176 - The Myth of Panic with Daniel Nilsson

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Fire Science Show.

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Perhaps I'm talking a little bit too much about my travels recently, but indeed the trip to New Zealand was something else and besides participating in the Brilliant Fire NZ conference, I also had the chance to stay for a few days at the University of Canterbury.

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For me, it was a very important trip, as research from Canterbury inspired me to become a scientist and I've always looked up to these guys.

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So it was fantastic to meet up with all the colleagues from New Zealand Charlie ,A ndy B Aatif, Ton , pete Thompson and also some guests they had Bronwynn Forrest and Patrick Van Hess.

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Like so many people I've met and I've enjoyed all those meetings thoroughly, and among those, one who hosted me was Professor Daniel Nilsen.

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I've spent three days with Daniel at Canterbury and, of course, I took the chance to interview him.

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Daniel is one of the lead human behavior and fire experts and actually also someone from whom I've learned about the craft of engineering systems for human evacuation.

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First I was in 2015, where he led a course on evacuation with late Rita Fahy in Copenhagen.

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Anyway, for a long time I was trying to set up an interview with Daniel and we were thinking about appropriate topic and you know, one thing that is very interesting in the space of human evacuation is this phenomenon or myth of panic.

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That is something that always starts a very emotional discussion in social media when someone uses the term panic.

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Panic is widely used to describe fires and evacuations in the media, but the question is is it really there?

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Is it a real thing?

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Can we blame stuff on panic?

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Actually, many scientists already know that you cannot, but still there are a lot of myths around the phenomenon of panic.

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In this episode we go deep on panic and we try to some extent debunk the myths.

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We try to illustrate where they came from.

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So we're going through ancient literature from early 20th century to see how it was first described in publications and then see how our understanding of panic evolved.

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And also what's really really important and that's the fundamental part of the episode we discuss what it means to engineering, what decisions are being taken wrongfully because of the concept of panic, which is incorrect, and what decisions can be taken better if we start to acknowledge the human behavior on a higher level on the way that it should be acknowledged in fire safety engineering.

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So in this episode we're trying to replace a myth of panic with fire safety engineering Another episode that I had the chance to record live in person.

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The dynamic is a little bit different than when we record online.

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I kind of enjoy it.

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Perhaps in future I'll be able to do more like this.

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But anyway, enough of talking, let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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Welcome to the Firesize Show.

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Okay, hello everybody.

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I'm here today with Professor Daniel Nielsen.

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Hey, daniel, hi, what a nice change to be in person.

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For me that's perhaps the third time it happens.

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Really good, and thanks for the invitation to the University of Canterbury.

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In this episode we're going to discuss panic, one of the favorite things of all behavioral fire scientists.

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So often it's referred to as the P word.

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Why does it annoy a behavioral scientist that much?

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Well, I think there are a lot of myths concerning panic and it's been described in a lot of different ways in the literature.

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So, looking back, panic is mentioned in like historic literature quite a bit and there are a lot of claims made about panic, claims that some might be true and many of them are actually myths.

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And these myths, they seem to live for a very long time in our awareness and sometimes we make suboptimal decisions based on myths about panic and we're afraid of something which might not actually happen.

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So you think there's real consequences of this non-factual idea of?

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what panic is, Absolutely.

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I've seen too many cases where people are afraid of panic vaguely defined as panic something they're afraid of and the consequences that that would result in, and then they try to limit information to people.

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Okay, and that's not really very good, since if you limit the information to people, then they can't make informed decisions.

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So hence, evacuation should, in theory, take a long time.

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And is there any medical definition of what panic would be if we go outside of fire?

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There are definitions of panic.

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So you have definitions of panic.

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In the stock market you have anxiety and panic attacks.

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That's quite different from fire and there are definitions of panic.

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Is in the fire situation we're gonna get there yeah, yep, you've prepared some material from historical papers, like where we can go through the how it started, like where the myths came from.

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That's, that's absolutely, and I thought I'd start off by reading some sections out of books just to give you a bit of an idea of how panic has been described, and one of the publications that I often use in my my courses when I teach on the topic of panic is the one by croker, and croker wrote a publication in 1917 1917 okay, that's a long time ago yeah, and croker was a fire chief in new york, I believe, and and wrote a book based on his experience of being a fire chief, and this is just one example of a series of events that happened, according to croker describing what he describes them, or he mentions, as panic.

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so he says that a girl sitting at the nearest machine or table sees it so, so the fire.

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She leaps up and yells fire, shrieking as hard as she can.

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In the space of a breath the room is in pandemonium.

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The girls 60 or 70 of them are all on their feet, jamming each other against the rows of machines, yelling, trampling on each other.

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In their frantic efforts to get to the exit they ordinarily use an elevator or a staircase.

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In the flimsy material the fire is spreading fast, but it is still the merest infant fire, making a good deal of smoke and a little more heat, but still capable of quick extinction, even with a chemical extinguisher.

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On the floors above and below that in which the fire is, panic also holds sway.

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The garment workers, the feather workers, the shirt waste workers, remembering other horrors, stampede without any cause, like sheep determined to be slaughtered.

