“Panic in the skies”? Myths and realities about human behaviour in disasters and extreme events

Let me know whether you can see it or not. Perfect, perfect. Okay, so I will make a start. This is a brief talk about how people behave in disasters and extreme events. And I've been working on disasters since 2015, when I did my PhD in the Boxing Day floods in York, if some people might remember it. York flooded back in 2015, December 2015, January 2016. And they had an interest since then in disasters and extreme events. And I was always fascinated by how people behave, right? Because there are so many different misconceptions and so many different realities for how we behave. So today I want to just give you a brief overview of what we know about behavior, what we hear about it being irrational, and people as losing control, and so on, and what actually happens. Now, I will focus more on the first bit, what is actually the misconception. And I will have a brief overview of what actually happens. You will get some of that. But the main focus will be on the first part. So let's make a start. Now, if you think about popular imagination, right? And someone says, without thinking about it, tell us how do people behave? If a disaster hits right now, if a bomb goes off somewhere nearby, what will people do? And usually the response that, apologies, the response that you would expect to have is that people will panic, right? That when something happens, something sudden and extreme, like a bombing or an earthquake or something like that, people will panic, they will lose control, they will lose their mind. So it's important to look into this in some more detail. Now, why is the first thing that we will think about panic? Why is that the first thing that people will usually mention? And there are many reasons for this, of course. Everyday talk, it's a common concept that to some extent, attacks, for example, which actually happen, they're a clinical category in itself. But when this concept goes into public discourse, into everyday talk, it loses its meaning, it becomes problematic. And we will see why today. So in everyday talk, it's very widely used. On the cinema, again, can you imagine a movie where a disaster happens and people do not panic? It wouldn't be so interesting. It wouldn't be so, you know, it would be more like a documentary, not an action movie. On news reporting, people use this. Boris Johnson, when COVID started, said people should not panic by, and we will discuss this in a while. And because of all this, of course, people that run computer simulations or emergency responders or official governmental guidance on disasters, endorse sometimes this concept of panic. And, of course, this leads to problems. It leads to inappropriate emergency management or inefficient. Sometimes when the responders or the police think that people might panic, think that there might be disorder, this is followed by coercion, by violence sometimes. Sometimes they use code words to communicate threats because they think that people hear about what's happening, they will panic. We need to use code words to signal what we think is happening. Or they might withhold information altogether, which becomes a problem. So, in general, there are many different discourses of mass panic. There are many different ways of talking which are about mass panic, as I quote here, or collective pathology. This idea that the mass, people like the mass, they behave like a herd, they become a problem. And, for example, we have this narrative of mass panic, that when people are especially in conditions, they become very impulsive, very selfish, and we see uncoordinated responses. We have what we see as helplessness or the disaster syndrome, that people who survive are very stunned and cannot react. And we do know that in disasters, in these types of extreme events, instant extreme events, some people will freeze. When a bomb goes off, around 15 people, 15% of people will freeze. But we know that's not a generic response. Not everybody will freeze. And it's not because of panic. One argument is that our cognitive processing, how we process, our brain processes the world, freezes for a while and we cannot react. It's a shocking state. And that's another explanation. Or the other mass panic narrative is a civic disorder, that people in a crowd, they become criminals, and crowd conditions bring out the worst in our human nature. These are some common narratives related to mass panic. Now, why is that a thing? Where does it come from? We need to be a bit aware of history, and how we have these narratives being so widely used now in society. For start, there was a concern that soldiers would be losing discipline in times of war, and they would flee. So governments were worried about what would happen if their soldiers couldn't fight, if they were running away instead of standing their ground. Another reason was about governments having concerns about human-made disasters, like nuclear bombs, and how a nuclear holocaust would affect human behavior. And the idea here was that there would be disorganization, and there would be chaos and panic, and there would be problems, additional problems, on top of the nuclear bombs, that human behavior would be even worse than the bomb. It would pose even worse problems for those in charge. So you get the idea. It was usually people higher up worrying that people in other positions, usually lower, would lose their minds and would panic. And what were the causes of panic? Strauss, in 1944, wrote about many different reasons that would lead to panic, supposedly. Extreme danger, people not having faith in their leaders anymore, physical weakening, if you think about fatigue or exhaustion, or previous shock in times of war, for example, lessened mental ability, there would be confusion, noise, and distraction, and so on. Or emotional tensions that would cause people to hallucinate almost, because of being anxious and isolated. Or there would be suggestion, people would endorse ideas uncritically, and this