Collective resilience in emergencies and disasters: What can(

1
Collective resilience in emergencies and
disasters What can(t) be done to prepare the
public

• John Drury
• Department of Psychology
• University of Sussex

2
Collective resilience in emergencies and
disasters

• Acknowledgements
• Steve Reicher (St Andrews University)
• Chris Cocking (London Metropolitan University)
• 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

3
Models of resilience

• The ability to withstand or recover quickly from
  difficult conditions
• Policy and practice (resilience embodied in
  institutions, organizational policies for
  emergency preparedness/planning)

4
Models of resilience

• Disaster research
• Resilience is the ability of organizations to
  recover from attack and function successfully
  without top-down direction (Dynes, 2003)
• Factors
• Informal networks (Tierney, 2002)
• Provision of resources (Kendra Wachtendorf,
  2001).
• World Trade Center 2001 emergency services
  improvised forms of coordination, despite loss of
  command and control centre

5
Models of resilience

• Psychology and psychiatry
• Personal resilience a persons 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

6
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 essentially to pre-existing
  social resources (bonds etc.)
• 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. .... It refers to
  groups of traumatised people whose old
  communities have been destroyed and who are
  learning to survive in a new world, where
  community may be non-existent, new or emerging,
  or multiple. (Fielding Anderson, 2008, p. 7
  emphasis added)
• (Although also a hint here of emergence)

7
Collective resilience A social psychological
model

• Shared identity (psychological unity) ?
• We trust and expect others to be supportive,
  practically and emotionally
• in turn, reduces anxiety and stress
• Shared definition of reality (legitimacy,
  possibility)
• In turn, allows co-ordination
• 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
• Encourages us to express solidarity and cohesion
• Makes us see each others plight as our own and
  hence give support sometimes at a cost to our own
  personal safety

8
Collective resilience (Drury, Cocking,
Reicher, 2009a, b Williams Drury, 2009)

• Model derived from 20 years of social identity
  research on group processes, organizational and
  health behaviour (e.g. Haslam, 2004 Haslam et
  al., 2009 Turner et al., 1987)
• Origins of shared identity and hence collective
  resilience
• (i) existing group memberships e.g.
  communities
• (ii) emergent group memberships ad hoc crowds
• Novel claims of this approach
• The concept of resilience can be applied to
  unstructured, ad hoc collectives (crowds) not
  just organizations
• Hence doesnt assume there needs to be existing
  bonds / networks etc.
• Being part of a psychological crowd can
  contribute to personal survival in an emergency
  (the crowd as an adaptive mechanism)

9
7th July 2005 London bombings(Cocking, Drury,
Reicher, 2009b)

• Four bombs, 56 deaths, 700 injuries.
• Emergency services
• didnt reach all
• the survivors
• Immediately.

10
Data

• Contemporaneous newspaper accounts 141
• Personal (archive) accounts 127
• Primary data interviews and written e-mail
  responses 17
• Total 146() witnesses, 90 of whom were
  survivors
• Material coded and counted panic, help versus
  selfishness, threat of death, affiliation, unity

11
Non-adaptive panic or adaptive order?

• It took about twenty twenty-five minutes before
  we got out and some people were really itching
  to get off the train so more people the more
  agitated people were not being shaken up they
  felt they were, even though they wanted to get
  off at the same time so it was quite a calm calm
  evenly dispersed evacuation there wasnt people
  running down the train screaming their heads
  off. It was very calm and obviously there was
  people crying but generally most sort of
  people were really calm in that situation, which
  I found amazing.
• (LB 1)

12
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)

13

• I remember walking towards the stairs and at the
  top of the stairs there was a guy coming from the
  other direction. I remember him kind of
  gesturing kind of politely that I should go in
  front- you first that. And I was struck I
  thought, God even in a situation like this
  someone has kind of got manners, really.
• (LB 11)

14

• I didnt see any uncooperative activity, I just
  saw some people who were so caught up in their
  own feelings that they were kind of more focused
  on themselves but I didnt see anyone who was
  uncooperative. I didnt see any bad behavior
• (LB 4)

15
Accounting for help
16
Accounting for help
17

• Interview accounts
• unity
• together
• similarity
• affinity
• part of a group
• everybody, didnt matter what colour or
  nationality
• you thought these people knew each other
• teamnesssic
• warmness
• vague solidity
• empathy

18

• Int can you say how much unity there was on a
  scale of one to ten?
• LB 1 Id say it was very high Id 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 Id say very low- three out of ten, I mean
  you dont really think about unity in a normal
  train journey, it just doesnt happen you just
  want to get from A to B, get a seat maybe
• (LB 1)

19

• Explaining shared identity (unity) in London
  bombings
• Survivors were mostly commuters
• We-ness was emergent
• Almost all who referred to unity referred to
  common fate to shared danger
• Sounds like Blitz spirit?
• As has been noted - Disasters bring people
  together (Fritz, 1968 Clarke, 2002)
• The psych mechanism Common fate is a criterion
  for social identification (Turner et al., 1987)

20
Implications

• IF shared identity can arise from the emergency
  or disaster itself, then collective resilience is
  endogenous, in human nature
• Disaster planning and policy needs to take this
  into account or risk undermining it!
• This argument in line with that made by a number
  of sociologists and disaster psychiatrists (e.g.,
  Dynes, Furedi, Wessely, Glass Schoch-Spana)

21
Implications for disaster planning

• Not protecting a psychologically vulnerable
  public (by withholding information) but
  organizing adequate communication plans
• Less anxiety, more efficacy and more empowerment
  the more information
• The modern discrepancy between getting
  (surveillance) versus giving information
  technologies needs to be questioned
• BUT! communication requires trust

22
Implications for disaster planning

• 2. Understanding the crowd as a resource not a
  (psycho-social) problem
• Example London bombs survivors acted as fourth
  emergency service
• Catering for the public desire to help, allowing
  the public to be involved in its own protection

23
Implications for disaster planning

• 3. Facilitating collective independence
• Information
• Practical, material resources are empowering
• Emotional guidance (dont panic) and
  treatment (expert post-trauma counselling)
• (i) presuppose a dependent, passive public
• (ii) reproduce a perceived relationship of
  inequality and alienation
• (iii) hence will encounter resentment,
  hostility and resistance

24
Summary and conclusions

• Resilience is a key concept
• Model of collective resilience based on social
  psychological principles
• If correct then we need to understand the bases
  and consequences of resilience in human responses
  to disasters
• Emergency planning and preparedness needs to take
  account of these natural bases to facilitate
  (rather than undermine) resilience.