Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (19 page)

A man, another stranger, helped Lesce up and directed him toward the light, out of the shopping concourse. Finally, he emerged onto Nassau Street and tried to call his wife. At that moment, there was another explosion and the second tower fell. Once again, Lesce was slammed onto the ground. And once again, a stranger helped him up.

Eventually, with the help of still more people, Lesce made his way to a hospital. When he got home, he had a message on his answering machine. “Hi, my name is Peter. I’m a survivor; I hope you’re a survivor too.” The man had found Lesce’s briefcase in the stairway of the Trade Center and wanted to return it.

From beginning to end, Lesce was held up by the people around him. When I ask him what he would have done if he had been alone on the eighty-sixth floor, he says he doubts he would have made it out. “If no one had been there, I would’ve wet my pants. I would’ve yelled. I would’ve done whatever I possibly could to communicate with somebody. Then I would have sat there and waited to die.”

The Sociology of the Beverly Hills Fire

At 8:45
P.M
., a waitress had opened the door to the Zebra Room in the Beverly Hills Supper Club. Thick black smoke roared out at her. But she did not call the fire department or try to fight the fire. She ran to find the club managers. Like the office workers in the World Trade Center on 9/11, she followed the preexisting chain of command. As word of the fire slowly spread, people reacted like actors in play, each according to role.

Servers warned their tables to leave. Hostesses evacuated people that they had seated, but bypassed other sections. Cooks and busboys, perhaps accustomed to physical work, rushed to fight the fire. In general, male employees were slightly more likely to help than female employees, maybe because society expects women to be saved and men to do the saving. Age mattered too. The younger cocktail waitresses seemed more confused. But the banquet waitresses, who tended to be older, were calm and reassuring.

And what of the guests? Most remained guests to the end. Some even continued celebrating, in defiance of the smoke seeping into the room. One man ordered a rum and Coke to go. When the first reporter arrived at the fire, he saw guests sipping their cocktails in the driveway, laughing about whether they would get to leave without paying their bills. Most people became surprisingly passive. The newspapers the next day would proclaim mass hysteria.
MANY TRAPPED IN PANIC
, read the headline of the Associated Press story. But later investigations would show that the vast majority of people were well behaved. In fact, children, wives, and the elderly were among the most likely to survive.

As the smoke intensified, Wayne Dammert, a banquet captain at the club, stumbled into a hallway jammed with a hundred guests, of all ages, from all different parties. The lights flickered off and on, and the smoke started to get heavy. But what he remembers most about that crowded hallway is the silence. “Man, there wasn’t a sound in there. Not a scream, nothing,” he says now. Standing there in the dark, the crowd was waiting to be led.

The Beverly Hills employees had received no emergency training, but they performed magnificently anyway. Dammert directed the crowd out through a service hallway into the kitchen. There were too few exits in the club, and they were hard to find. The place was like a maze, actually. He remembers having to repeatedly scream at certain patrons to “get the hell out!” He risked his life because he felt obligated to do so. “My thought was that I’m responsible for these people. I think most of the employees felt that way.”

At the time of the fire, Norris Johnson and William Feinberg were sociology professors nearby at the University of Cincinnati. They were riveted by the news of the fire, like everyone else in the area. As sociologists, they were particularly curious to know how a group of strangers in tuxes and ball gowns had behaved during a sudden and merciless fire. Eventually, they managed to get access to the police interviews with hundreds of survivors—a rare and valuable database. “We were just overwhelmed with what was there,” remembers Feinberg, now retired. People were remarkably loyal to their identities. An estimated 60 percent of the employees tried to help in some way—either by directing guests to safety or fighting the fire. By comparison, only 17 percent of the guests helped. But even among the guests, identity influenced behavior. The doctors who had been dining at the club acted as doctors, administering CPR and dressing wounds on the grounds of the club like battlefield medics. Nurses did the same thing. There was even one hospital administrator there who—naturally—began to organize the doctors and the nurses.

