Dermot Barr, John Drury, Linda Bell, Nils Devynck, Çağla Gayretli, Simran Lalli, Harry Linfield
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Explaining a collective false alarm: Context and cognition in the Oxford Street crowd flight incident
Collective false alarms can cause significant disruption, costly emergency response, and distress. Yet an adequate psychological explanation for these incidents is lacking. We interviewed 39 participants and analysed multiple secondary data sources from the 2017 false alarm in Oxford Street, UK, to develop a new explanation of this phenomenon. There was evidence that awareness of recent collectively self‐relevant terrorist attacks lowered the threshold for interpreting ambiguous signals as signs of hostile threat. Interviewees also fled and hid after inferring threats from others’ fear and flight responses. Cooperative behaviour was sporadic and was associated with an emergent sense of groupness that occurred in limited locations. The analysis suggests that crowd behaviour in false alarms has more in common with the meaningful behaviour typically found in real emergencies than with the image of uncontrolled ‘mass panic’ portrayed in news media. These findings have implications for policy in preparing the public for terrorist attacks.
期刊介绍:
Topics covered include, among others, intergroup relations, group processes, social cognition, attitudes, social influence and persuasion, self and identity, verbal and nonverbal communication, language and thought, affect and emotion, embodied and situated cognition and individual differences of social-psychological relevance. Together with original research articles, the European Journal of Social Psychology"s innovative and inclusive style is reflected in the variety of articles published: Research Article: Original articles that provide a significant contribution to the understanding of social phenomena, up to a maximum of 12,000 words in length.