| Home > Events > The Public as an Asset, Not a Problem > Lee Clarke The Problem of Panic in Disaster Response Transcript [Listen to this talk] [View the slides] DR. URSANO: It's a marvelous chance now for us to move on, and to hear some additional comments. Dr. Lee Clarke is a Professor of Sociology at Rutger's University. His early worked concerned how decision-makers chose among the various risks in uncertain environments. He is one of the few people who has published not only in the American Journal of Sociology, but also in the Atlantic Monthly. He's also served as consultant to the Department of Energy. This morning we look forward to hearing his comments on the problem of panic in disaster response. Lee. DR. CLARKE: Thank you for that. That's wonderful. Can I ask that the lights be brought back up, unless there's some great compelling reason to keep other folks in the dark. Thank you for having me here. I'm going to keep that short because I need all my 15 minutes, all of them. If there's a silver lining, it's a cloud with a silver lining, the silver lining in 9/11 is that our imaginations have been stretched, and prodded, and doubted, and it is important, I think, because if we're going to be valuable in this war on terror, we have to imagine in new ways, because they say, everything has changed. We're only now starting to discern how it is that our society changed as a response to 9/11, and government response to it. One thing we know for sure, before 9/11 experts on terrorism thought that it was against the terrorists' interests to kill large numbers of people. That was the conventional wisdom, so now there is no conventional wisdom on terrorism, so our imaginations have to change. Now it used to be that we advised people not to imagine the worst cases. We would tell them that it was against their interest, and against good reason to concentrate on the risk, as opposed to the outcomes. We would tell them it was unreasonable, that perhaps we would even be prone to panic if we focused on worst case possibilities, rather than the likelihood of occurrence. But, of course, we live in a worst case world now, and I think our imaginations are not going back. Now I'm going to make two broad points today and fill these in. One is that we know a lot about preparation and response to disaster from social science. And the second is that planning processes can be way too top heavy. The first point, of course, first. We know a great deal about how people prepare and respond to disasters in social science, but we have failed, those of us in disaster studies, we have failed to properly communicate this knowledge to officials, and even to some emergency planners. And the result has been the perpetuation of a number of myths. One is that people automatically follow their leaders. Another is that we need only one spokesperson with a single consistent strong message. Not true. Another is that people become inured to warnings that there's some sort of cry wolf issue, that if we tell them that they're in danger multiple times, after a while they won't believe us. And the last two I'll concentrate on, that people panic in disasters. At least in the United States, panic is quite rare in disasters, although it does happen occasionally. And that people can't handle bad news. Now I want a quick sort of academic footnote here. We need to be careful. We need to look wherever we can for new ways to imagine about terrorist attacks, and especially bioterrorist attacks, but we have to be careful about this, because nobody has really thought through, or I haven't seen it, thought through the implications of making direct comparisons between bioterrorist attacks and other kinds of normal disasters. One obvious difference is that a bioterrorist attack will not be geographically concentrated. For theoretical reasons, I'm not going to -- I won't spend time on that today. That could matter enormously. Nonetheless, we look at other instances for lessons. We look at the World Trade Center, of course, and there we see very little panic. People were scared out of their minds, but that's a perfectly rational thing to do. One of the reasons there wasn't a higher death toll in New York is indeed that people are generally -- generally responded well, but this is not surprising to those of us in disaster research. All right? They did not rush, pushing people out of the way to get out of the building. They helped each other. They helped complete strangers. This is not unusual. We look at other bio events, the Yellow Fever outbreak in 1793, the Spanish Flu outbreak is probably one of the most important examples we can draw on, the Rajneesh cult attack on a small town in Oregon in 1984, the important lessons there is that at least 1000 people sought treatment. People overflowed the hospital. Everybody was overwhelmed in the area, very little evidence of panic. By panic, we understand people taking actions that end up harming themselves and harming other people, and engaging in anti-social behavior. That's the sort of panic that's quite rare, at least in the United States. Between 1932 and 1945 the Japanese attacked the Chinese with all kinds of agents, Bubonic Plague, Cholera, Anthrax and all, but if you read those cases carefully you see very little evidence of the kind of panic that we see in disaster movies, so such cases suggest that panic will not be more likely. Let me move into a couple of other issues. For miscommunication research, we know that if people trust the messenger, they generally respond -- this is a nice picture, isn't it? They generally respond quite well to alarming news. I've been calling this somewhat reluctantly for the past year and a half the Giuliani Phenomenon. And Dr. Cohen referred to -- talked at great length about the qualities of Giuliani right after the terrorist attack. It's interesting, what he said differs very dramatically from what other members of Giuliani's staff have said at other conferences, what they have concentrated on in contrast to Dr. Cohen are Giuliani's John Wayne proclivities, take charge kind of guy, take no prisoners, we're in charge, everybody is okay, but that in fact -- and I think that was -- he was a strong leader, and that is important for any leader, and will be in any kind of terrorist attack. But I think in addition to the John Wayne proclivities there are Giuliani's Alan Alda proclivities, where he's hugging somebody. That is to say, as Dr. Cohen said last night, he didn't get up there and say everything is fine. We're all in control. He wasn't like Alexander Haig after Regan got shot. This is important because it made him trustworthy. He showed his vulnerability. He didn't over-promise. When we over-promise it's a problem. We know some things about how to engender trust under difficult conditions. We also know some things about how to engender distrust. I'm not going to read all these quotes. They're wonderful quotes. These are quotes that happened after the first Anthrax fatality of Bob