would become contagious, and people would imitate these ideas. So the crowd would become a problem that would facilitate and spread dangerous behaviors, which were a problem for those in power, for governments, for the police. And many different psychologists developed ideas based on the idea of panic. McDougall, for example, spoke about contagion of ideas, this uncritical contagion of ideas, about fear becoming intensified and people acting impulsively. Lapierre said that people cannot interact anymore, and when interaction is being interrupted and disrupted, people just lose this sense of togetherness, and they just become, he says, an aggregate of shocked individuals, and they cannot act properly. And Freud, for example, of course, you know Sigmund Freud, one of the very, very important psychologists, wrote about panic in his work on crowd behavior, and said that panic appears because existing social bonds dissolve, and people lose their trust to the leader, and to other group members, of course, and this causes individualistic reactions from people. So what Freud said is the mutual ties have ceased to exist, and the gigantic and senseless dread is set free. A general agreement across all these psychologists is that crowds are one way in which panic spreads. And how do we go back to crowds? Why crowds specifically? Now some of you, some of you that might have seen the relevant chapter on day 110, some might not have seen it yet, some might not be on the module, one of the main psychologists related to this is Gustave Le Bon, and Gustave Le Bon was writing in the late 1900s about crowds and why they are irrational. And he was saying there are three mechanisms. One is submergence, and what he meant by this is that when we are close to a crowd, we are anonymous around other anonymous people, and this submergence in the crowd, we lose ourselves in it. And then because we have lost ourselves, and everybody's anonymous on a sea of anonymous people, there is contagion, there is a lack of judgment, people cannot judge what's happening, and all these ideas become contagious and uncritically adopted. And how does contagion work? He said because of suggestion, because of people, others who are influential, or because of what he called a racial unconscious, or randomly. People just are suggestible, they're gullible, they cannot think properly anymore, and ideas spread. And of course, Le Bon said that, for example, people in a crowd, they descend seven ranks in the ladder of civilization, isolate people that are cultivated individuals, in a crowd they become barbarians, acting by instinct. And of course, Le Bon has all sorts of problems. He had plagiarized his work from other thinkers of his time, but he plagiarized his work, and his book on crowd psychology in 1895 became a landmark. Hitler and Mussolini adored this book, because supposedly they were learning how to control the masses, and there is evidence of that. So you see that, because of Le Bon's work, all of many other psychologists, including Freud, were massively affected and influenced by this type of work. But let's now see what are the problems with this concept of panic. The first problem, the first bullet point that you see, is that it's used very inconsistently. If we look at what people mean when they talk about panic, some people will say they felt fear, so more negative emotions. Some will talk about physical reactions, shaking for a fast heartbeat, the bomb went off and then we were shaking for two days. Or the outcomes, they will say that panic is because there was a crowd crush, and if there was a crowd crush or a stampede, as they call them, which is incorrect, this is because of panic. They assume that the reason is panicking, it's a psychological reaction. But it's used very inconsistently. There is no definition about what panic and mass panic is. The second reason, and because it's used very inconsistently, is that it's very hard to operationalize. In other words, if you're a psychologist, you want to measure your concepts. You want to be able to make a questionnaire that you give to people and they will give an answer to it. They will answer it in some way. But because panic is so inconsistently used, it's very hard to make a scale out of it. Do we make a scale out of fear? Maybe. But why would fear be panic? Fear is a rational response. If there is a fire, I will feel afraid. If there is an animal chasing me, I will feel afraid. That's fear, that's not panic. So you see what the problem is. The third reason is that even in conditions where there should have been panic, the ideal conditions, there's no evidence of it. Quarantelli, a major sociologist of crowd, of disaster behavior, he died a few years ago sadly, said that there might be panic flight, people running away very fast when something happens, but it happens very rarely. It happens for very short distances and for a very short time. People will run fast, very far away usually, but it's endorsed by very few people. So it's not a generic response. And when we see this, when we see panic flight, this running from danger for a short bit, it usually happens when there is a sudden threat and direct threat, when there is a very limited spatial area, when escape is still possible, when others cannot help you, and it happens in closed spaces, if that makes sense. And the fourth reason is, how can we judge something as panic or as irrational from the outside? It's easy for us to do this from the outside, but for people who are in an emergency, are there when it happens, think about it, they don't have much information, right? Sometimes to overreact is appropriate. Most injuries or deaths in disasters happen because people underreact, not because they overreact. And sometimes when you have no information, and you might overreact a bit, you might make the wrong decision, you might take the wrong exit, you might do something that's incorrect. But an incorrect decision, keep that in mind, is not the same as an irrational decision. People can make mistakes and get injured or die because