Collective resilience in the crowd:Collective resilience in the crowd:Lessons of the London bombings of July 7Lessons of the London bombings of July 7thth 2005 2005

John Drury(University of Sussex)

Royal College of Psychiatrists Annual Meeting 2009S10 Responding to terrorism: Mental health matters

AcknowledgementsThe 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 mass emergency behaviour

Psychosocial vulnerability– Maladaptive ‘mass panic’– Freezing– PTSD

Psychosocial resilience– Maintenance of adaptive social organization– Effective response/agency– Ability to cope and recover

7th July 2005 London bombings Drury, J., Cocking, C., & Reicher, S. (2009). The nature of collective resilience: Survivor reactions to the 2005 London bombings. International Journal of Mass

Emergencies and Disasters, 27, 66-95.

Four bombs, 56 deaths, 700+ injuries.

Emergency

services didn’t

reach all the

survivors

immediately.

Data-set

Contemporaneous newspaper accounts: 141Personal accounts: 127Primary data: interviews, written e-mail responses:

19

Total: 146(+) witnesses, 90 of whom were survivors

Material coded and counted: help versus selfishnessthreat of deathAffiliationunity…

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’ 57 42 13 ‘I was helped’ 17 29 10 ‘I saw help’ 140 50 19 ‘Selfish’ behaviours 3 11 4 Total

141

127

19

Accounting for help

Contemporaneous newspaper accounts

Archive personal accounts

Primary data: Interviews and e-mails

Possibility of death 70 68 12 Not going to die - 2 1 With strangers - 57 15 With affiliates - 8 4 Total

141

127

19

Accounting for help

Contemporaneous newspaper accounts

Archive personal accounts

Primary data: Interviews and e-mails

Unity 7 20 11 Disunity 0 0 1 Total

141

127

19

Interview accounts of ‘unity’:

‘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• Psychological unity 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 psychological mechanism: ‘Common fate’ is a criterion for shared social identity (Turner et al., 1987)

‘Collective resilience’: a social psychological model

Shared social identity →

We trust and expect others to be supportive, practically and emotionally (Drury & Reicher, 1999)

• reduces anxiety and stress (Haslam et al., 2005)

Shared definition of reality (legitimacy, possibility)• allows co-ordination (Turner et al., 1987)

• enhances our ability to organize the world around us to minimize the risks of being exposed to further trauma

Encourages us to express solidarity and cohesion• Makes us see each other’s plight as our own and hence give

support (Levine et al., 2005) sometimes at a cost to our own personal safety

Collective resilience: Implications

Through the perception of a ‘common fate’, even ad hoc crowds can share a social identity and hence exhibit collective resilience.

The crowd can be seen as an adaptive mechanism in emergencies – Previous research has (over-)emphasized psycho-

social ‘vulnerability’ (e.g. mass panic) in emergency crowds

– Being part of a psychological crowd can contribute to personal survival in an emergency

– The emergency services need to take account of the crowd desire and ability to contribute to rescue and recovery

Summary and conclusions

• The London bombs is one of many examples of adaptive crowd behaviour in an emergency

• Psychological group membership should be included as a factor in our overall conception of resilience

• Reversal of perspective: crowd as solution not (psycho-social) problem in emergencies