The role of social identity processes in mass emergency behaviour: An integrative review

By J. Drury. 2018

286 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT This review provides a new integration of recent research that has formed the basis of a social identity explanation of supportive collective behaviour among survivors in emergencies and disasters. I describe a model in which a sense of common fate is the source of an emergent shared social identity among survivors, which in turn provides the motivation to give social support to others affected. In addition, by drawing on the concept of relational transformation in psychological crowds, I show how an emergent shared social identity can engender a range of further behavioural and cognitive consequences that contribute to collective self-organisation in emergencies, including expected support, coordination of behaviour, and collective efficacy. It will be argued that the model can been applied to explaining how potentially dangerous crowd events avoid disaster: shared social identity operates as the basis of spontaneous self-organisation in these cases, as in many emergencies and disasters.

Subfields: Emergency Medical Services, Ocean Engineering, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13670e4ed367fa4e2c6be4a646d8f5aeacd8c9c2

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In Emergency Medical Services

In Ocean Engineering

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The trouble with trust: Time-series analysis of social capital, income inequality, and COVID-19 deaths in 84 countries (2020, unknown): “Dezecache et al. (2020), Drury (2018), and others have argued that social affiliation and contact are natural responses to threat and these inclinations were adaptive in our evolutionary past.”
Catastrophe Compassion: Understanding and Extending Prosociality Under Crisis (2020, unknown): “Drury, J. (2018) The role of social identity processes in mass emergency behaviour: an integrative review.”
Panic, Irrationality, and Herding: Three Ambiguous Terms in Crowd Dynamics Research (2019, background): “As pointed out by Drury, Novelli, and Stott [24], “To judge a response as irrational requires a frame of reference, but the frame of reference is often unclear in a mass emergency”.”
The social psychology of responses to trauma: social identity pathways associated with divergent traumatic responses (2019, background): “For this reason, we suggest that trauma can facilitate positive change and the emergence of a stronger sense of collective identity (Drury, 2018; Vezzali et al., 2016) in the wake of disaster.”
Motivating voluntary compliance to behavioural restrictions: Self-determination theory–based checklist of principles for COVID-19 and other emergency communications (2021, methodology): “Some of the guidelines additionally draw on social identity approach (Drury, 2018; Drury et al., 2019), which can complement especially the relatedness-supporting guidelines of SDT.”
Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on career development: Insights from cultural psychology (2020, unknown): “Previous research also shows that, people in collectivistic (vs. individualistic) cultures are more likely to use group performance, rather than leaders' personal characteristics to evaluate their effectiveness (e.g., Ensari & Murphy, 2003).”