of them, but it doesn't mean that they are the wrong decisions, that they're irrational decisions. So hopefully this distinction makes some sense. And for all these reasons, there are issues with the concept of panic. If you look at these example events here, first World War chemical attacks, second World War bombing raids, the Hiroshima bombing, the Sarin attack in Tokyo, the 9-11 attacks, the London bombings 2005, we'll discuss this in more detail. Researchers didn't find any panic. Let's take 9-11 as an example, before the evacuation. And many of you will, I remember it, I was very young back then, but I still have this very vivid memory of watching live on TV, the planes, the national TV in Greece back then was showing it, I was in primary school and I still have this memory in my head. The planes have been crushed and there are reports about what people did afterwards, and during, you know, during the incident. In the pre-evacuation stage, people left immediately, many were getting ready to escape, they were preparing, many were seeking refuge, many were giving support or receiving support from others, and many, most people were gathering information, giving information, people were trying to help. This does not show us panic, right? During the evacuation stage, they split the stairs in half. On the left side, those that were uninjured were trying to go down, they were allowing the injured to go first, people were slowing down to help people with kids, more elderly people, people with different mobility issues, to go down. And the firefighters were going on the right. There was coordination, there was reasoned coordination to make the process better for everyone. This does not indicate panic. People were looking for victims, were giving information, were calling for their loved ones, were helping others to safety, coordinating all together. There were norms of appropriateness, women and children go first, for example, the elderly have a priority, they were trying to establish security, and you had people, of course, going to help from around the place. All of these do not show panic, they show coordinated, reasoned, responsible behavior. You might remember the beginning of COVID, I remember this, I was here in the UK when it happened, many countries had this phenomenon, they called it panic buying. People were hoarding toilet paper, hoarding everything, and it was common everywhere. Panic buying is a thing, the newspapers were talking about it, Boris Johnson came and said people should not panic buy. So we did a study back then. We looked at the literature, first of all, what do articles say about panic buying? What do other researchers say? And they were using the same narratives as Le Bon and all the other classic psychologists. Contagion of fear, amplified fear, herd behavior, people going back to their primitive instincts and so on, they couldn't be rational. People were trying to reduce internal conflict in their minds, logic would disappear, and people would become very isolated, selfish people just trying to secure their own interests. But we thought what we know about disasters is not this, we know that people behave rationally, usually any random irrational behaviors are done by tiny minorities, not by everyone. People support each other, so what is the case with panic buying? So we interviewed 23 people in the UK at the beginning of COVID, and we published a paper on this later on. And we found from the interviews, we saw the data, we saw the patterns in this data, and we found three things, three types of patterns. Many people use the word panic. They said, yes, I did buy more tomato sauce because I was panicking. And we asked them, okay, what do you mean by this though? What do you mean by panic? It was the usual story. They were saying, I was afraid, I was uncertain, I panicked. But it was more of this public, this cultural use of the word panic in a very general term to indicate all sorts of things. Fear, which makes sense, you don't know whether you're going to have food. Uncertainty, which is a normal response. None of us knew what was happening. Or product shortages. They were using the outcome as shortages as an example of panic, even though that was not the case. Just having empty shelves does not indicate panic. It's all sorts of other issues we will discuss in a while. The second thing was the role of the media. The media and how they reported things to create more drama, of course, and of course, to increase visibility. They were showing what other people were doing, and they were creating this perception that everybody was panic buying. So there was this idea of what we call in psychology, meta-perceptions. What I think that other people are thinking. And based on what I think that other people think, I act. If I think that everybody's panic buying, then I might go and secure myself, buy some more products. But if everybody starts doing this, you can see the idea, it becomes a problem. And the third thing was the meaningful motivations. The government had said, prepare for a two or three week lockdown, I can't remember the exact number of weeks, and try to limit your trips to supermarkets. And that's what people did. They bought more products to reduce their trips. They were getting ready for shortages or for longer stays at home, or to guard themselves against those that might panic as a defense. But in a sense, if the government tells you, be ready to stay home for longer, it makes sense to buy more products. And I remember in my case as well, back then, instead of going to the supermarket every two days and buying some milk, some eggs, some bread, a can of tomato sauce, I would buy three cans of tomato sauce and two bottles of milk. What this caused, everybody buying slightly more, was it caused the supply chains to collapse. Because supermarkets would usually stock for the day, they don't keep warehouses. And of course, if they have tailored their supply chains based on the last 10 years of how people shop in this way, and they know how much milk they need