The role of social identity processes in mass emergency behaviour: An integrative review

ABSTRACT

This review provides a new integration of recent research that has formed the basis of a social identity explanation of supportive collective behaviour among survivors in emergencies and disasters. I describe a model in which a sense of common fate is the source of an emergent shared social identity among survivors, which in turn provides the motivation to give social support to others affected. In addition, by drawing on the concept of relational transformation in psychological crowds, I show how an emergent shared social identity can engender a range of further behavioural and cognitive consequences that contribute to collective self-organisation in emergencies, including expected support, coordination of behaviour, and collective efficacy. It will be argued that the model can been applied to explaining how potentially dangerous crowd events avoid disaster: shared social identity operates as the basis of spontaneous self-organisation in these cases, as in many emergencies and disasters.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergencies
• disasters
• social identity
• social support
• common fate

Acknowledgements

The ideas described in this review are a collective product and I would like to acknowledge in particular the contributions of my co-authors Steve Reicher, Richard Williams, Clifford Stott, Chris Cocking, David Novelli, Hani Nabulsi, Rupert Brown, Roberto González, and Daniel Miranda. Also, thanks to Evangelos Ntontis, Khalifah Alfadhli, Tony Manstead, Miles Hewstone, and the reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this article

Notes

¹ There is an important distinction between those theories that set out to explain variation between individuals in responses to emergencies (such as that of Leach, 2004) and those individual-mechanism focused theories that set out to explain collective responses (such as that of Mawson, 2007).

² A related issue here is that the term panic can also be used as a blaming device and criticism (Cocking & Drury, 2014) – hence its usefulness as a form of social critique in the concept of a moral panic (Cohen, 1972).

³ There is clearly a potential confound in designs such as these, which use social groups that have well-established stereotypes, as a way of operationalising shared identity. Our decision to use such groups was based on the reasoning that minimal groups might be less engaging for these kinds of experiments. In the case of the second experiment described here, while it is true that the “football fan” identity has a number of associations, it is not clear that it is particularly associated with a norm of helping behaviour.

⁴ All sources were checked and cross-referenced to make sure we were not double-counting.

⁵ Though it might be argued that shared social identity means that the same bias would transfer to the group level.

⁶ Square brackets indicate text edited out to save space.

⁷ In retrospect, the linking of “calmness” with orderliness is problematic, because it suggests that emotionality is the issue. It is possible for a relatively unemotional crowd to block a door if their exit is uncoordinated (Mintz, 1951), and for a frightened or angry crowd to display self-organisation.

⁸ These levels of unity varied within events as well as between them; for example, two interviewees at the BBB2 were classified as low and two others at the same event were classified as high.

⁹ While the numbers for personally selfish behaviours were the reverse of predictions, the numbers were so low that the comparison is probably meaningless: low-identifiers 0% of interviewees (0 instances), high-identifiers 8% (1 instance).

¹⁰ Though some research suggests that extreme events (e.g., earthquakes) are remembered better when there is personal involvement (Neisser, 1996; Prati et al., 2012).

¹¹ Staub and Vollhardt (2008) note that numerous studies have found a correlation between involvement in suffering and helping behaviour, including many from the disaster literature. Vollhardt (2009) suggests that the experience of suffering provides a new motivation and proposes that mechanisms could include empathy, perceived common fate, and shared social identification with other victims.

¹² This study took IOS as a measure of identity-fusion. Identity-fusion has been predicted, and found, to lead to greater self-sacrificial behaviours for others (Gómez et al., 2011; Swann et al., 2014) and has been used to explain supportive convergence behaviour in an emergency (Buhrmester, Fraser, Lanman, Whitehouse, & Swann, 2015). The concepts of identity-fusion and social identification are similar, and conceptually it might be argued that identity-fusion itself can imply some degree of social categorisation in that one or more individuals are being grouped with self and distinguished from other individuals. It is also worth noting that personally self-sacrificial behaviours were found among some of the survivors of the July 7th London bombings, which we explained in terms of shared social identity, not identity-fusion (Drury et al., 2009b).

¹³ I problematise the term looting in this context because it is often used to lump opportunistic burglaries together with incidents where survivors take goods from abandoned shops for their own survival (see Tierney et al., 2006).

¹⁴ Shared goals were also included as a parallel mediator to expected support, but we did not use these in the final model below because they did not fit well. On reflection, it was decided that this measure lacked construct validity as the items did not appear to map on clearly to the concept in question.

¹⁵ The results of the famous smoke-filled room experiment by Latané and Darley (1968) were interpreted to suggest that others’ non-responses indicated to participants that the smoke was not dangerous. However, Darley and Latané’s (1968) parallel study, using a (less ambiguous) epileptic seizure as the emergency, led to the conclusion that diffusion of responsibility was the reason for non-response. Subsequent developments of their explanatory framework for bystander non-intervention concentrated on diffusion of responsibility through group size rather than social appraisal processes (see Levine & Manning, 2013, for a review).

¹⁶ The following video of collective inaction in response to an alarm is well known in fire safety training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtX-10c3fT0 .

¹⁷ The questionnaire respondents were a different sample from the interview study. In both samples, many of the respondents were people who regularly attended dance music events at the time of BBB2.

¹⁸ The English spelling is Mecca.

¹⁹ Thanks to Viv Vignoles for this point.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under Grants RES-000-23-0446 (to John Drury, Stephen Reicher, Damian Schofield and Paul Langston) and ES/N01068X/1 (to John Drury, Stephen Reicher, and Clifford Stott); the Leverhulme Trust under Grant F/00 230/AO (to John Drury and Clifford Stott); Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica under Grant CONICYT/FONDAP/15130009 (to Centro de Medición Mide UC, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the Interdisciplinary Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies); and a doctoral scholarship grant from the Ministry of the Interior, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (to Hani Alnabulsi).