You’re on an airplane that crash lands. Smoke fills the cabin, and you’ve got only seconds to react. How would you respond? Would you immediately take action — or freeze in place?

 

While you might think you know how a scene like this would play out from watching movies, the reality of what occurs in the aftermath of a disaster is quite a bit different. And that knowledge gap could prove deadly.

My guest, Amanda Ripley, spent years researching how humans actually respond in emergencies, interviewing their survivors, as well leading researchers. In her book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, she uncovers the myths and realities of survival psychology and explores the individual and structural factors that shape people’s outcomes in unexpected crises. Today, Amanda explains why the biggest threat during an emergency isn’t panic but passivity — and how to overcome the tendency to be overly complacent and compliant. We discuss why you might actually want to read the airplane safety card, what we can learn from the surprising calm that prevailed in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, how to improve your risk assessment, what influences if you’ll act heroically in an emergency, and much more. This episode will give you plenty to think about — and could even make the difference in how you respond if you’re ever faced with the unthinkable.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM article on how to develop situational awareness
• AoM article on why people respond passively to emergencies
• Box breathing
• Beverly Hills Supper Club fire
• Rick Rescorla

Connect With Amanda Ripley

• Amanda’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You’re on an airplane that crash lands, smoke fills the cabin, and you’ve only got seconds to react. How would you respond? Would you immediately take action or freeze in place? While you might think you know how a scene like this would play out from watching movies, the reality of what occurs in the aftermath of a disaster is quite a bit different. And that knowledge gap could prove deadly. My guest, Amanda Ripley, spent years researching how humans actually respond in emergencies, interviewing survivors as well as leading researchers. In her book “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why,” she uncovers the myths and realities of survival psychology and explores the individual and structural factors that shape people’s outcomes in unexpected crises. Today, Amanda explains why the biggest threat during an emergency isn’t panic, but passivity, and how to overcome the tendency to be overly complacent and compliant. We discuss why you might actually want to read the airplane safety card, what we can learn from the surprising calm that prevailed in the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11, how to improve your risk assessment, what influences if you’ll act heroically in an emergency, and much more. 

This episode will give you plenty to think about. It could even make the difference in how you respond if you’re ever faced with the unthinkable. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/disaster.  All right Amanda Ripley welcome to the show.

Amanda Ripley: Thanks for having me, Brett. Good to be here.

Brett McKay: So back in 2008, you put out a book called “The Unthinkable,” and it’s all about the psychology and sociology of disasters and survival, how humans behave in a disaster situation. What was the original spark behind the book, “The Unthinkable”?

Amanda Ripley: Well, way back for the original version of the book, I had been covering disaster, after disaster, after disaster for Time magazine at the time. From 9/11 in Manhattan to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in New Orleans to the European heat wave that it’s easy to forget killed 50,000 people in Europe one summer. So it seemed like we were doing a lot of stories about loss and grief and blame. But there was one kind of story that we didn’t do as much, which was what can we learn from the survivors of these things? What did it actually feel like physically, mentally, even socially, to survive a disaster? And what I had noticed interviewing survivors is that every single one had things they wish they had known, things that they wanted the rest of us to know. So that’s what led me to write the book.

Brett McKay: And then you recently came out with an updated version. Why update it nearly 20 years later?

Amanda Ripley: Well, it’s funny, it wasn’t my idea. I wish I could say it was, but basically, during the pandemic, the publisher noticed an uptick in sales and they reached out to me to say, “Hey, this book could probably use an update.” I mean, it’s actually kind of astounding how much had changed since 2008. I mean, that was before smartphones, social media, before the level of political polarization we have, before so many things that have changed since then. And of course, the pandemic itself being a massive global disaster made it feel like, yeah, we gotta update this thing.

Brett McKay: Before you began researching and writing this book way back, how did you think people typically responded in disasters and emergency situations?

Amanda Ripley: It’s a good question. I mean, I think I thought it was like in the movies. I thought that people would panic and freak out and just behave terribly. And it was really the interviews with probably starting with the survivors of the World Trade Center after 9/11, who piqued my curiosity because they said, actually it was really quiet and calm in the stairwells and people were moving really slowly. So it wasn’t the kind of mayhem that I had expected. And that was kind of one of the first things where I was like, huh, there’s more here that I don’t understand.

Brett McKay: And something you… The argument you make in the book is that our erroneous understanding of how humans behave in disasters. I think people have that typical idea that you had, oh, there’s a disaster, everyone just freaks out. But that erroneous understanding actually contributes to us not being prepared for them.