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Croker then continues and says perhaps you think this is an exaggerate or a sensational account of a hypothetical case.

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It is not Just.

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This very thing happened in March 1911 at the Triangle Waste Fire in Washington Place.

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This is one of the more famous fires in the history of fire engineering.

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Now, if you look at this description, there are several things that are mentioned to describe what panic is.

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There seems to be an indication of an overreaction.

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Yeah, yelling running.

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Exactly.

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So there is a fire.

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It's a small fire, but people are overreacting Exactly.

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He also claims that it's not particularly logical behavior.

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They don't really take in all the information and sort of go for the best option.

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They don't consider their options.

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I'm quite surprised that he mentions people on other flows are also reacting, also reacting in the same way, and sort of.

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There is an element With a stampede, stampede, and that's the other thing is that in many of these old publications, and Stampede Stampede, and that's the other thing is that in many of these old publications and you can see it in new publications as well the authors use analogies and sort of compare it to animal behavior.

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So a stampede, we lose rationality, we behave like animals, which is very graphical.

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But the question is if that's actually a good explanation.

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If you put it into the context of the times when it happened.

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You don't have modern fire alarms, you don't have big trust in firefighters' response, you certainly do not have modern escape pathways, and people are living in times where they get news from newspapers and they read about those terrific fires in which hundreds of people perished every now and then.

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We're still in the age of great fire of XYZ city, right, yeah?

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So I think a responsive person in 1917, hearing about a fire being in the circumstances of overcrowded room, witnessing it firsthand, with no real good escape routes, that's pretty different from a responsive 21st century user of an airport.

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Well, possibly there is a difference in the type of behavior, but still, that people would respond or overreact in this way, even when the fire is very small, it's still to me very unlikely.

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The other thing in Croker's description is that there's almost this link between panic and the casualties.

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So panic causes casualties, Stampede, Stampede.

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People get injured.

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And the final question I ask myself when I read this was was Croker actually there?

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Did Croker witness this?

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If he's a fire chief in New York, was he in the factory when it happened?

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Or is this looking at the consequences of the fire and drawing your own conclusions?

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And maybe providing a poetic description or a book right, exactly, but this is not the only account.

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There are other accounts as well, so Phillips in 1951, so a bit later said that panic has been the cause of more loss of life than burning by fire or suffocation by smoke.

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Okay, quite a powerful statement.

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To say that more people die from panic than actually from smoke inhalation, which we know today is, is not true people die from smoke, yeah, but but then again, okay, again the context 1951.

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Yeah, and I've interviewed david purser.

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He told me that this brought uh interest to him because firefighters told him in 1940s people would not die from smoke, they would go out of the room, take five breaths and they're good.

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Yeah, and suddenly you start having people dying.

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So this is before the plastics era.

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It is, but it's still with things burning.

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So so, just carbon monoxide.

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So it is sort of in a lot of these publications, panic is considered dangerous and hence something that needs to be prevented.

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Well, here it says that it has been the source of more loss of life than the fires themselves.

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So then, you need to consider it in design and, as we mentioned before, some of these publications claim that panic can happen even if there's no real cause, like a real small fire or something that people might just believe there is a fire and can actually cause panic.

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So Phillips continues and says panic may be aroused when there is not the least danger from fire and in an undisciplined rush to escape many may suffer serious injury or death.

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So you have another claim here that people will overreact.

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It doesn't have to be a danger at all and people will run towards exit and are crushed in exits since there are too many people running at the same time.

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So in this record it's more like the panic is the real danger, not the fire itself, exactly, so perhaps better to not notify, yeah, and sort of looking at what triggers panic.

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Philips does give some explanations, yeah, like incidents that may lead to panic include the sight of smoke or flames, the smell of burning, the sound of escaping gas or any unexpected noise or happening, whether the danger is real or imaginary.

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So we have a bunch of publications that says anything can cause panic, and if panic happens we get really bad outcomes.

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It is interesting, though, that in some of these publications you look at the characteristics of people and who are more prone to panic than others.

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Phillips again says that the possibility of panic arising will depend to a large extent upon the composition of the assembly of people.

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Panic is most infectious this is something you find in a lot of the publications that it's like a disease it infects from one person to another, and the loss of control by a few weaker-minded persons may rapidly affect the whole.

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A crowd consisting of children and young persons may be more prone to panic than an assembly of older persons of a reasonable degree of intelligence.

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Okay, quite powerful wording.

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It's from the 1950s, but basically saying that some people are more prone to panic than others, what kind of scientist was?

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Phillips, was he a behavioral scientist, fire scientist, I guess fire person Okay, and this is actually true for many of these publications that it is often someone who might be multidisciplinary, have an opinion about panic.

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So from this record of Philips.

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It's not just that.

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It's caused easily by a slight view of smoke, a slight view of fire or any other trigger.

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It can happen spontaneously in a group of people without you having any control of that.

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It's infectious, it spreads.

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Like a disease.

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Yeah, so if one person panics, then everyone will panic.

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Yeah, yeah, they'll have a mass disaster.

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It causes a loss of control by a few weaker-minded people and rapidly affects the whole.

