Beyond 'stampedes' : towards a new psychology of crowd crush disasters
Abstract
The Bethnal Green tube shelter disaster, in which 173 people died, is a significant event in both history and psychology. While notions of “panic” and “stampede” have been discredited in contemporary psychology and disaster research as explanations for crowd crushes, some have cited Bethnal Green as the exception that proves the rule. Alternative explanations for crushing disasters focus on mismanagement and physical factors, and lack a psychology. We analysed 85 witness statements from the Bethnal Green tragedy to develop a new psychological account of crowd disasters. Contrary to the established view of the Bethnal Green disaster as caused by widespread public overreaction to the sound of rockets, our analysis suggests that public perceptions were contextually calibrated to a situation of genuine threat; that only a small minority misperceived the sound; and that therefore this cannot account for the surge behaviour in the majority. We develop a new model, in which crowd flight behaviour in response to threat is normatively structured rather than uncontrolled, and in which crowd density combines with both limited information on obstruction and normatively expected ingress behaviour to create a crushing disaster.
Citation
Barr , D , Drury , J , Butler , T , Choudhury , S & Neville , F G 2023 , ' Beyond 'stampedes' : towards a new psychology of crowd crush disasters ' , British Journal of Social Psychology . https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12666
Publication
British Journal of Social Psychology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0144-6665Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2023 The Authors. British Journal of Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funders: the Economic and Social Research Council (grant reference number ES/T007249/1).Collections
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