The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

series of vicissitudes mercifully ending one day in final cataclysm.”

two kinds of evolution: the genetic kind and the cultural kind. Both shape our behavior, and the cultural kind has gotten a lot faster.

But had the attacks happened at a different time, at least fourteen thousand people would have been killed, according to NIST’s conservative estimates based on the rate of movement on 9/11.

“If you’re looking at 100% of the variance in evacuation behavior, income accounts for no more than 5–10 percentage points,” he says. “What really accounts for the differences are people’s beliefs.”

He has concluded that human beings are unable to handle war in the modern age. “We’re

Once upon a time, we were better at war.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published a series of revolutionary papers on human decision making. They explained that people rely on emotional shortcuts, called “heuristics,” to make choices. The more uncertainty, the more shortcuts. And

But as coastal cities get bigger and bigger, people have to evacuate earlier and earlier. The infrastructure is not set up for a fast exit, so ten-and twenty-hour traffic jams are becoming common—making people even more reluctant to leave on a sunny day, forty-eight to seventy-two hours before the actual storm.

not just that but employers in these large coastal cities do not like to let their employees evacuate early

Of course, too much dread can be as problematic as too little. Coming less than a month after Katrina, and striking many of the same places, Hurricane Rita hit a profound resonance in the cultural psyche. For a brief period, the worst-case scenario was easy to imagine. Though only 1.25 million people were told to evacuate, 2.5 million did so. A carefully planned evacuation quickly devolved into mass frustration. One-hundred-mile-long traffic jams clogged the freeways around Houston. 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.

easiest way to mesmerize the brain is through images. Anecdotes, as any journalist or advertiser knows, always trump statistics.

citation?

The “anterior insula” is active when people calculate the risk of bad things happening—like disasters. This region also shows activation when people are anticipating upsetting images.

institutionalize memory in everyday life.

Your brain is better at filtering out media hype when it is reading. Words have less emotional salience than images.