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Okay, so indeed, like this description from those early, early materials that they do reassemble the image of panic that media would, would employ.

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So it's like kind of uh, I would say cultural description of what panic could be right, which we know that it's not very factual when you compare that with science.

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Yes, there are definitely some elements and some myths that you need to consider.

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There have been sort of as you saw from Phillips.

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They claim that some individuals are more prone to panic than others.

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There have been claims that that is actually a national difference, so some nationalities might panic more than others.

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So bird and docking, for example, claim that, yes, you would have different tendencies to panic in different countries.

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Bird and docking also have a funny quote about British crowds.

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They actually claim that British crowds panic less than other crowds in the world and they're British.

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So they say that other cases could be quoted for the good behavior of British crowds.

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It might be added that foreigners have been known to say that the British rarely panic because they are fundamentally unimaginative.

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Since they don't have any imagination, then the British don't panic and they behave quite well in emergencies.

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I'm also not so sure about good behavior of British crowds.

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Yeah, so there are a lot of those claims.

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But, an interesting thing though, we talked about publications from different parts of the world and we basically looked at the Western world during the Cold War and pre-Cold War, but they actually had the same types of claims in the Soviet Union.

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They actually had the same types of claims in the Soviet Union.

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So the USSR, where Reutemann in 1975 wrote that panic spreads rapidly over the whole or a large part of the public and induces people to flee from the danger zone in any way they can.

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This leads to the use of physical force by everyone, or at least many of the individuals trapped in the premises.

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So he even adds physical force that you're fighting to get out, and says that this could happen when one person gets panic and then it spreads, similar to disease.

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So even in a country where they didn't really have a lot of communication, I would suspect with the UK or the US, where Croker was from they still have this concept of panic in the Soviet Union.

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And, as I said, cold War I don't expect too much, but perhaps you know.

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I wonder to what extent those observed because, as you mentioned, there's multiple people, multiple records stating very similar things.

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I would guess it must have been to some extent observed behavior.

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Perhaps people to some extent behaved like that and it's just qualification of the action that has been misleading.

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Perhaps people were in a very emotional response to fire and not necessarily the state of panic.

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One potential explanation of it, which we will discuss as well, is that you have difficulty estimating how other people behave.

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You know how you behave, but you have difficulty understanding how other people behave, and if you can't understand someone's behavior, they must be panicked.

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And since you don't understand why they behaved in a certain way, Do we have access to any records like voice records or video records of events like that?

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Or interviews with people, but not like personal statements, more like objective video material.

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Absolutely.

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We've done experiments where we tried to give people different type of information to see how they behave.

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Yeah, to try and test out some of these myths, like can you tell them there's a fire, for example, can you not?

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And then we've observed their behavior.

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Reutemann continues to give some examples of cases where you've had panic.

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Arguably Probably Reutemann wasn't actually there, since he gave examples in the US and other places.

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Argues that it can cause crowd crush, same as we heard from the other.

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Yeah, stampede.

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He also says that panic may also arise when there is no real danger to life.

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So you see the same type of trend Again.

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It's re-emphasis of the exactly Can be caused by the smallest, faintest smoke exactly someone just saying fire and everyone panics, but also claims which many of the other publications claim that it can be prevented, so we can reduce the risk of panic.

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Now, a funny addition this is publication from the soviet union.

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They had political editors.

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So it does say in this publication that modern theaters and movie houses, clubs and cultural centers and other public buildings constructed in the USSR provide comfortable conditions and guarantee the safety of the public in such premises and halls by providing suitable passages, doors and staircases.

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Besides, the administrative and operational staff of such buildings are trained to forestall panic and effectively extinguish any fire in the building.

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Okay, so it wasn't a problem in the Soviet Union, it was just outside of the Soviet Union.

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It was a problem, but I expect that to be the political editor who went in and added but it's interesting that they've already recognized there would be operational things like the staff being able to forestall the panic, even though it's so easily triggered.

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Exactly, if it's so easily triggered and so overwhelming, how can a single person of a staff stop it right?

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yeah, no, I agree, it's sort of.

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It's something that can be caused by anything.

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So the the logical question here is how can you prevent something which can happen without any cause?

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Yeah, what can you do?

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if it's just prevented exactly.

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So it's sort of a counter-argument to the argument of panic happening, since how can you prevent something that can happen, irrespective of so?

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It could be a small thing or nothing at all, so you couldn't really prevent that, but they still claim that you can prevent it.

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So is this something that leads to those dangerous things like limiting the information, like?

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this attempt to prevent Absolutely so in many of these publications.

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Going back to Phillips again, phillips writes that in some buildings a warning system of lights or other means which would not attract the attention of the public is used to give early warnings of an emergency to staff who are then in a position to be of material assistance in maintaining an orderly evacuation of premises.

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So basically what Phillips is saying that since there is a risk of panic, then we limit the information to the people.

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Okay, tell the staff we're trained, and then the staff can deal with the people.

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But then again, if people panic for no reason at all, the staff trying to evacuate people could trigger panic right.

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Yeah.

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So how does that help really?

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But there is that tendency or that recommendation in many publications to actually limit the information that is given to people, and this is, in my view, this is actually quite bad.

