Over the past week, several Republicans have defended the idea of avoiding panic as a justification for lying to the public in crisis situations, following the revelations in Bob Woodward’s book that Trump was well aware of the dangers of the coronavirus at the same time he was downplaying it. The problem, as the disaster science expert Samantha Montano noted on Twitter, is that mass panic should be the least of our worries in a disaster—because it doesn’t happen.
That may seem counterintuitive. After all, we’ve all seen screaming hordes of people fleeing disaster areas: It’s a staple trope of movies and TV shows. But there are more than 50 years of disaster studies demonstrating that people don’t do that in real life. As early as 1954, E.L. Quarantelli, who later founded the Disaster Research Center, had enough data to suggest that panic after a disaster was “uncommon.” Studies of disasters—from hurricanes to snowstorms isolating people in highway rest stops to the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11—show that the public does not panic, does not run screaming, and typically reacts in a reasonably rational way. In fact, studies show that people tend to react in highly social ways after a catastrophe; the first assistance to victims almost invariably comes from nonprofessionals, and affected people tend to come together and organize to improve their situation.
