The Nature of Collective Resilience: Survivor Reactions to the 2005 London Bombings
By J. Drury, C. Cocking, Stephen D. Reicher. International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters, 2009
325 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Accounts from over 90 survivors and 56 witnesses of the 2005 London bombings were analysed to determine the relative prevalence of mass behaviors associated with either psychosocial vulnerability (e.g. ‘selfishness’, mass panic) or collective resilience (e.g. help, unity). ‘Selfish’ behaviors were found to be rare; mutual helping was more common. There is evidence for (a) a perceived continued danger of death after the explosions; (b) a sense of unity amongst at least some survivors, arising from this perceived danger; (c) a link between this sense of unity and helping; and (d) risk-taking to help strangers. We suggest a novel explanation for this evidence of ‘collective resilience’, based on self-categorization theory, according to which common fate entails a redefinition of self (from ‘me’ to ‘us’) and hence enhanced concern for others in the crowd.
Subfields: Emergency Medical Services, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d8ee93d7698df6eaa32157a3375e4be0cfb5fad
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In Emergency Medical Services
In Sociology and Political Science
- J. Drury
- Richard Williams
- Evangelos Ntontis
- R. Amlȏt
- G. Rubin
- Mark Levine
- Rachel Manning
- Martijn van Zomeren
Citations in the corpus
- Social identity, group processes, and helping in emergencies (2013, background): “Further, while reports of helping were common across their datasets, they were particularly prevalent in survivors’ accounts that referred to a sense of unity with others in the emergency situation (Drury et al., 2009b).”
- The role of social identity processes in mass emergency behaviour: An integrative review (2018, background): “As with the London bombings study (Drury et al., 2009b), people sometimes talked about “panic” in different ways over the course of the interview; yet when this was unpacked by asking people what theymeant by “panic”, the same people often described helping behaviour alongside their fear (Cocking &…”
- Emergent social identities in a flood: Implications for community psychosocial resilience (2018, methodology): “The emergence of collective behaviour in emergencies and disasters has been explained through the social identity model of collective psychosocial resilience (SIMCR; Drury et al., 2009; Drury, 2012; Williams & Drury, 2009).”