
• ‘The ability to withstand or recover quickly
from difficult conditions’
• Policy and practice (‘resilience’ embodied
in institutions, organizational policies for
emergency preparedness/planning)
Models of resilience
Disaster research
• Resilience is the ability of organizations to recover from
attack and function successfully without top-down
direction (Dynes, 2003)
Factors:
• Informal networks (Tierney, 2002)
• Provision of resources (Kendra & Wachtendorf, 2001).
World Trade Center 2001: emergency services improvised
forms of coordination, despite loss of command and
control centre
Models of resilience
Psychology and psychiatry
• Personal resilience: ‘a person’s capacity for adapting
psychologically, emotionally and physically reasonably
well and without lasting detriment to self, relationships or
personal development in the face of adversity, threat or
challenge’ (NATO guidelines, cited in Williams & Drury,
2009)
Factors:
• Innate and acquired
• Developmental experiences
• Repertoires of knowledge
• Family, peer, school and employment relationships
• Life events
• Attachments
‘Collective resilience’
Models of resilience
Concept employed by a number of recent researchers (e.g., Almedon, 2005;
Kahn, 2005) either descriptively:
• ‘Collective resilience refers to the coping processes that occur in reference
to and dependent on a given social context’ (Hernández, 2002, p. 334).
Or with reference essentially to pre-existing social resources (bonds etc.):
• ‘… collective resilience [is] understood as the bonds and networks that hold
communities together, provides support and protection, and facilitates
recovery in times of extreme stress, as well as resettlement. These social
bonds are variously referred to as social networks, community facilities and
activities, active citizenship, or social capital. .... It refers to groups of
traumatised people whose old communities have been destroyed and who
are learning to survive in a new world, where community may be nonexistent, new or emerging, or multiple.’ (Fielding & Anderson, 2008, p. 7;
emphasis added)
(Although also a hint here of ‘emergence’)
‘Collective resilience’:
A social psychological model
Shared identity (psychological unity) →
• We trust and expect others to be supportive, practically and
emotionally
• in turn, reduces anxiety and stress
• Shared definition of reality (legitimacy, possibility)
• In turn, allows co-ordination
• In turn, enhances agency/power (the ability to organize the world
around us to minimize the risks of being exposed to further trauma)
• Allows us to feel collective ownership of the plans and goals we make
together
• Encourages us to express solidarity and cohesion
• Makes us see each other’s plight as our own and hence give support
sometimes at a cost to our own personal safety
‘Collective resilience’
(Drury, Cocking, & Reicher, 2009a, b; Williams & Drury, 2009)
Model derived from 20+ years of social identity research on group
processes, organizational and health behaviour (e.g. Haslam, 2004;
Haslam et al., 2009; Turner et al., 1987)
Origins of shared identity and hence collective resilience:
(i) existing group memberships – e.g. ‘communities’
(ii) emergent group memberships – ad hoc crowds
Novel claims of this approach:
• The concept of resilience can be applied to unstructured, ad hoc
collectives (crowds) not just organizations
• Hence doesn’t assume there needs to be existing bonds / networks
etc.
• Being part of a psychological crowd can contribute to personal survival
in an emergency (the crowd as an adaptive mechanism)
7th July 2005 London bombings
(Cocking, Drury, & Reicher, 2009b)
Four bombs, 56 deaths, 700+ injuries.
Emergency services
didn’t reach all
the survivors
Immediately.
Data
• Contemporaneous newspaper accounts: 141
• Personal (archive) accounts: 127
• Primary data: interviews and written e-mail
responses: 17
• Total: 146(+) witnesses, 90 of whom were
survivors
• Material coded and counted: ‘panic’, help versus
selfishness, threat of death, affiliation, unity…
Non-adaptive panic or adaptive order?
“It took about twenty twenty-five minutes before we
got out … and some people were really itching to
get off the train so more people the more agitated
people were not being shaken up they felt they
were, even though they wanted to get off at the
same time so it was quite a calm calm evenly
dispersed evacuation there wasn’t people running
down the train screaming their heads [off]. It was
very calm and obviously there was people crying
[ ] but generally most sort of people were really
calm in that situation, which I found amazing.”