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Now, the publication that really was relied on a lot was this that you see here he's holding a book and it looks old.

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There's Manual of Safety Requirements in Theaters and Other Places of Public Entertainment that you see.

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Here he's holding a book, yeah, and it looks old as manual of safety requirements in theaters and other places of public entertainment, issued by home office london's his majesty stationary office 1935.

00:21:40.227 --> 00:21:44.704
Yeah, and he stole it from swedish library exactly.

00:21:45.144 --> 00:21:45.807
So this is.

00:21:45.826 --> 00:21:50.335
There's a funny story which um around us and so I, when I did my phd.

00:21:50.776 --> 00:22:04.211
I really needed to quote this and I really needed to see it, and it wasn't really available anywhere in sweden, so I had to get it on loan from the uk and it was the most quirky and strange loan I've ever had.

00:22:04.211 --> 00:22:19.584
I got it on a one day loan from the national library, or I think it was was either Oxford or Cambridge where they sent it, and they even called our librarian to tell them to sit beside me when I read it, since it was a national treasure and I could never lose it.

00:22:19.584 --> 00:22:21.828
So I did that and I read it.

00:22:21.828 --> 00:22:30.904
And then the next week I went down into our library and there was actually a book that had been donated to us from the Swedish Fire Protection Agency.

00:22:30.904 --> 00:22:34.251
They changed their library and they had donated a lot of books, and it was donated.

00:22:34.251 --> 00:22:38.229
It was in our basement at Lund University and I was clicking through the book and there it was.

00:22:38.229 --> 00:22:42.150
So we had a national treasure in our that no one knew about.

00:22:42.451 --> 00:22:45.161
But it was really good, since now I have the source material.

00:22:45.161 --> 00:22:48.247
So this is what was relied on and it is.

00:22:48.247 --> 00:23:07.017
I mean, it is official, it's His Majesty's stationery office, it has an official stamp on it and what it says in this book is that it is recommended that any telephone for the use for the purpose of communicating with the fire brigade shall be so situated that members of the public cannot overhear a call and be alarmed.

00:23:07.017 --> 00:23:08.602
This might easily cause panic.

00:23:08.602 --> 00:23:17.711
So an official document saying you can't tell people since then they will panic, means that engineers would look at this and say, well, I need to limit the information to people.

00:23:18.621 --> 00:23:32.320
So, as an important comment to the listener, you're hearing recalls from a very, very old past of what has not even been 5-7 engineering then and which to some extent have transponed themselves to the modern times.

00:23:32.320 --> 00:23:38.000
However, today we know that early communication with the building occupants is critical.

00:23:38.000 --> 00:23:51.880
The response is fundamental to limit the time it takes for the pre-evacuation of people and essentially this is the fundamental thing that allows to do 5-step engineering, Absolutely.

00:23:51.880 --> 00:24:05.412
So it's kind of interesting to see that this idea of panic or these descriptions you've shown, they go like 180 degrees, like opposite direction of what we would consider good 5-step engineering today.

00:24:05.593 --> 00:24:06.795
Yeah, they do.

00:24:06.795 --> 00:24:08.988
But it's not just old publications.

00:24:08.988 --> 00:24:16.549
Like in publications that are written today, you still have claims about panic and panic happens, and we're doing this to prevent panic.

00:24:16.549 --> 00:24:30.115
So, even though many of the publications I've read are from early 1950s or 1934, you still have this myth of panic, this thing that people are afraid of, that we're trying to prevent.

00:24:30.115 --> 00:24:36.817
Now, the first time this was actually systematically criticized was by Jonathan Syme in the 1980s.

00:24:36.817 --> 00:24:49.727
So Jonathan Syme wrote a publication called the Concept of Panic, where he went through the description of panic and how it was used in the field and started criticizing it, since we use panic without actually knowing what panic meant.

00:24:50.047 --> 00:24:52.113
That was the main criticism in this publication.

00:24:52.113 --> 00:24:57.691
So someone might say well, this was a fire here, A lot of people died, there was panic.

00:24:57.691 --> 00:25:03.711
But in those accident investigations the investigator didn't really understand that people's perspective.

00:25:03.711 --> 00:25:06.692
They just saw the outcome and they said this must have been panic.

00:25:06.692 --> 00:25:15.792
They didn't try and interview people to figure out how did you make decisions in that situation, and did you make a panic decision or not?

00:25:16.496 --> 00:25:17.220
So that was one of the criticism.

00:25:17.220 --> 00:25:26.012
It's quite interesting because let's brace them for a second you were tasked with a fire where you had, let's say, 50 people died in a narrow passage Yep.

00:25:26.012 --> 00:25:30.287
So how can you tell a panic from just the crowd crash incident?

00:25:30.287 --> 00:25:40.891
How can you tell a panic from people who just lost their way and were unable to evacuate, or they were maybe taking care of others in that room?

00:25:41.661 --> 00:25:47.009
And I would even ask the question of was the outcome of the fire even related to the panic?

00:25:47.009 --> 00:25:52.344
Since many times when you have crowd crash situations, then it might actually be something else.