Stephens down in Florida. These are ways not to engender trust. I'll just read the last two because I love them. I think they're so telling. Florida's Lieutenant Governor says, "No reason to think this incident is anything other than what we've seen in the United States over recent years." It took journalists five seconds to discover it was the first pulmonary case of Anthrax in 25 years. Health and Human Services Secretary says, "People should not go out of their way and do anything other than what they've been doing, what they're doing." This is a time when we're on high alert. That's what we're doing, we're being concerned. We're going out of our way to -- other people tried to imply that poor Bob Stephens contracted Anthrax by digging in a garden or in a stream in North Carolina. These are not calming. Such statements do not engender trust, and they are easily dismissed for all the foolish things that Americans do. We smoke, we drink, we overeat. We drive cars. Of all the foolish things that we do, we are among the most educated and the most skeptical people on the planet. Soothing homilies don't work. Let me move to my last point, having to do with planning being too top heavy. Let me -- a little caveat here quickly because I've sometimes been misinterpreted, which it's all my fault for failing to -- been misinterpreted as being anti-organization or anti-planning. I am not. I like organizations. I like what they do. I like planning. I like what it does. Grade school fire drills and hurricane evacuation plans are excellent examples of tight command and control planning. We need that under certain conditions. The problem is that, especially at the federal level, there's too much emphasis I think on issues of command and control. I put this slide together before Saturday, but I just couldn't take it out. It's a NASA slide. The command and control approach sees managers as generals in charge, and people in the street as children. This seems to be especially true, as I say, at the federal level. There are two big problems with command and control. One is that command and control works best when all the tasks to be accomplished are contained within the system. Controlling the nuclear arsenal, operating theater in a hospital, an aircraft control carrier, all some evidence that even on an aircraft control - that's not right - aircraft carrier, a nuclear aircraft carrier that responsibility devolves. But in those cases, all the things that you have to do are contained within the system. In the case of a terrorist attack, especially a bioterrorist attack, not everybody is in the organization. You can't just assume that you can order people around. You can't just assume you can order all Americans around. We're too diverse. We're took skeptical. We're too distrusting. Another point is, contingency plans are often written by organizationally based planners for other organizations. The problem is that our world, especially a world under bioterrorist attack may not conform to command and control assumptions. I put together my own little planning scenario. Let's call this Clarke's unrealistic scenario. It goes like this, I'll be quick.
Several hundred people develop flu-like symptoms. It's noticed in some places, but not in others, very unrealistic, providing lots of opportunities for misinterpreted signals. Some insiders suspect widespread contamination, but others aren't so sure. We don't want to panic everybody, so the information -- so people sit on it. The Department of Homeland Security has been worrying about al-Qaida and so it's caught off-guard when the Arian nations mount an attack against African Americans. Congress, movie stars somehow gain access to the media and become players. There are confusions and turf wars. Experts contradict each other. They're shifting blame and pointing fingers. At some agencies, amazingly, bosses tell their public health officers not to talk to reporters. Meanwhile, people evacuate at their own pace, at times of their own choosing, and at the end of the crisis the body count is lower than initially expected, but mainly because of luck and the incompetence of the terrorists. There are hearings, investigations and new rules, and then we have conferences on lessons learned. Who is thinking about this kind of unrealistic scenario? I'm not sure. I looked long and hard at the Department of Homeland Security's documents on prevention response and countermeasures, and I'm looking for some mention of the public in there, my little organization chart. I think that the budgetary figure is actually $5 billion too high. But anyway, this is a rudimentary organization chart of the new DHS. I find instead of mention of the public, what I find is references to fear and panic and the first responders. The first responders here are always officials and organizations. The problem is the person in the street is the first responder. It's the passenger on the airplane. It's the teacher in the local school system. It's your neighbors. Those are the first responders. It matters. It matters. I saw -- we know the disaster response is largely a local affair, so I looked also in those documents for some reference to that. You see some words about coordination at the local level. You look in vain for the actual people. It matters. Our models of how people respond in disasters, it matters if those models are wrong. Okay. How to involve the public. We need to find ways to not just think about educating the public, but actually involving them in more active ways. I have no solutions. If I had the solutions, well, I guess I'd be boss of everything. I have no solutions, but just as imagination prodders we need, of course, massive upgrading of the Public Health Service. We might engage in something like the operation alerts during civil defense days, but in ways that involve people more directly. We might think about disaster response as organized the way that normal social life is organized. We are a people organized by race, we're organized by age, by occupation, by families, by churches, by non-profit organizations, all at the very local level. We need to push the effort, the resources and the imagination. We need to push the imagination down. Effective preparation, detection and response will always depend on formal organizations. This is a good thing. Organizations are very effective, but organizations are built to do some things well, and to neglect other things, and there's no one best way. Complex organizations tend for good reason not to be fleet of foot and nimble of mind, but it may be exactly flexibility and speed that we need most in a bioterrorist attack. Thank you. DR. URSANO: Thank you, Lee. I'm always impressed when we have discussions about panic that we are focusing on what are the behaviors which, in fact, interfere with adaptive response. What we're hoping to do is to foster those and to recognize that the most probable response of any community is, in fact, adaptive behaviors. [return to top] |