(LB 1)
Helping versus personal ‘selfishness’
(Helping: giving reassurance, sharing water, pulling people from
the wreckage, supporting people up as they evacuated,
make-shift bandages and tourniquets)
Contemporaneous
newspaper
accounts
Archive
personal
accounts
Primary data:
Interviews and
e-mails
‘I helped’
‘I was helped’
‘I saw help’
‘Selfish’ behaviours
57
17
140
3
42
29
50
11
13
10
17+
4
Total
141
127
17
‘I remember walking towards the stairs and at
the top of the stairs there was a guy coming
from the other direction. I remember him
kind of gesturing; kind of politely that I
should go in front- ‘you first’ that. And I was
struck I thought, God even in a situation
like this someone has kind of got manners,
really.’
(LB 11)
“I didn’t see any uncooperative activity, I just
saw some people who were so caught up
in their own feelings that they were kind of
more focused on themselves but I didn’t
see anyone who was uncooperative. I
didn’t see any bad behavior”
(LB 4)
Accounting for help
Contemporaneous
newspaper
accounts
Archive
personal
accounts
Primary data:
Interviews and
e-mails
Possibility of death
Not going to die
70
-
68
2
12
1
With strangers
With affiliates
-
57
8
15
4
Total
141
127
17
Accounting for help
Contemporaneous
newspaper
accounts
Archive
personal
accounts
Primary data:
Interviews and
e-mails
Shared fate
Unity
Disunity
0
7
0
11
20
0
5
11
1
Total
141
127
17
Interview accounts:
‘unity’
‘together’
‘similarity’
‘affinity’
‘part of a group’
‘everybody, didn’t matter what colour or nationality’
‘you thought these people knew each other’
‘teamness’[sic]
‘warmness’
‘vague solidity’
‘empathy’
Int: “can you say how much unity there was
on a scale of one to ten?”
LB 1: “I’d say it was very high I’d say it was
seven or eight out of ten.”
Int: “Ok and comparing to before the blast
happened what do you think the unity was
like before?”
LB 1: “I’d say very low- three out of ten, I
mean you don’t really think about unity in a
normal train journey, it just doesn’t happen
you just want to get from A to B, get a seat
maybe”
(LB 1)
Explaining shared identity (unity) in London
bombings
• Survivors were mostly commuters
• ‘We-ness’ was emergent
• Almost all who referred to unity referred to ‘common fate’ –
to shared danger
• Sounds like ‘Blitz spirit’?
• As has been noted - Disasters bring people together (Fritz,
1968; Clarke, 2002)
• The psych mechanism: ‘Common fate’ is a criterion for
social identification (Turner et al., 1987)
Implications
• IF shared identity can arise from the emergency
or disaster itself, then collective resilience is
endogenous, in ‘human nature’
• Disaster planning and policy needs to take this
into account – or risk undermining it!
• This argument in line with that made by a number
of sociologists and disaster psychiatrists (e.g., Dynes,
Furedi, Wessely, Glass & Schoch-Spana)
Implications for disaster planning
1. Not protecting a psychologically ‘vulnerable’
public (by withholding information) but
organizing adequate communication plans
– Less anxiety, more efficacy and more
empowerment the more information
– The modern discrepancy between getting
(surveillance) versus giving information
technologies needs to be questioned
– BUT! communication requires trust
Implications for disaster planning
2. Understanding the crowd as a resource
not a (psycho-social) problem
• Example – London bombs: survivors acted as
fourth emergency service
• Catering for the public desire to help, allowing the
public to be involved in its own protection
Implications for disaster planning
3. Facilitating collective independence
Information
Practical, material resources are empowering
‘Emotional’ guidance (‘don’t panic’) and ‘treatment’
(expert post-trauma counselling)
(i) presuppose a dependent, passive public
(ii) reproduce a perceived relationship of inequality and
alienation
(iii) hence will encounter resentment, hostility and
resistance
Summary and conclusions
• Resilience is a key concept
• Model of ‘collective resilience’ based on social
psychological principles
• If correct then we need to understand the bases
and consequences of resilience in human
responses to disasters
• Emergency planning and preparedness needs to
take account of these natural bases to facilitate
(rather than undermine) resilience.