00:25:52.423 --> 00:26:01.460
It might be a too narrow passage yeah, and people trying to funnel situation exactly a funnel and you get an increase of the crowd pressure, and this was one of sime's points.

00:26:01.460 --> 00:26:03.805
Like, panic is often used as a scapegoat.

00:26:03.805 --> 00:26:06.230
You have a fire, a lot of people die.

00:26:06.230 --> 00:26:09.305
Well, you need an explanation for why a lot of people die.

00:26:09.305 --> 00:26:11.209
They're're dead, so they panicked.

00:26:11.209 --> 00:26:12.311
It's their fault, they died.

00:26:12.311 --> 00:26:14.907
So you're using a skateboard goat.

00:26:14.907 --> 00:26:24.132
You're basically blaming the people for the outcome of the fire by saying that you panic, and one of the problems of this is it takes away the focus from the real reason.

00:26:24.132 --> 00:26:28.664
Okay, since you look at it and you say 50 people died in this opening, they must have panicked.

00:26:28.664 --> 00:26:29.665
Case closed.

00:26:29.685 --> 00:26:44.411
We don't have to look at changing our design to do wider exits not a funnel, for example, since we've found the reason, and that was a reason which, if we go back to the old publication, which is impossible to stop anyway.

00:26:44.431 --> 00:26:49.670
It was just a freak accident, though, if you have trained personnel in the USSR, then yes, maybe so, maybe so.

00:26:49.670 --> 00:26:51.415
So why did Syme start?

00:26:51.415 --> 00:26:53.382
Did you have any chance to ever talk with him about that?

00:26:53.682 --> 00:27:00.223
I haven't had a chance to talk to Jonathan Syme, so Jonathan Syme passed away before I got into this area.

00:27:00.223 --> 00:27:11.432
But I think the reason was one of the reasons was the fact that panic was used as a reason for limiting information about the fire to people, which is bad.

00:27:11.432 --> 00:27:17.133
And another thing that Syme highlighted in his publication was also the role of the media.

00:27:17.133 --> 00:27:23.026
So panic in the headline sells paper Okay, without actually a definition.

00:27:23.026 --> 00:27:27.352
And you sort of have panic and the reader reads that and you go oh panic, oh yeah, interesting.

00:27:27.352 --> 00:27:28.683
Today we would say clickbait.

00:27:28.683 --> 00:27:36.387
Yeah, pretty much Everyone who reads that paper probably has a different definition of what panic is, but everyone is interested to read the paper.

00:27:36.387 --> 00:27:37.431
So that was another reason.

00:27:37.431 --> 00:27:45.644
And media he saw often used panic without actually describing what Sime would say is a panic situation.

00:27:45.644 --> 00:27:51.128
It was just people who are stressed, trying to get out quickly, but saying panic sells papers.

00:27:51.128 --> 00:27:54.464
So media had an important role in this.

00:27:54.464 --> 00:27:55.748
So let's go to science definition maybe.

00:27:55.748 --> 00:27:56.589
Well, it's.

00:27:57.070 --> 00:28:19.426
The thing with jonathan syme is that jonathan syme didn't actually offer a definition, just said that the way we use it today is not suitable okay, so just observation just observation and he criticized some of the things like irrational behavior is often used like they don't act in a rational way, whereas Simon would argue that, no, given their perspective, they probably did what they thought was right.

00:28:19.426 --> 00:28:22.446
But irrational means that people act.

00:28:22.446 --> 00:28:24.772
They have all the information and they do the opposite.

00:28:24.772 --> 00:28:26.426
And he didn't really see that.

00:28:26.426 --> 00:28:39.906
You don't really see that in fire situations you can see people having a lot of stress put on them and making simplified decision-making, but not necessarily having the perfect information and saying, well, that's the exit I should take, but I'm going to take that one which is worse.

00:28:39.906 --> 00:28:43.067
Okay, so people don't really do that in a fire situation.

00:28:43.067 --> 00:28:49.673
So hence irrational might not be the right word to use in a definition of panic.

00:28:49.673 --> 00:28:55.345
So there are a couple of myths related to panic that are important to know about.

00:28:55.445 --> 00:28:59.482
As an engineer, one of the things we've talked about is limit the information for panic.

00:28:59.482 --> 00:29:02.048
Now this has been dismissed.

00:29:02.048 --> 00:29:08.945
You should tell people about the fire, you should tell them what is happening, and I guess the first publication to look at that was by Canterbury and Sime.

00:29:08.945 --> 00:29:25.916
They did interviews with survivors from fires and homes and hospitals and they asked people about recognition, their location, when they realized there was a fire, tried to get them to tell the interviewer about their behavior and their perception, and they developed something which is called the behavior sequences.

00:29:25.916 --> 00:29:37.982
And the behavior sequence is just a series of behaviors that are typical for an evacuation situation, and the main thing of the behavior sequences is that initial part of the behavior sequences, where people receive information.

00:29:38.403 --> 00:29:50.586
They either ignore the cue or they investigate and search for more information until they're convinced they should evacuate, since you either ignore, which means it takes longer, or you get that first cue and then you go.

00:29:50.586 --> 00:29:54.352
I need to confirm and I need to process and I need to make sure that this is actually a fire.

