The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

If hazards have personalities, nuclear waste is the disheveled man standing on the street corner swearing. No one wants to get near him, regardless of how harmless he is. Hurricanes, on the other hand, are the slow, plodding types that the neighbors will later say looked perfectly harmless.

People are overconfident about driving through water, even though they are bombarded with official warnings not to.

In fact, the groups most likely to say they would ride out the storm were homeowners (39%), whites (41%), and long-term residents (45%).

People have a tendency to believe that they are, well, superior. Psychologists call this the “Lake Wobegon effect”—after the fictitious Minnesota town invented by Garrison Keillor, who described it as a place “where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

Hurricanes are especially tricky because we have to respond to them before things get ugly. We have to evacuate when the skies are clear and blue. Going back to the dread equation, it’s hard to imagine the violence to come.

What they found is remarkable: sunshine strongly correlated with daily stock returns—in ways that couldn’t easily be explained by any other factors. If it was sunny in the morning, stocks were more likely to go up. Risk analysts call these nuanced emotional judgments “affect”—or, as Slovic puts it, “faint whispers of emotion.”

A spokesman for the State Transportation Department, Mike Cox, told reporters that no one had predicted how many Texans would be so frightened by Katrina. “Not one of our fifteen thousand employees is a psychologist,” he said, nicely summarizing the big problem.

Every single patient exhibited the same combination of indecision and emotional flatness.

“At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use.” Once we factor in emotion, then, the human risk equation is actually more sophisticated, not less.

The public totally discounts low-probability, high-consequence events. The individual says, it’s not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.”

It’s surprising how rarely warnings explain why you should do something, not just what you should do.

Suddenly the warning would not just sound like a nagging legalese; it would sound like common sense. It would motivate.

They should simply say this, the volunteer suggested: “Taking luggage will cost lives.”

Airline employees, like professionals in most fields, don’t particularly trust regular people. “Like police, they think of civilians as a grade below them,” says Daniel Johnson, a research psychologist who has worked for the airlines in various capacities for more than three decades. At aviation conferences, he still has trouble getting experts to appreciate the human factor. “They would rather talk about hardware and training manuals—and not worry about what I consider equally important, which is the behavior of the actual people.”

Consider what the people who created this announcement did not do: they had an excellent opportunity to tell me how many subway fires happen in the D.C. system each year. That would have gotten my attention. They also had a chance to explain why it’s almost always better to stay in the subway car in case of a fire (because the rails on the track can electrocute you, and the tunnels are, in some places, too narrow to fit through if a train is coming).

A capitalist society with a free press has many things to recommend it. But it is not a place where citizens have overwhelming confidence in authority figures. Distrust makes it harder for the government to compensate for its citizens’ blind spots—one of government’s most vital functions.

These deaths are almost always described in news accounts as “freak accidents,” despite the fact that they are relatively common.

In human brain imaging studies, part of the brain called the “ventral striatum” is highly active in gamblers and drug addicts. Within this region, something called the “nucleus accumbens” lights up when people just anticipate winning money. When this region is activated, people have a tendency to take more risks. So all a casino has to do is get you to anticipate winning—even if you never actually experience it.

Subtlety can work too. In Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, lines etched into a large renovated factory mark how high the Potomac River has risen in previous floods. At the Starbucks next door, one of the photos on the walls shows floodwaters surrounding the café and a man in a yellow rain slicker canoeing past.

The best warnings are like the best ads: consistent, easily understood, specific, frequently repeated, personal, accurate, and targeted.

“I tell people that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. The very definition of ‘news’ is ‘something that hardly ever happens,’” writes security expert Bruce Schneier. “It’s when something isn’t in the news, when it’s so common that it’s no longer news—car crashes, domestic violence—that you should start worrying.”

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.

The next time you hear about something that scares you, look for data. Be suspicious of absolute numbers—or no numbers at all.

Mileti, one of the nation’s foremost experts on hazards, lives along one of the biggest earthquake faults in North America. I ask him if this is wise. “No, it makes no sense,” he says. But, unlike 86 percent of Californians, Mileti has earthquake insurance. He also has several days’ worth of supplies. And instead of paying off his house, he has stashed his savings in the bank, so he’ll have cash if he needs

The terrorists held more than fifty captives—one of the largest groups of diplomatic hostages in history.

