Collective resilience Collective resilience in mass emergencies and disasters: in mass emergencies and disasters: A new approach A new approach John Drury (University of Sussex) Steve Reicher (St Andrews University) Chris Cocking (London Metropolitan University) British Psychological Society Annual Conference 2009
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Collective resilience in mass emergencies and disasters: A new approach John Drury (University of Sussex) Steve Reicher (St Andrews University) Chris Cocking.
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Collective resilience Collective resilience in mass emergencies and disasters: in mass emergencies and disasters:
A new approachA new approach
John Drury
(University of Sussex)
Steve Reicher
(St Andrews University)
Chris Cocking
(London Metropolitan University)
British Psychological Society
Annual Conference 2009
Collective resilience Collective resilience in mass emergencies and disasters: in mass emergencies and disasters:
A new approach A new approach
Acknowledgements
Richard Williams (University of Glamorgan)The research referred to in this presentation was made possible by a
grant from the Economic and Social Research Council Ref. no: RES-000-23-0446
Models of resilience
Personal resilience
‘a person’s capacity for adapting psychologically, emotionally and physically reasonably well and without lasting detriment to self, relationships or personal development in the face of adversity, threat or challenge’ (NATO guidelines, cited in Williams & Drury, 2009)
Factors:• Innate and acquired• Developmental experiences• Repertoires of knowledge• Family, peer, school and employment relationships• Life events• Attachments
Models of resilience
‘Collective resilience’
Concept employed by a number of recent researchers (e.g., Almedon, 2005; Kahn, 2005) either descriptively:
• ‘Collective resilience refers to the coping processes that occur in reference to and dependent on a given social context’ (Hernández, 2002, p. 334).
Or with reference largely to pre-existing social resources:
• ‘… collective resilience [is] understood as the bonds and networks that hold communities together, provides support and protection, and facilitates recovery in times of extreme stress, as well as resettlement. These social bonds are variously referred to as social networks, community facilities and activities, active citizenship, or social capital. ....’ (Fielding & Anderson, 2008, p. 7)
‘Collective resilience’: A social psychological model
Social identity →
• We trust and expect others to be supportive, practically and emotionally (Drury & Reicher, 1999)
• in turn, reduces anxiety and stress (Haslam et al., 2005)
• Shared definition of reality (legitimacy, possibility)• In turn, allows co-ordination (Turner et al., 1987)• In turn, enhances agency/power (the ability to organize the world
around us to minimize the risks of being exposed to further trauma)
• Allows us to feel collective ownership of the plans and goals we make together (Haslam, 2004)
• Encourages us to express solidarity and cohesion• Makes us see each other’s plight as our own and hence give support
sometimes at a cost to our own personal safety (Levine et al., 2005)
Total: 146(+) witnesses, 90 of whom were survivors
Material coded and counted: ‘panic’, help versus selfishness, threat of death, affiliation, unity…
Helping versus personal ‘selfishness’
(Helping: giving reassurance, sharing water, pulling people from the wreckage, supporting people up as they evacuated, make-shift bandages and tourniquets)
‘unity’‘together’‘similarity’‘affinity’‘part of a group’‘everybody, didn’t matter what colour or nationality’‘you thought these people knew each other’ ‘teamness’[sic]‘warmness’‘vague solidity’‘empathy’
Int: “can you say how much unity there was on a scale of one to ten?”
LB 1: “I’d say it was very high I’d say it was seven or eight out of ten.”
Int: “Ok and comparing to before the blast happened what do you think the unity was like before?”
LB 1: “I’d say very low- three out of ten, I mean you don’t really think about unity in a normal train journey, it just doesn’t happen you just want to get from A to B, get a seat maybe”
(LB 1)
Explaining crowd resilience in the London bombings
• Survivors were mostly commuters• ‘We-ness’ was emergent
• Almost all who referred to unity referred to shared danger or ‘common fate’
• Sounds like ‘Blitz spirit’?• Disasters bring people together (Fritz, 1968; Clarke, 2002)
• The psych mechanism: ‘Common fate’ is a criterion for self-categorization (Turner et al., 1987)
Comparative event study Interviews with (21) survivors of (11) emergencies
(Drury, Cocking, & Reicher, in press 2009a)
Sinking ships (Jupiter, 1988; Oceanos, 1991)
Harrods bomb (1983)
Hotel fire (1971)
Grantham train accident (2003)
Tower block evacuations (2001, 2002)
Bradford City fire (1985)
Fatboy Slim Brighton beach party (2002)
Ghana football stadium crush (2001), Hillsborough crush (1989)
Step 1: Constructing comparisonsLow (n = 9) versus high (n = 12) identifiers
Step 2: Origins of enhanced identification
Identification Low High Total ‘I felt in danger’ 56a 67 62 ‘Shared sense of danger’
67 92 80
a Figures are percentage of interviewees endorsing the statement, based on low-identification sample size of nine and high-identification sample size of 12.
Step 3: Comparing high and low identifiers on co-operation and selfishness
a Figures are percentage of interviewees endorsing the statement. (Figures in brackets indicate number of survivors the interviewee reported seeing or experiencing.)
Step 4: Comparing low and high identifiers on orderliness and disorderliness