every day, and they know how many eggs, if everybody buys two cartons of milk, not one, the chain collapses. And then this appears as if it's caused by people panicking and emptying the shelves. But in reality, it was tiny additional purchases by many people that caused the system to collapse. So we saw that this concept of panic buying, it's not really panic buying. It's people trying to protect themselves, it's people listening to the government, it's people trying to avoid the virus, or people following the media and being afraid by what is happening, by what the media are portraying. So you see the problem with panic here, it does not explain something. If you look into it a bit closer, if you do some research and talk to some people, it becomes much more clear. And what Quarantelle said is that one of the most important experts in this field, he said, I don't think the term panic should be treated as a social science belief concept. It's a label taken from popular discourse. During the whole history of our research involving 700 field studies, I'd be hard pressed to cite but a very few marginal instances of anything that could be panic behavior. And if you don't trust me, at least trust Quarantelle, who was leading one of the Delaware Research Disaster Center, a major disaster center in research in this field. So what do we know about panic? How can we sum this up? First of all, it's not a crowd phenomenon. If it happens, it happens on a small number of Why do people behave problematically in evacuations? Do they panic and then they die when they have to evacuate? No, it's usually because it's very close spaces. People don't know where the exits are. Sometimes they don't act. And sometimes the fact that they try to allow other people to exit first, they try to stick with their groups, it might delay the process and we might have victims. Sometimes trying to be nice in that case, might in rare occasions become a problem. When they should just evacuate, trying to stick to your group and not leave them to move the process might become a problem. Third, the responsibility sometimes overstated. Many people die from fumes, from fire, from not having enough exits, from not knowing what to do, from malfunctioning doors, from overcrowding closed space for profit, or from management failures. But of course, these are structural problems. Overcrowding a nightclub is a problem. And then it might lead to injuries or deaths. But this is not because of the crowd panicking. You see the issue here. In Ghana's 2001 soccer stampede, 130 people died. The police fired tear gas in a stadium of 30,000 people who locked doors. And then people got troubled. It led to deaths. But it was not panicking. It was not the irrationality of the crowd. And so victim blaming in these cases, panic is a way of leading to victim blame and deflecting attention away from the structural problems. Don't overcrowd the place and have functioning exits and functioning doors. Even when people are very afraid, they don't usually panic. But Hollywood has made this a very common narrative to use. And anxiety is increased by ambiguity. Withholding information is a problem and it's not a response to panic. It might lead to more anxiety to withhold information. People should give support, not try to hide it. So how do people actually behave in disasters then? We know that everyday life continues. Even with an extreme event, after a flood, after a hurricane, people try to reestablish a routine, a sense of life, a sense of social life. And we see not irrational behaviours, but adaptive behaviours. People seek safety and shelter. They give support. They run away, which is healthy. If there was a fire now, I would run away. This is an adaptive behaviour. It helped me survive. They make reference to their loved ones and to their friends and family. They engage in rescue activities. They come together in groups and they cooperate. They express solidarity. This is what we see in disasters the vast majority of times. In Hurricane Katrina, the media were showing anarchy, anomie, chaos, disorganisation, a total collapse of control, and this classic narrative of the regression to animal-like behaviour. But was this the case? Not really. The hotels opened up their doors for citizens. People were giving mutual support to each other. They commandeered boats to rescue working-class neighbours. They could only get survivors and no guns were allowed. They could collaborate with the authorities. Food and water were being looted from abandoned homes, we will discuss looting in a second. They occupied the school that had a dining room and blankets and supplies, and they kicked vandals out. They received donations. They set up a communications centre and were scrounging diesel for generators. And someone might say, yes, but looting is a problem. Is it though? What type of looting? And the argument is that some forms of action like looting might be illegal, but most times, not all times, but most times they are pro-social. They are done to help those around. And as we said, everyday life continues. Things that were happening before a disaster keep happening during and after a disaster. Looting, the bad looting, is very rare. It happens in a covert manner. It is condemned by the majority and is opportunistic. Some people might steal some things for their own benefit. It's mostly done by gangs and is affected by social factors. Poverty, discrimination, marginalization. So some gangs would engage in criminal activities before a disaster. They might engage in robberies and things like that. They will do the same after a disaster. This is the bad type of looting. But pro-social looting is very common. It's done in an open way by big groups of community people usually. It's socially supported and it's with particular targets like supermarkets and so on. And what is taken from there is usually served to the community to support the community. It's not for people for themselves. And for this reason, it's almost never prosecuted. When you hear about looting, it's usually