00:29:54.352 --> 00:30:01.463
That always takes time and that's why we have pre-movement time, or at least part of the pre-movement time is that recognition time.

00:30:01.463 --> 00:30:04.414
So people never hear one cue and they go.

00:30:04.414 --> 00:30:11.329
I'm going to evacuate and take zero seconds Always takes a significant time for them to process it, to make a decision.

00:30:11.349 --> 00:30:15.136
Always takes a significant time for them to process it, to make a decision.

00:30:15.136 --> 00:30:23.170
So in the previous thought process it was thought that you will see the fire and you may panic, or if you're sufficiently British or intelligent, you will not Instantly.

00:30:23.170 --> 00:30:27.819
Instantly right and now we understand there's a series of chain of events.

00:30:28.422 --> 00:30:43.205
And with this behavior sequence sort of framework, the more information you can give people to a limit, I mean you can't overload them with information but if you give them clear information, they should, in theory, get out of this loop quicker Okay, since they make an informed decision quicker.

00:30:43.205 --> 00:30:46.568
So, for example, if you smell smoke, there is no alarm.

00:30:46.568 --> 00:30:48.267
You need to explore what's happening.

00:30:48.267 --> 00:30:57.940
If you have a voice alarm that tells you there is a fire, it tells you which floor it's on and it tells you to evacuate, you might not have to look as long for additional information.

00:30:58.670 --> 00:30:59.378
So it's quicker.

00:30:59.378 --> 00:31:03.538
That is an exercise that I like to give to people like a thought experiment.

00:31:03.538 --> 00:31:07.960
Imagine you're walking through a corridor of your office and you hear a fire alarm.

00:31:07.960 --> 00:31:13.267
You would most likely be confused about it in a way that you would not know.

00:31:13.267 --> 00:31:14.724
Is it a real fire alarm?

00:31:14.724 --> 00:31:15.729
Is it a drill?

00:31:15.729 --> 00:31:17.306
Was something planned today?

00:31:17.306 --> 00:31:28.647
But if you end up in the same situation, walking through that corridor, and you smell burned plastic from a cable and you hear the alarm, that must be a fire somewhere, right?

00:31:28.909 --> 00:31:44.606
Absolutely, and I've seen this from my own experience when we evacuated an office building and we just used their alarm, which was a ringing bell, and I was a bit confused, since everyone said that they checked the clouds or the cloud, and I didn't really understand what they meant.

00:31:44.606 --> 00:31:46.385
But they actually checked the intranet.

00:31:46.385 --> 00:31:47.609
That was the first thing.

00:31:47.609 --> 00:31:53.788
So they heard an alarm and then they were wanting to check is this a drill or is this a real fire?

00:31:53.788 --> 00:31:59.974
So they checked the internet and then, when they didn't say anything about a drill, then okay, it's probably real.

00:31:59.974 --> 00:32:02.702
So that's part of that behavior sequences and that's a delay.

00:32:02.702 --> 00:32:06.902
So the more information you can give them, the better, the quicker.

00:32:06.902 --> 00:32:18.261
And Jonathan Syme so Prue and Syme actually did an experiment, a really interesting experiment, where they evacuated a metro station and they had the opportunity to try different types of alarms.

00:32:18.261 --> 00:32:25.023
So they had one alarm which was a ringing bell, which is not great if you don't train people what it means.

00:32:25.023 --> 00:32:27.692
They had staff running around telling people to evacuate.

00:32:27.692 --> 00:32:32.145
They had a public announcement system saying evacuate, but no real reason.

00:32:32.145 --> 00:32:44.663
They had staff plus this PA system which told people to evacuate, and then they had a PA system which added information about what has happened plus what people should do, okay, and the outcome was Bell.

00:32:44.663 --> 00:32:49.804
Well, they had to terminate the experiment before everyone was out, since no one, there were still people on the platform.

00:32:50.184 --> 00:32:56.382
When you had staff running around, it was a matter of how quick the staff was and how quickly they were running, but it took about eight minutes.

00:32:56.382 --> 00:33:04.169
When you had a public announcement system where you didn't say what has happened, just that they should evacuate, it actually took 11 minutes.

00:33:04.169 --> 00:33:05.251
It's a long time.

00:33:05.251 --> 00:33:10.087
And when you had staff plus the same PA system, then it was more efficient than the staff.

00:33:10.087 --> 00:33:11.589
So staff only took eight minutes.

00:33:11.589 --> 00:33:14.796
You add a PA system, it takes seven minutes.

00:33:15.135 --> 00:33:30.666
But the thing was that when they had a PA system which said what had happened and what you should do, then it was by far the shortest time six minutes to evacuate the station without any staff interaction, since you told them what had happened and they don't have to look for additional information.

00:33:30.666 --> 00:33:32.873
And then you told them what had happened and they don't have to look for additional information.

00:33:32.873 --> 00:33:34.017
And then you told them what to do and they did that.

00:33:34.017 --> 00:33:34.116
Okay.

00:33:34.116 --> 00:33:43.282
So telling people what is happening and so telling people what they should do is good, since you reduce that time it takes for people to respond initially.

