Collective resilience
in mass emergencies and disasters:
A new approach
John Drury
(University of Sussex)
Steve Reicher
(St Andrews University)
Chris Cocking
(London Metropolitan University)
British Psychological Society
Annual Conference 2009
Collective resilience
in mass emergencies and disasters:
A new approach
Acknowledgements
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
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
Models of resilience
‘Collective 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 largely to pre-existing social resources:
• ‘… 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. ....’ (Fielding & Anderson, 2008, p. 7)
‘Collective resilience’:
A social psychological model
Social identity →
• We trust and expect others to be supportive, practically and
emotionally (Drury & Reicher, 1999)
• in turn, reduces anxiety and stress (Haslam et al., 2005)
• Shared definition of reality (legitimacy, possibility)
• In turn, allows co-ordination (Turner et al., 1987)
• 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 (Haslam, 2004)
• 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 (Levine et al., 2005)
‘Collective resilience’
(Drury, Cocking, & Reicher, 2009a, b; Williams & Drury, 2009)
Origins of social identity and hence collective resilience:
(i) existing group memberships
(ii) emergent group memberships – ad hoc crowds
Novel claims of this approach:
• The concept of resilience can be applied to ‘unstructured’
collectives (crowds) not just ‘communities’
• The crowd as an adaptive mechanism
– Previous research has (over-)emphasized psycho-social
‘vulnerability’ of emergency crowds (e.g. mass panic)
– Being part of a psychological crowd can contribute to personal
survival in an emergency
7th July 2005 London bombings
(Cocking, Drury, & Reicher, in press 2009b)
Four bombs, 56 deaths, 700+ injuries. Emergency services
didn’t reach all the survivors Immediately.
Data
Contemporaneous newspaper accounts: 141
Personal accounts: 127
Primary data: interviews, 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…
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
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 crowd resilience in the London
bombings
• Survivors were mostly commuters
• ‘We-ness’ was emergent
• Almost all who referred to unity referred to shared
danger or ‘common fate’
• Sounds like ‘Blitz spirit’?
• Disasters bring people together (Fritz, 1968; Clarke, 2002)
• The psych mechanism: ‘Common fate’ is a
criterion for self-categorization (Turner et al., 1987)
Comparative event study
Interviews with (21) survivors of (11) emergencies
(Drury, Cocking, & Reicher, in press 2009a)
Sinking ships (Jupiter, 1988; Oceanos, 1991)
Harrods bomb (1983)
Hotel fire (1971)
Grantham train accident
(2003)
Tower block evacuations
(2001, 2002)
Bradford City fire (1985)
Fatboy Slim Brighton beach
party (2002)
Ghana football stadium crush (2001), Hillsborough crush (1989)
Step 1: Constructing comparisons
Low (n = 9) versus high (n = 12) identifiers
Step 2: Origins of enhanced identification
Identification
‘I felt in danger’
‘Shared sense of
danger’
a
Low
56a
67
High
67
92
Total
62
80
Figures are percentage of interviewees endorsing the statement, based on low-identification
sample size of nine and high-identification sample size of 12.
Step 3: Comparing high and low identifiers on cooperation and selfishness
‘Survivors helped others’
‘Other survivors helped me’
‘I helped other survivors’
‘Other survivors were personally
selfish to others’
‘Other survivors were personally
selfish to me’
‘I was personally selfish to other
survivors’
a
Identification
Low
High
a
78 (14) 83 (34)
44 (6)
66 (14)
33 (7)
66 (14)
Total
81 (48)
55 (20)
50 (21)
44 (5)
33 (4)
39 (9)
22 (2)
33 (5)
28 (7)
0 (0)
08 (1)
4 (1)
Figures are percentage of interviewees endorsing the statement. (Figures in
brackets indicate number of survivors the interviewee reported seeing or
experiencing.)
Step 4: Comparing low and high identifiers on
orderliness and disorderliness
‘Order and calm’
‘Control of emotions’
‘Mass panic’
‘Individual-only panic’
‘Everyday rules’
‘Normal roles’
‘Courtesy’
‘Discourtesy’
a
Identification
Low
High
22a
42
33
42
56
50
44
83
33
67
56
83
11
25
11
0
Figures are percentage of interviewees endorsing the statements.
‘I don’t think people did lose control of their emotions and I
think the restraint shown by .. particularly several of the..
individuals that I’ve mentioned I’ve talked about .. it was
the degree of the capacity of people to help others who
were clearly struggling, you know.. it’s it should be source
of great pride to those people I think. [ ] I mean a lot of
people were very.. as I was you know.. you’re being
pushed, you’re being crushed when you’re hot and
bothered you’re beginning to fear for your own personal
safety and yet they were I think controlling or tempering
their emotions to help… try and remedy the situation and
help others who were clearly struggling’
(Hillsborough 2)
Comparative event study - conclusions
• High-identification group more likely to report
shared danger (‘common fate’)
• Evidence of solidarity across the data-set – no
‘mass panic’
• BUT solidarity was greater for the highidentification group
• Solidarity involved strangers not just affiliates
Summary and conclusions
• In mass emergencies, resilience can be
enhanced by psychological group
membership
• The concept of ‘collective resilience’ offers
a social psychological account of (adaptive)
crowd behaviour in emergencies
• Reversal of perspective: crowd as solution
not (psycho-social) problem in emergencies