Collective resilience in the crowd:
Lessons of the London bombings of July 7th 2005
John Drury
(University of Sussex)
Royal College of Psychiatrists Annual Meeting 2009
S10 Responding to terrorism: Mental health matters
Acknowledgements
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 mass emergency behaviour
Psychosocial vulnerability
– Maladaptive ‘mass panic’
– Freezing
– PTSD
Psychosocial resilience
– Maintenance of adaptive social organization
– Effective response/agency
– Ability to cope and recover
7th July 2005 London bombings
Drury, J., Cocking, C., & Reicher, S. (2009). The nature of collective resilience:
Survivor reactions to the 2005 London bombings. International Journal of Mass
Emergencies and Disasters, 27, 66-95.
Four bombs, 56 deaths, 700+ injuries.
Emergency
services didn’t
reach all the
survivors
immediately.
Data-set
Contemporaneous newspaper accounts: 141
Personal accounts: 127
Primary data: interviews, written e-mail responses:
19
Total: 146(+) witnesses, 90 of whom were survivors
Material coded and counted:
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)
Contemporaneous
newspaper
accounts
Archive
personal
accounts
Primary data:
Interviews and
e-mails
‘I helped’
‘I was helped’
‘I saw help’
‘Selfish’ behaviours
57
17
140
3
42
29
50
11
13
10
19
4
Total
141
127
19
Accounting for help
Contemporaneous
newspaper
accounts
Archive
personal
accounts
Primary data:
Interviews and
e-mails
Possibility of death
Not going to die
70
-
68
2
12
1
With strangers
With affiliates
-
57
8
15
4
Total
141
127
19
Accounting for help
Contemporaneous
newspaper
accounts
Archive
personal
accounts
Primary data:
Interviews and
e-mails
Unity
Disunity
7
0
20
0
11
1
Total
141
127
19
Interview accounts of ‘unity’:
‘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
• Psychological unity 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 psychological mechanism: ‘Common fate’ is a
criterion for shared social identity (Turner et al., 1987)
‘Collective resilience’:
a social psychological model
Shared social identity →
We trust and expect others to be supportive, practically and
emotionally (Drury & Reicher, 1999)
• reduces anxiety and stress (Haslam et al., 2005)
Shared definition of reality (legitimacy, possibility)
• allows co-ordination (Turner et al., 1987)
• enhances our ability to organize the world around us to
minimize the risks of being exposed to further trauma
Encourages us to express solidarity and cohesion
• Makes us see each other’s plight as our own and hence give
support (Levine et al., 2005) sometimes at a cost to our own
personal safety
Collective resilience: Implications
Through the perception of a ‘common fate’, even ad
hoc crowds can share a social identity and hence
exhibit collective resilience.
The crowd can be seen as an adaptive mechanism
in emergencies
– Previous research has (over-)emphasized psychosocial ‘vulnerability’ (e.g. mass panic) in emergency
crowds
– Being part of a psychological crowd can contribute to
personal survival in an emergency
– The emergency services need to take account of the
crowd desire and ability to contribute to rescue and
recovery
Summary and conclusions
• The London bombs is one of many
examples of adaptive crowd behaviour in
an emergency
• Psychological group membership should be
included as a factor in our overall
conception of resilience
• Reversal of perspective: crowd as solution
not (psycho-social) problem in emergencies