00:33:43.763 --> 00:33:59.686
And I've done similar experiments and others have done as well where we've done equivalent experiments with voice alarms and, and in one voice alarm we say that there is a fire and in another one we say that we don't mention fire, and in none of these cases we ever get stressed behavior or panic.

00:33:59.686 --> 00:34:00.950
People are quite calm.

00:34:00.950 --> 00:34:04.346
They behave in a very similar way, and this is just one example.

00:34:04.346 --> 00:34:15.224
I did it at Lund University, but others have done it in other places and don't typically see any panic or stress reaction in those situations where the stimuli are quite mild.

00:34:16.246 --> 00:34:20.934
Have you ever seen intense emotional response in an experiment?

00:34:21.900 --> 00:34:29.284
The only time I've seen an intense emotional response was when we've done experiments in a smoke-filled tunnel with acetic acid.

00:34:29.925 --> 00:34:31.268
So that was irritating smoke.

00:34:31.268 --> 00:34:33.253
It was slightly irritating smoke.

00:34:33.253 --> 00:34:46.750
The thing, though, in that particular case where the person was stressed, it was probably more linked to claustrophobia, sort of being in an enclosed environment, rather than it being fire smoke.

00:34:46.750 --> 00:34:59.612
I've seen stress as well, when we did an evacuation in Victoria Tower, where you see a heightened level of stress but you don't have people running or rushing to exit eating.

00:34:59.612 --> 00:35:00.961
No, no, stampeding.

00:35:00.961 --> 00:35:03.550
Those experiments was with one person at a time.

00:35:03.550 --> 00:35:08.086
They just walk maybe a bit faster, but I haven't seen any any running really.

00:35:08.086 --> 00:35:09.431
So that's a rational response.

00:35:09.431 --> 00:35:10.355
Right, it is.

00:35:10.355 --> 00:35:13.643
You should move quicker when there is a fire.

00:35:13.764 --> 00:35:17.309
Now, another myth is that crowd crush is the same as panic.

00:35:17.731 --> 00:35:29.351
Okay, and the problem with that is you see a crowd crush and then you say, well, that's equivalent to panic, but there have been so many cases of crowd crush that are unrelated to panic.

00:35:29.452 --> 00:35:37.362
People might be extremely stressed as they're being crushed, but that's different from the stress and their behavior leading to the crowd crush.

00:35:37.362 --> 00:35:44.425
In many cases, what causes a crowd crush is narrow openings, really high densities, counterflow.

00:35:44.425 --> 00:35:53.425
If you have a funnel where a lot of people are moving and everyone's pushing a bit, but then towards the edge or the end of the funnel, you get an increase of pressure.

00:35:53.425 --> 00:35:57.222
So an example would be the love parade, where you had opposing flows.

00:35:57.222 --> 00:36:06.753
You had a, basically a tunnel that they had to go through, and the flow of people going in was simply bigger than the tunnel capacity, and hence you got the crown crusher.

00:36:06.753 --> 00:36:14.713
That does not mean that people were panicking to get out through that tunnel, but it just meant the flow led to a situation where you got a crash.

00:36:14.713 --> 00:36:18.510
So in that case you wouldn't be able to say well, we had a crash, hence panic.

00:36:19.000 --> 00:36:27.048
The important distinction is that panic is something non-preventable in a way, while crowd crash is preventable by engineering.

00:36:27.320 --> 00:36:28.543
Crowd crash is preventable.

00:36:28.543 --> 00:36:31.490
I guess we have to figure out first what panic actually is.

00:36:31.490 --> 00:36:33.346
That's an interesting question.

00:36:33.346 --> 00:36:35.532
So does panic exist Now?

00:36:35.532 --> 00:36:42.460
The panic the way it's been described in historical literature probably doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean that panic doesn't exist.

00:36:42.460 --> 00:36:45.487
It's just that we need a clear definition of panic.

00:36:45.487 --> 00:36:48.012
But it's not the same as Crowdcrush.

00:36:48.012 --> 00:36:49.804
It's not the same as Crowdcrush Exactly.

00:36:49.885 --> 00:36:50.987
It doesn't end with Stampede.

00:36:50.987 --> 00:36:54.710
No, exactly, and I would argue it rarely ends with Stampede.

00:36:54.710 --> 00:37:02.590
But we'll come back to the definition of panic, which is also the reason why I think it very rarely leads to a Stampede.

00:37:02.590 --> 00:37:03.713
Okay, let's go further.

00:37:04.059 --> 00:37:06.869
Another myth was that panic spreads as a disease.

00:37:06.980 --> 00:37:13.222
Yeah, people from top floor reacted the same way, exactly, and that has been dismissed in many fires.

00:37:13.222 --> 00:37:16.048
So one example that I remember is the World Trade Center bombings.

00:37:16.048 --> 00:37:38.423
One of the things that was discovered there was that as people were evacuating and they were evacuating down staircases and they were filled with smoke and lighting had gone out a lot of people expressed frustration, and you can say that that's sort of expressing their anxiety the seed of panic, according to the old definition, rather than that spreading through the crowd as wildfire or a disease.

