The role of social identity in
emergencies and mass
evacuations
John Drury
University of Sussex, UK
Acknowledgements
 Chris Cocking (University of Sussex, UK)
 Steve Reicher (University of St Andrews, UK)
The research was made possible by a grant from the Economic
and Social Research Council Ref. no: RES-000-23-0446.
Popular images of mass emergency and
evacuation behaviour
1. Crowd ‘panic
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‘Instinct’ overwhelms socialization
Emotion outweighs reasoning
Rumours and sentiments spread uncritically
Reactions disproportionate to danger
Competitive and personally selfish behaviours
predominate
Ineffective escape
Popular images of mass emergency and
evacuation behaviour
2. ‘Blitz spirit’:
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Adversity brings people together
More solidarity when people feel under attack
People pull together
Resilience, coping, strength
Sense of community
Explaining social behaviour and
helping in mass emergencies
 Affiliation
 existing social ties) determine how people
behave, whether they survive
 e.g. fire at the Summerland leisure complex in
1973 (Sime, 1983)
 BUT how, when and why do people co-
operate with strangers – sometimes even
risking their lives to help them? (‘Blitz spirit’)
Research questions
 How do crowds behave when faced with
danger such as natural disasters or terrorist
attacks?
 Does ‘mass panic’ occur?
 Do people just help their families and friends?
 Does a shared social identity (sense of
unity, togetherness) enhance co-ordination
and co-operation in disasters and
emergencies?
The research
 An archive, questionnaire and interview study
of survivors’ experience of the London
bombings of July 2005.
 A comparative interview study of a number of
different emergency events
 Experimental simulations of emergency
evacuations
London bombings of 7/7/05
Three bombs on the London Underground and one on
a London bus
56 people killed (including the four bombers) over 700
injured
Those in the bombed underground trains were left in
the dark, with few announcements, and with no way of
knowing whether they would be rescued, whether the
rail lines were live and so on.
There were fears by both those in the trains and the
emergency services of further explosions.
London bombs: data-set
12 face-to-face interviews plus seven e-mail responses
Secondary data:
(i) ‘Contemporaneous’ interviews with survivors and
witnesses, from 141 different articles in 10 different
national daily newspapers.
(ii) 114 detailed personal accounts of survivors (web,
London Assembly enquiry, books or retrospective
newspaper features.
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= data from at least 145 people, most of whom (90)
were actually caught up in the explosions
Personally selfish and competitive
behaviour was rare
 Personal accounts: only four cases of
people's behaviour that could be described as
personally selfish, and six cases where the
speaker suggested that another victim
behaved selfishly to them or to someone
else.
 Seven people referred to their own behaviour
as selfish BUT in most cases this seemed to
be ‘survivor guilt’
Mutual help was common
In the personal accounts:
 42 people reported helping others
 29 reported being helped by others
 50 reported witnessing others affected by the
explosions helping others
 ‘this Australian guy was handing his water to
all of us to make sure we were all right I I was
coughing quite heavily from smoke inhalation
and so [ ] I’d got a bit of a cold anyway which
aggravated it [ ] and also I mean he was
really helpful but when the initial blast
happened I was sat next to an elderly lady a
middle aged lady … and I just said to her “are
you all right?”’
 (Edgware Road)
LB7: these guys helped me up on the platform
and then this woman came and asked if I was
alright and then held my hand as we walked
up the platform together. And um got the lift
up to the tube station and sat down for ages
and ages and then this really nice woman
came and sat with me and put her coat round
me kind of looked after me
Female, early 20s, King’s Cross (in carriage
bombed)
‘People outside our carriage on the track were
trying to save the people with very severe
injuries - they were heroes.
The driver of our train did his utmost to keep all
passengers calm - he was a hero. If he knew
what had happened he gave nothing away.’
(King’s Cross)
Affiliation?
Most of the people affected were amongst
strangers:
 nearly 60 people in the personal accounts
reported being amongst people they didn’t
know (including 48 people who were actually
on the trains or bus that exploded)
 only eight reported being with family or
friends at the time of the explosion.
Did people help despite feeling in
danger themselves?
 There was a widespread fear of danger or
death through secondary explosions or the
tunnel collapsing. Yet:
 Nine of our 19 respondents gave examples of
where they had helped other people despite
their own fear of death.
Was there a sense of shared identity?