the latter and not the former. It's done by gangs and so on. These are just patterns, of course, right? There might be variability behaviors. These are the general patterns we see. So why do people behave in a pro-social way? What are the reasons? There are three different types of theories in psychology. I will not cover all three now, but I will go over them very briefly to give you an idea. The first one is social norms. Social norms are these informal, unwritten usually, rules of what is the proper way to behave. And if you think about 9-11, a social norm is that women and children and the sick people and the elderly go first. It's a way of behaving. And some of these norms persist, of course, during a disaster. And this explains why people are pro-social and exhibit these solidarity behaviors. We help the elderly and the more weak before a disaster, we do the same afterwards. The social norm is there. It tells us to behave in a proper way, in a culturally appropriate way, and we do so. The second reason is the pre-disaster affiliations, bonds, and networks. This idea that people behave, they express solidarity in people they know before a disaster. And these groups, of course, these bonds and ties, they are there during a disaster. So people keep helping the people that they know, which makes sense. People stick closer to their friends, to their family. People have a tendency to be pro-social, and they have a tendency to join groups. So when a disaster happens, they know who they know from before, and they help them. They stay close to their friends and family, and they help them. But there is a third case, which is also very interesting, which is, why do people sometimes help strangers? Why do we see this spontaneous togetherness? Why do groups emerge when people don't know each other from before? And why does this thing called shared social identity, a sense of togetherness with others, a sense of being part of the same group, why does it emerge? How does it emerge? What's the psychology of it? And I will stick a bit more to this. And I will do this for an example of the 2005 London bombings, which my PhD supervisor, John Drury, and his colleagues, Steve Reiser and Chris Koching, explored in a paper published in 2009. In 2005, many of you might remember this, two bombs went off, three bombs went off in a tube and on a bus. Many people died, sadly, many were injured, and many were trapped underground for a very long time. And John Drury and his colleagues have this question. How did survivors behave in the tube? And was any support provided? And why? So they got interviews from survivors, they got written accounts from them, the primary data, as we call them, and they also look at secondary data, data that were out there and could be collected, like newspapers, articles, or archives. And they explored all this to find patterns. They did what we call a thematic analysis, to find themes, to find patterns in the data. And one of the first things they argued is, can we call this panic? Some people used the term panic. They said, oh, the bombs went off, it was so dark, and we panicked. But when asked what they meant, they said there was no screaming. Many people were trying to get out of the door, but they weren't trying to get out of the door stupidly. So many people were talking about fear. The usual things we discussed earlier, fear and certainty, which are expected. You're in the tube alone amongst other strangers, a bomb has gone off, you don't know what's happening, there is no light. And many participants said that the reaction was calm and orderly. One of the bombs had gone off. People were very calm and measured responses. And most responses were helping behaviors, not selfishness. People were giving support, were receiving support, were witnessing others giving support. They reported very low numbers of selfish behavior or individualistic behavior. And even in that case, it was because some people were injured. They couldn't take care of others, they had to take care of themselves. And one person said, as you see highlighted in red, and I was shocked, I thought, God, even in a situation like this, someone has kind of gotten manners really. Little thing, but I remember it. Because they were saying, you should go first. I didn't see any uncooperative activity. I saw people that were so caught up in their own feelings, they were kind of more focused on themselves. But I didn't see anyone that was uncooperative. I didn't see any bad behavior. So no panic, measured responses, and mostly social support. And why? Why did people suddenly report this sense of togetherness? You see these types of accounts. I felt we're all in the same boat together. And then for the feelings that I was feeling could have been felt by them, I thought, because I don't think any normal human being could just calmly sat there going on. Yeah, this is great. It was a stressful situation. And we're all in this together. And the best way to get out of it was to help each other. So I felt exactly, I felt quite close to the people near me. There was this sense of common fate, where we might not know each other, we might have been commuting to work, a bunch of strangers on the tube, and then a bomb goes off. We're all survivors here. We're all trying to help each other. We all need to survive. And this common fate made them feel as part of the group. For this reason, they talked about unity for themselves and others, no accounts of disunity or fragmentation, a sense of shared social identity, unity, togetherness, similarity, affinity, part of a group. Everybody was together. It didn't matter what color or nationality. A lot of these people knew each other. And also many references, emotional references, warmness, solidity, empathy. There was a nice atmosphere of people trying to help each other. And based on this study, and many other studies were carried out months later, John Drury did this work with the London bombings. They did some work with an earthquake in Chile, in Santiago in Chile, not Santiago, another city, but