Watch any zombie movie, and you’ll likely see people panicking and turning on each other to prevent the undead from snacking on their brains. But researchers recognize that such responses are merely myths.
In crises, most people actually respond with compassion, care and cooperation. Humans, it turns out, have been teaming up to deal with catastrophes since the early days of civilization.
While researching my book “Saved at the Seawall: Stories from the September 11 Boat Lift,” I spent hundreds of hours interviewing individuals involved in the spontaneous evacuation of nearly 500,000 people from Lower Manhattan by boat after the World Trade Center attacks. I heard plenty about the horrors facing stranded, dust-choked civilians who scrambled to board any available vessel. But everyone I spoke with denied any panic, pushing or shoving. In fact, crowds parted ways to allow seriously injured individuals to evacuate first.
Meanwhile, maritime crews put themselves in harm’s way over and over, pointing their bows back toward ground zero to pick up still more passengers desperate to escape Manhattan Island. Researchers have found examples throughout history of the “catastrophe compassion” that leads people to volunteer during disasters.
“In times of catastrophe, people often go into a highly cooperative mode instinctually,” Athena Aktipis explained in her book “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times.” Look at any recent cataclysm and “we see that more people step in to help and provide aid, and that chaos and taking advantage of others is the exception, not the rule.”
I spoke with Aktipis, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, who urges people to remember this when preparing for disasters of all kinds — especially while building a “Z-team” of those we’d want to have by our side while facing an apocalypse, zombie or otherwise. (Z stands for zombie, of course.) Aktipis is a cooperation theorist and social psychologist who has studied cooperation, human generosity and conflict for more than 20 years.
Serious as she is about prepping for the Big One (find her survival kit recommendations here), Aktipis is also determined to “make the apocalypse fun again.” She wrote that she hopes her book will take readers from “feeling fear about the uncertainty of the future to feeling ready to restructure your life to create a more sustainable and resilient future for all humankind.”
After all, she argued, “deep down, all of us want to save the world,” and collaboration is the time-tested prime directive.