Any deliberation that follows will happen through the prism of fear. People’s behavior in a disaster is inexplicable until we understand the effect of fear on the body and mind.

“Fear is so fundamental,” says brain expert Joseph LeDoux. “There are key environmental triggers that will turn it on and well-worked-out responses that help you cope with it.

A rifle shot registers around 120 to 155 decibels. As soon as Asencio’s ears detected the booming gunshots, before he even realized what they were or that he was afraid, a signal traveled to his brain by way of the auditory nerve. When the signal reached his brainstem, neurons passed along the information to his amygdala, an ancient, almond-shaped mass of nuclei located deep within his brain’s temporal lobes that is central to the human fear circuit. In response, the amygdala set off a cascading series of changes throughout his body. In a flash, Asencio transformed into survival mode—without any conscious decision making on his part.

If Asencio responded like most people, the chemistry of his blood literally changed so that it would be able to coagulate more easily. At the same time, his blood vessels constricted so that he would bleed less if he got hurt.

(The hormones are so powerful that, after a life-or-death situation, many people report having an odd, chemical taste in their mouths.)

The brain must decide what to prioritize and what to neglect.

This is the “high road.” It is a more accurate depiction of what happened, but it is also slower.

Asencio did experience another classic fear response, however: the slowing down of time. “Time and space became entirely disjointed,” he wrote later. “The action around me, which had seemed speeded up at first, now turned into slow motion. The scene was like a confused, nightmarish hallucination, a grotesque charade. Everything I saw seemed distorted; everyone, everything, was out of character.”

The exact same phenomenon is reported by patients with epilepsy, depression, migraine, or schizophrenia, which tells us that the sensation probably has something to do with a breakdown in the brain’s ability to integrate a flood of data.

“It’s a way to survive,” says Hanoch Yerushalmi, an Israeli psychologist who has worked with many victims of trauma. “People are saying, ‘You have my body, but you don’t have my soul.’”

Most people have no concept of how little they will be able to see in a fire, and how much harder the brain will have to work as a result. We would get a very mild preview.

In life-or-death situations, people gain certain powers and lose others. Asencio found he suddenly had crystal-clear vision. (In fact, his sight remained stronger for several months after the siege, leading his optometrist to temporarily lower his prescription.)

Stress hormones are like hallucinogenic drugs. Almost no one gets through an ordeal like this without experiencing some kind of altered reality.

Data comes in at slightly different times, so no two clocks tick at exactly the same pace. But your brain synchs everything up so you are not confused. How does the brain do this? And what is it doing differently when things seem to move in slow motion?

In other words, trauma creates such a searing impression on our brains that it feels, in retrospect, like it happened in slow motion.

As an instructor, he had taken training very seriously. He had created subconscious muscle memories for holding his gun in one hand, two hands, every conceivable position, so that he did not need to think when the time came to fire.

As he did more stakeouts, Cirillo started to appreciate his subconscious more and more. He realized that it worked best if he got out of its way; in other words, he needed to turn off his conscious mind to avoid distracting thoughts that would sap precious mental resources. So he started training himself with only positive imagery, to clear his mind of any self-doubting conscious thoughts.

“Your subconscious mind is the most fascinating tool in the world,” he said. “You can do things you could never do consciously.”

“The more prepared you are, the more in control you feel, and the less fear you will experience.”

But the larger point holds: fear is negotiable.

“How that person responds will have something to do with their genetics, but also the sum total of their life experiences—which is basically training.”

He found that people perform best when their heart rates are between 115 and 145 beats per minute (resting heart rate is usually about 75 bpm). At this range, people tend to react quickly, see clearly, and manage complex motor skills (like driving).

The performance ranges will vary depending on the individual. But the heart rate of untrained people in life-or-death situations can instantly shoot up to 200 bpm—a stratospheric level that is hard to negotiate. The trick is to stretch out your zone through training and experience. Even a little preparation—like noticing where the exit is before things go awry—can go a long way. “If you give people an option, something to anchor onto when they don’t know what to do, that small help is huge.

“If there’s not enough training, you get channelized on one thing, and you forget the whole big picture.”

He also teaches pilots to make sure one member of the flight crew remains focused on flying the plane at all times. And