The sociologists expected to see evidence of pushing or selfish behavior. But that’s not what they found. “People kept talking about the orderliness of it all. It was really striking,” says Feinberg. “People used what they had learned in grade school fire drills. ‘Stay in line, don’t push, we’ll all get out.’ People were queuing up! It was just absolutely incredible.”

Safety in Numbers

Life is simpler when lived alone. That may be why far more creatures roam the planet alone than in groups. Male elephants, which have no real predators, do not bother with other elephants except to mate. They stomp across the land unburdened by others.

Humans are not so self-sufficient. We mingle in groups our whole lives, and we cling to one another in disasters. After the terrorist bombings on the London transit system on July 7,2005, which killed fifty-two and wounded hundreds, some victims actually resisted leaving the tube station. “I needed the [others] for comfort,” one victim explained to U.K. psychologist Drury. “I felt better knowing that I was surrounded by people.”

When children are involved, the reason for solidarity is plain. A species’ survival depends upon protecting its young, and human babies are more vulnerable longer than any other animal offspring. But we see the same behavior among adult groups. One study of mining disasters found that miners tended to follow their groups even if they disagreed with the group’s decisions. Grown men trapped underground would rather make a potentially fatal decision than be left alone.

Why is that? Morality aside, is there any practical reason to value camaraderie as much as we do? Why don’t we behave like animals in these situations? Or do we? I called primatologist Frans de Waal to see if other mammals behave the same way in life-or-death situations. Maybe our own behavior is just a by-product of civilization—a charming but unnatural bit of gallantry.

De Waal has written eight books on chimpanzees and spent decades observing them in captivity. Chimps and humans share about 99.5 percent of their evolutionary history, so the comparison can be instructive. When chimpanzees see a possible enemy, de Waal says, they gather close and start to touch each other. They might even embrace. In other words, they act a lot like humans. “A common threat has a unifying effect,” he says.

Why do chimps band together? For one thing, de Waal says, the show of affection might intimidate the enemy. If the predator wants one of them, he will have to deal with all of them. Companionship also calms the chimps, making them better able to handle the stress of the threat. The same is true in humans. In laboratory experiments, people who are asked to complete tasks with a friend at their side exhibit lower heart and blood pressure rates than when they go through the tasks alone.

Even before a challenge materializes, camaraderie has clear benefits. In the early 1980s, primatologist Carel van Schaik went to Indonesia to try to understand monkey groups. Van Schaik studied two communities of long-tailed macaques—one on the island of Simeulue, a blissful macaque paradise with no cat predators, and one in Sumatra, a far scarier place populated by tigers, golden cats, and clouded leopards. After watching both communities, van Schaik found a significant difference. On Sumatra, where there were more predators, the macaques traveled in much larger groups. The bigger the threat, in other words, the bigger the posse—and the more eyes, ears, and nostrils with which to detect a predator. On Simeulue, the monkeys traveled in very small groups—the smallest groups of virtually any macaque community ever studied. They simply didn’t need one another the way the Sumatra macaques did.

Even lower-order animals band together in times of danger. Fish cluster in tight schools, and birds call to each other to warn of an approaching hawk. But they don’t do it to be nice. As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has noted, “Anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish.” We help one another because we get benefits from doing so, if not immediately and directly, then eventually or indirectly. Evolutionary biologists call this “reciprocity.” And, in evolutionary terms, it means that an animal does something to improve its odds of passing on its genes—either by reproducing or by protecting its relatives.

If I carry Lou Lesce’s briefcase down the stairs of the World Trade Center, I might not get anything tangible in exchange, but I might still get something. “Evolutionary biology has a hypothesis to account for small conspicuous acts of kindness,” says animal behavior expert John Alcock. “My guess is that the people who assisted others in the World Trade Center knew that others were observing. They were not calculating, but their desire to commit some nice act—commiserating, directing, guiding others to safety, might have had a substantial payoff in terms of improved reputation.” There may have also been something calming about helping others that day; it lent a sense of normalcy and orderliness to the abnormal and disorderly.