 Occasional references to unity and shared
fate in secondary data, e.g. ‘Blitz spirit’
 BUT no references to dis-unity either
 Interview data:
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Nine out of twelve were explicit that there was
a strong sense of unity in the crowd
References to unity were not only typical but
also spontaneous and elaborate/detailed:
 ‘empathy’
 ‘unity’
 ‘together’
 ‘similarity’, ‘affinity’
 ‘part of a group’
 ‘you thought these people knew each other’
 ‘vague solidity’
 ‘warmness’
 ‘teamness’
 ‘everybody, didn’t matter what colour or nationality’
London bombs: Summary
 No mass panic behaviour
 Mutual aid was common, personally selfish
behaviour was rare
 Most people felt in danger but continued to
help
 Evidence of unity in the primary data
 Hence relationship between: external threat,
shared identity, helping behaviour
Study 2: Multiple events
 Interviews with (21) survivors of (11) disasters (and
perceived/potential disasters): e.g. Hillsborough
(1989), sinking ships, Bradford City fire (1985),
Fatboy Slim beach party (2002)
H1. Greater common identity = more
helping
 Estimated strength of identity
 Measured number of helping incidents (which
outnumbered ‘selfish’ incidents anyway)
 Level of common identity predicted amount of
helping incidents (given, received, observed)
marginally significantly, β = 0.42, SE B = 0.23,
t(20) = 1.99, p = 0.06.
 Int. How would you describe those who were in the
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evacuation with you? Is there any phrase or word you
would use to describe them?
J2 As as a whole group?
Int Yeah
J2 ……I guess I’d say mutually supportive ..We
were all strangers really we were certainly
surrounded by strangers but …. most of, I mean I’d
got my kids by me, but most people were split up
from anybody they knew, and yet there was this sort
of camaraderie like you hear about in the war times
and this sort of thing .. there there was certainly a
pulling together as apposed to a pulling apart.
(Jupiter 2)
H2. Perceived threat leads to common
identity
 London bombs study suggested that unity
emerged and developed within the event
itself: shared fate brings people together.
 regression of perceived threat to self on level
of common identity was found to be a trend in
the predicted direction (β = 0.46, SE B = 0.28,
t(14) = 1.86, p = 0.09)
 all of a sudden everyone was one in this situ- when
when a disaster happens when a disaster happens, I
don’t know, say in the war some- somewhere got
bombed it was sort of that old that old English spirit
where you had to club together and help one another,
you know, you had to sort of do what you had to do,
sort of join up as a team, and a good example of that
would be when some of the fans got the hoardings
and put the bodies on them and took them over to the
ambulances
 (Hillsborough 3)
Issues remaining from field studies
 Shared identity measured after the event
 Ideally, to show that shared identity matters in
helping in mass emergency behaviour,
psychologists need to be able to manipulate it
in the lab then measure the effects
Study 3: Experimental simulation
Simulation study - design
 Participants had task of escaping from fire in
underground rail station
 In the computer simulation:
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characters were sometimes in their way
some characters were in need of help – but
helping would delay your exit
Participants had to escape as quickly as
possible
Simulation study - results
 Participants were either cast as ‘group’
members (social identity) or individuals
(personal identity)
 In most cases, those cast as group members
helped the characters in need more than did
other participants, even if this meant delaying
their exit
 In questionnaires they indicated they cared
more about the other characters than did the
‘personal identity’ participants
Overall conclusions
 Helping behaviour is more common than
panic in emergencies and disasters
 Shared identity explains some of the helping
behaviour (and reduces ‘selfish’ behaviour) in
emergencies
 In contrast to ‘panic’, an emergency brings
people together not drives them apart
Practical implications
 If ‘panic’ is wrong and crowd behaviour is social and
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meaningful
 More emphasis is needed on communicating with the
crowd and less on the crowd as a physical entity (exit
widths)
If shared social identity is the basis of much helping
 Those in authority should encourage a sense of collective
identity in the public
If there is a potential for resilience among strangers
 The authorities and emergency services need to allow and
cater for people’s willingness to help each other
Survivors’ need for mutual support groups may be therapeutic
and need to be researched
The role of group-behaviour in emergencies needs to be
included in existing computer-based models of crowd
dynamics for increased psychological realism
Take-home message
 The collective is a resource not an obstacle in
mass emergencies
 Rather than being excluded from emergency
defence and evacuation, the public should be
allowed to be more centrally involved