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FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE - SCIENCE MATTERS: Sense of togetherness
By Stephen Pincock, Financial Times
Published: Jul 23, 2005 

We've all had far too many opportunities over the past few years to contemplate 
being part of a crowd during a life-threatening emergency. For those in London, 
the nightmare has become particularly stark. As one of the millions of people 
who regularly ride the city's public transport system, I have found it almost 
impossible to avoid putting myself in the shoes of those caught up in the 
bombings.
By odd coincidence, just days before the July 7 attacks, I had been talking to a 
group of British researchers who have been studying how people in crowds respond 
in emergencies. Before the Tube and bus bombs I thought the findings had been 
worth hearing - now they are strikingly relevant.
John Drury and colleagues from the Universities of Sussex and St Andrews have 
been studying how crowds react in "panic" situations, and what factors influence 
the way individuals behave in such circumstances.
The group interviewed a selection of people who had been involved in real-life 
emergencies, including the fatal crowd crushing at the Hillsborough football 
stadium in 1989, the fire at Bradford football stadium in 1985, the evacuation 
of Canary Wharf after September 11 and an extremely overcrowded concert by DJ 
Fatboy Slim on Brighton beach.
Based on earlier research, Drury's team expected to find that there were two 
distinct sorts of crowd: one in which there was a history of unity, such as 
football crowds, where they expected more helping behaviour; and another in 
which people had been randomly thrown together, where they expected far less 
solidarity and more selfish behaviour.
"In fact, what we found was that in the event of the emergency, people often 
described feeling an increased sense of togetherness or unity which grew in 
relation to the perceived threat of death," Drury said. "This then prompted more 
helping behaviour than you would have expected otherwise."
To look into these unexpected observations further, the Sussex researchers got 
together with a team of computer scientists from Nottingham University, led by 
Damian Schofield, which specialises in creating models of disaster situations to 
help governments and companies prevent and deal with catastrophes.
Drury and colleagues asked Schofield's group to create a simulation of a fire in 
the London Underground, in which a user has to travel through a station to 
escape. They wanted to use this experimental model to test the idea that a 
shared identity within a crowd is an important factor in promoting helping 
behaviour when people are faced with an emergency.
At the Royal Society's summer science exhibition on July 4, I saw the simulator 
in action. On a computer screen, the view is as seen through the eyes of a 
person in crowded subway tunnel filled with people running away from a fire. 
Every now and then you come across an injured person lying on the floor and have 
to choose whether to help or to leave them behind. Meanwhile, an indicator shows 
a rising risk of death. "Don't think of this as a game," a volunteer was told. 
"Imagine what you would do in this situation."
The computer model allows the scientists to manipulate how the participants 
define themselves - either as part of the crowd or psychologically distinct from 
it. "We ask people to play the role of, say, football fans who have all been to 
see a game, or that they've been shopping and are on their way home," explained 
Drury.
After running the study on the first group of participants, Drury's group found 
that those who took part under the collective identity helped injured people on 
average 70 per cent of the time, compared to less than 50 per cent for those who 
were acting out the role of individuals in a random crowd.
After a second round of simulations, they asked participants to fill in a 
questionnaire that probed how much they had felt a group identity within the 
crowd. Those who indicated they felt a strong sense of "groupness" were the most 
likely to give help, and this sense of identity was a better predictor of 
helping compared with factors such as the size of the crowd.
No one is suggesting that everybody responds exactly the same way in an 
emergency, but the findings offer an insight into human behaviour that you could 
see echoed in the way Londoners responded to the bombings. Drury's group is now 
analysing accounts of people who were involved. (Anyone who would like share 
their experiences should go to www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~dzs/londonbomb/index.htm.)
Drury also sees a potential lesson for officials. "What came out of the 
interviews was that this groupness sometimes takes time to develop as people 
gradually realise that everyone is in the same boat," he says. "There might be a 
role for the authorities in trying to promote this collective spirit in 
emergencies in the way they address the crowd. There need not be an assumption 
that people will panic rather than use the information in a logical way."
stephen.pincock@journalist.co.uk