00:37:38.423 --> 00:38:01.601
You actually had people calming each other, so saying to others like you'll be fine, we'll do this together, we'll walk down together, and it was a very orderly evacuation and we've seen this quite a bit that people might express this frustration and stress, but then you have people around it, so, rather than being reinforced, many times it's actually dampened and people feel security by being there with others who try and calm them down.

00:38:01.601 --> 00:38:05.291
Now, this does not mean that we don't consider the behavior of others.

00:38:05.291 --> 00:38:07.164
So we have the theory of social influence.

00:38:07.224 --> 00:38:12.365
So you look at others and you understand their behavior, or you look at their behavior and you understand the situation.

00:38:12.365 --> 00:38:14.490
So we have the normative social influence.

00:38:14.490 --> 00:38:16.204
That's about the fear of being different.

00:38:16.204 --> 00:38:17.952
It's like an inhibitor.

00:38:17.952 --> 00:38:20.382
And then we have informational social influence.

00:38:20.382 --> 00:38:23.960
So if you see people who are stressed, you probably take the situation more seriously.

00:38:23.960 --> 00:38:30.302
That's a big step from taking a situation more seriously to stampeding example losing control.

00:38:30.302 --> 00:38:38.869
So yes, we do have some social influence influencing how we there's a good behavior, but it's not Absolutely.

00:38:39.291 --> 00:38:47.222
And if there is a fire alarm and someone is running past your office, you probably think it's a more serious fire than if someone is walking past your office.

00:38:47.222 --> 00:38:58.682
So, yes, there is that element, but in my view, probably not to the point of causing you to lose your thinking altogether and just run out, which would be the traditional definition of panic.

00:38:58.682 --> 00:39:00.628
So an interesting question.

00:39:00.628 --> 00:39:04.668
You've raised this a couple of times what is actually panic and does it?

00:39:04.728 --> 00:39:05.230
exist.

00:39:05.329 --> 00:39:06.434
What's the definition of panic?

00:39:06.434 --> 00:39:14.519
Now, the one that I often go to when I teach my students about panic is one by Quarantelli from 1954.

00:39:14.519 --> 00:39:18.248
Now, quarantelli defined panic in a slightly different way.

00:39:18.248 --> 00:39:18.990
What was it?

00:39:18.990 --> 00:39:25.405
Quarantelli was a researcher who looked at disasters, so how people behave in disasters.

00:39:25.425 --> 00:39:37.704
So not just fire, Not just fire any type of disaster, and so the definition is not just fire related, it's just sort of in disasters, not just fire, any type of disaster, and so the definition is not just fire-related, it's just sort of in disasters Now, and Quarantelli derived the definition rather than set.

00:39:37.704 --> 00:39:40.987
So usually as a researcher, you might define it and then you apply it.

00:39:40.987 --> 00:39:42.487
Quarantelli did it differently.

00:39:42.487 --> 00:39:57.275
So he looked at a thousand or several thousand cases where people's behavior in disasters were described, and whenever he discovered something which he, based on his gut feeling, would say I would say this is panic, he saved it.

00:39:57.275 --> 00:40:08.063
And then he read all of these publications and it was only a handful, it wasn't that many publications and tried, based on what he saw, to define panic.

00:40:08.083 --> 00:40:19.096
And the definition that he eventually wrote down was that panic is an acute fear reaction, marked by the loss of self-control, which is followed by non-social and non-rational flight behavior.

00:40:19.096 --> 00:40:22.467
And there are several things in this definition that are worth mentioning.

00:40:22.467 --> 00:40:25.161
Acute Okay, very, very.

00:40:25.161 --> 00:40:28.659
So acute would be the first one Very, very short-lived.

00:40:28.659 --> 00:40:34.581
So what Quarantelli saw was seconds of heightened anxiety and stress.

00:40:35.262 --> 00:40:48.251
People might temporarily lose their self-control, so not a whole moment running around we're talking five seconds, maybe two to five seconds, maybe a bit more in extreme situations.

00:40:48.251 --> 00:40:52.251
He also said that there was always an emotion, a fear reaction.

00:40:52.251 --> 00:40:54.425
Okay, so there is an emotional component.

00:40:54.425 --> 00:40:55.748
That seems to make sense.

00:40:55.748 --> 00:41:00.347
He also said that there's usually some type of non-social behavior.

00:41:00.347 --> 00:41:03.579
Now, quarantelli was very careful in the word choice here.

00:41:03.579 --> 00:41:05.123
Non-social is not antisocial.

00:41:05.123 --> 00:41:11.007
Antisocial would be fighting to get out, so not aggressive, but just not adhering to the social norms.

00:41:11.068 --> 00:41:17.141
Exactly, not considering the fact that you're there with others rather than hurting others to get ahead, and that's quite different.

00:41:17.141 --> 00:41:21.231
And you might remember some of the myths like people were fighting to get out.

00:41:21.280 --> 00:41:22.382
That's the definition of panic.

00:41:22.382 --> 00:41:27.364
According to Quarantelli, that doesn't really happen, but you might not consider the others.

00:41:27.364 --> 00:41:31.614

176 - The Myth of Panic with Daniel Nilsson

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