in Chile. Massive disaster, but they found the same pattern of solidarity and support. My work on flooding, we did the same work on COVID. And across all these studies, we saw a pattern. And based on this pattern, we developed what is called the social identity model of collective resilience. It's about collective resilience, which is the potential of crowds to collectively organize, provide and expect support during emergencies. And we call this because this is based on social identity processes. So for example, as you see here, this might be complex, but I will walk you through it. You have common faith, this sudden experience of common danger, common threat. And this common faith here leads you to see others as part of a group. It's not me versus you. We're all individuals. We are all survivors. We all need to get out of this bad situation alive. And this sense of togetherness, this shared social identity has different consequences, cognitive consequences. So how we think in a way we prioritize the group's interest, I think about the group. That's the cognitive part. I think about others and myself. And the relational changes. It changes this sense of being as a group with others, changes our relationship, how we treat them. We help them more. We maintain a sense of civility. We trust other people more and we expect support from them. It changes our relationship with them. And of course, the outcome is a sense of empowerment that we can all do it. What we call collective efficacy. We can all together save each other. A sense of coordination. People come together and organize to prevent trauma and regulate everybody's behavior. And of course, increase safety and decrease well-being. And now we have many different studies we have carried out with our group that show this pattern operating in different emergencies. And this explains, of course, why groups emerge when you didn't have a group before. So to sum it up here and leave some time for discussion, what are the main things that you can keep from this? Mass panic and the constant panic, it's a myth. It doesn't happen. People don't go crazy. They don't behave irrationally. They don't lose control. If we see some types of responses like this, they're very, very limited. They're the exception and they last for a very short amount of time. Most behavior is adaptive and prosocial. People try to survive. They carry their old ways into and try to recreate routines, to recreate groups, to recreate a sense of a normal life, to go back to what it was before. If any problems appear, especially in crowd situations, it's not because of panic. It's usually because of structural issues, overcrowding for profit, police violence in locked spaces, and so on. This might lead to casualties or injuries, but it's very easy to treat these as instances of pathology of the crowd. It was a psychology. It was panic, but it's usually not. What we see is solidarity, and solidarity is very common at the early stages of disasters. Life continues, but in a different way, of course. People have to readapt. That's why they try to recreate and stay with others. Of course, social norms are very important. Social norms help us navigate. Knowing and everybody behaving by allowing danger to go first saves lives. Social norms are very important. Pre-disaster bonds, your neighbors or your close family and friends are very important, people you knew before a disaster, to help you, of course, survive. But also groups emerge without these bonds, without knowing people from before. One argument we make from our work is that it's because of social identity, this emergent sense of togetherness that comes because of common fate. That's one explanation we have for why this happens. Based on our work for a few years now, we have fed all these findings, of course, to, for example, the cabinet office of the UK government. They have some really nice researchers there who collect all these findings and update their policies. Recently, our panic buying paper is part of this governmental policy on communications, and they're very clear that people who do not panic buy, give them information, don't use this concept. Our recommendations in general are the following, that responders need to know crowd psychology, at least the basics. Not only the theory, but panic is rare, it's not in crowds, social support is very common, and it's because people see each other as a group. And for this reason, we argue responders need to know these group norms, need to know how groups behave, and work with them, use these groups. The crowd is usually called a zero responder, because they're the first place that I give support during a disaster, like the Manchester arena bombings, people gave support there first, before the police and ambulances could arrive. So the argument is, work with these group norms, don't treat people as irrational. And also the groups that emerge, use them, cooperate with them. And of course, communicate, give information, tell people what you know and you don't know, and listen to them. Don't hide information, it causes more anxiety, and it might lead to more extreme behaviours. So if you want to learn more, take a screenshot of this. It's John Drury's review paper on what we know about mass emergency behaviour. It's a very easy to read paper, you might like it. Our work, our summary of work with John Drury and our colleagues, on psychosocial resilience in disasters, and some recommendations we have for responders. We have one about COVID, again a similar idea. Or if you want something more general, the best books I have ever read on this topic is Rebecca Solnitz's A Paradise Built in Hell. It's a fantastic book about different case studies over a period of 100 years across the world, of how people come together and give support, and the reasons why usually problems appear. But it's not an academic book, it's a So I will stop here, to leave some time for discussion, and to show you any questions you might have. I'm just going to confirm folks that I've got to turn off the recording now.