Until about a fraction of a second ago, in terms of human history, we lived in small, extended-family bands. We all knew one another, from birth to death. So by aiding one another, we could build a reputation for being generous and helpful, which would encourage others to cooperate with us—which would in turn boost our chances of reproductive success. “I know this sounds cold and analytical to the average layperson,” says Alcock. “I’m not saying that people who do this are not motivated by impulses that are moral, ethical, and desirable. I’m saying that it’s precisely because these impulses are adaptive that we admire them as moral and ethical.”

Sometimes what looks like altruism is actually quite the opposite. In an elegant paper published in 1971, biologist W.D. Hamilton described what he called the “geometry for the selfish herd.” When a dog runs after a herd of sheep, the sheep at the back of the pack will butt or jump his way into the ranks ahead of him—leading the herd to become more and more tightly packed together. From afar, it may appear that the sheep are banding together in a grand show of unity. In fact, each is just trying to avoid being eaten, by reducing his “domain of danger,” as Hamilton puts it. The animals on the edge of the herd are the easiest to pick off. So no one wants to be on the edge. Genes that help us avoid the edge are genes that are likely to endure through natural selection. So a human who feels compelled to stick with a group of strangers in a sinking ship may be doing it for all kinds of reasons—including, perhaps, a long-ago, deeply subconscious desire to avoid being eviscerated by a passing hyena.

It’s difficult to know for sure whether humans had enough predators to need to form selfish herds. After all, humans’ greatest predators have always been other humans. But we make formidable predators, and our best chances of survival are usually improved by sticking together. Groupthink, then, is the adaptive strategy of prioritizing group harmony. Dissent is uncomfortable for the group because it can be dangerous to the individual. Sometimes, when we appear to value the group ahead of our own skin, we are actually doing something else altogether.

The Wedding Party

At the Beverly Hills, the waitress told McCollister, the young bride, that her party had to leave. There was a small fire, but they could come back as soon as it was extinguished, she said. Hearing the news, McCollister turned to find her mother. As she turned, she noticed another waitress opening a folding wall in the center of the room. The opened partition revealed a wall behind it, entirely in flames. Then McCollister looked down the hallway and saw smoke flooding in like water. She felt a clarity of purpose, all of a sudden. “‘Everybody out, now,’” she said, ushering the guests out the French doors to the garden. “I put my arms out and was pushing people out the door, kind of like cattle, to show them where to go.” People were obedient and calm, she says, remarkably so. She felt filled with responsibility for her guests. “This is my party. They were there because of me.”

A woman in an adjoining room appeared to be trapped. So one of her guests lifted up a chair to throw it against the glass and rescue the woman. McCollister’s brother-in-law stopped the man. “Don’t throw the chair. They will sue you,” he said. But then another man threw the chair anyway, and the woman ran out.

McCollister was one of the last to leave the room. It seemed like a quarter of an hour had passed since they had learned of the fire, but it was probably just a couple of minutes. She and her guests got about seven feet into the garden when the room exploded behind them. The back of her dress was blackened. She turned around and stared at the inferno. “Most of us just sat there in shock,” she says. “I think this is where the groupthink happened. It looked like a movie. We just stood in disbelief.”

But not everyone stayed with the herd. The band members reached into the room and began throwing instruments out of the fire. McCollister’s cousin ran back in and rescued a wedding gift, a Baccarat crystal jelly jar that McCollister still has. One bridesmaid, Kathy, sprang into action. She was training to be a nurse, so she started helping the medics who arrived. Then she jumped in the ambulance and kept helping, shuttling back and forth between the fire and the hospital. “I remember seeing her carry IV bags back and forth. I was so amazed. She just picked up and went at it,” McCollister says. “Her dress got torn, she lost her shoes, and finally she just took her dress off and wore a hospital smock. She was awesome, absolutely awesome.”