Psychological disaster myths in the perception and management of mass emergencies
By J. Drury, David Novelli, C. Stott. 2013
90 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Disaster myths are said to be widespread and consequential. However, there has been little research on whether those involved in public safety and emergency response believe them. A survey examined how far police officers, civilian safety professionals, sports event stewards and comparison samples from the public believe the myths ‘mass panic’, ‘civil disorder’, and ‘helplessness’. Respondents endorsed the first two myths. However they rejected the myth of helplessness and endorsed the view that emergency crowds display resilience. Despite these contradictions in stated beliefs, there was also evidence of ideological coherence: each model of mass emergency behavior (maladaptive versus resilient) was linked to a model of crowd management (coercive and paternalistic versus mass-democratic). The practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Subfields: Emergency Medical Services, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc6b3f670b45130ea8069fcfcb62188b4e579e24
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In Emergency Medical Services
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Catastrophe Compassion: Understanding and Extending Prosociality Under Crisis (2020, unknown): “Interestingly, police officers – who presumably have extensive experience with people in crisis – were significantly less likely to agree with these statements [4] (additional references are given in the supplemental material online).”
- Panic, Irrationality, and Herding: Three Ambiguous Terms in Crowd Dynamics Research (2019, background): “We also found a relatively substantial number of quotes challenging the theory of irrationality and stating that the theory cannot be regarded as an accurate and verifiable description of a behavioural phenomenon in the face of threats [15, 30, 31].”