Looting was an exceedingly rare phenomenon after disasters, though paranoia about looting was always irrationally high. (In some cases, authorities are so overcome with worry about mass panic and looting that they preemptively clamp down on the public, even turning violently on innocent citizens who themselves aren’t actually panicked at all. Disaster scholars refer to this phenomenon as “elite panic.”) In short, our ugliest assumptions about human behavior would be almost uniformly rebuked by the ways actual humans behaved—again and again and again.
