The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

These days, we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as victims, which is a shame. Because regular people are the most important people at a disaster scene, every time.

But even in other, more overtly dire situations, crowds don’t tolerate irrational panic behavior. Most of the time, people remain consistently orderly—and kind, much kinder than they would have been on a normal day.

“Sometimes it’s hard to get people to do worst-case planning because the worst case is so bad. People just throw up their hands.”

In general, TV makes us worry about the wrong things. Your brain is better at filtering out media hype when it is reading. Words have less emotional salience than images. So it’s much healthier to read the newspaper than watch TV.