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, it’s much more insidious than it seems. Probably one of the biggest threats to our civilization is the low expectations that the people in charge have for us and that we have for each other in disaster. So it sounds dramatic the way I’m saying it, but again and again in my reporting, I saw examples of people in positions of authority assuming that the public was going to panic and freak out and so then not sharing facts with them and not helping them make informed decisions because of that distrust for the public, which of course then runs both ways, right? The public distrusts authority figures. And that distrust is a major feature of the updated version of the book because it’s gotten so much worse since the book first came out. And it’s unto itself a significant threat.

Brett McKay: Yeah, a point you make is that because people in authority mistrust the public that, oh, these are a bunch of crazy people who just… They’ve lost their minds, we can’t trust them. Instead of dealing with the people problem, dealing with the humans, what they typically resort to is, well, how can we use technology or how can we manipulate the environment to get people to do what we want? For them, disasters are a technology issue, not a human issue.

Amanda Ripley: Exactly. And I think that’s… I mean, we see that a lot, right, in education and other fields where we think if we can just invest in enough gear, then we can save ourselves. And it really wildly underestimates… And I speak for myself, I wildly underestimated the human factor. As you say, we have a lot of incredible tools now to help us get out of harm’s way. The thing we are not doing is incorporating psychology into how to use those tools, because it doesn’t matter how good your forecasting is or how incredible your vaccines are if people don’t trust you and you don’t trust them.

Brett McKay: Yes, and I know we’ll talk about special forces guys today because that’s some of the people you talk to in researching this book. But I know they have a maxim that it’s humans over hardware. So when they’re planning a mission, they don’t worry about the tool so much. Those can come in handy, but you got to think about the human element first.

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, and that’s one of the interesting things is that a lot of the research and reporting in the book comes from two categories, which are military research, U.S. Military research, but also other places, and then also plane crash analyses. And the reason for that is that those are two areas in which researchers have really been investing in trying to understand human psychology under duress. In other places, there’s much less of that. So even though plane crashes are not likely to happen, we can learn a lot about human behavior under duress because psychologists and sociologists have looked really closely at these disasters.

Brett McKay: So you organized the book along what you call the survival arc. It’s this process that we all go through whenever we encounter a disaster. The three parts of the arc are denial, deliberation, and decisive action. Let’s talk about denial first. You mentioned you talked to survivors of the World Trade Center attacks, and the thing that surprised you was how slow people were, and then survivors describing how people kind of acted like nothing was wrong initially. So tell us more about that. What was the typical response of someone? They felt the building rock and shake. They heard a loud explosion. What did people do? Because I would think, oh, man, get out of there as soon as possible. That didn’t happen.

Amanda Ripley: Right. No. So there is a kind of immediate return to normalcy. So your brain tries to fit what’s happening into everything that’s happened before, which makes total sense and works 99% of the time. And if you haven’t been in a disaster like that or trained for it in a realistic way, then your brain will try to just put it away and carry on. So in this case, I talk about Elia Zedeno, who was a survivor from the World Trade Center, and she said the building just rocked. I mean, in a way it had never before when that first plane hit. And she remembers grabbing onto her desk at her cubicle at the Port Authority and lifting her feet up off the ground and yelling, “What is going on?” because it really felt like it was going to fall over. So it was not a normal or subtle experience. But yet she said later, everything in her body wanted someone to yell back, “Nothing, it’s fine,” and kind of return to normalcy. And so she felt herself not wanting to evacuate.

But luckily, in her case, somebody yelled back, “Get out of the building,” which is a great example of how assertive commands can break through that initial denial. But even then, she found herself sort of walking in circles, looking for things to take with her, which is very normal. We see this on plane crashes as well. People want to… They’re delaying. They’re delaying the evacuation for different reasons, including, let me just note, that in the World Trade Center, in certain parts of that complex, people heard official commands to stay in place, which was the protocol for skyscraper disasters. So literally, they’re being told not to evacuate in some cases. In other cases, we just procrastinate leaving, even when there’s smoke filling the ceiling. And there are good reasons for this, but it can be really dangerous. So it’s something to kind of expect and notice. Yeah, I can notice it in myself now. I’ll notice that I’m kind of not reacting and that I’m hoping it goes away, and I’ll try to push through that phase.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that was one of the biggest takeaways from the book, and I think about it all the time, that normalcy bias. We all have it. I had to remind myself, if something crazy happens in my day-to-day life, like a disaster, an emergency, I had to remind myself, my initial reaction is going to be like, oh, yeah, I’ll try to figure out a way how everything is normal. I’ll try to convince myself that everything’s okay when it’s not. And I think about this a lot, my wife and I think about this a lot, when we get on an airplane. Because you talk about one of the things they found in airplane crashes, whenever there’s an accident and people are able to get out. Well, that’s another myth that people have about airplane crashes. Most of them are actually pretty survivable, except for we always see the really catastrophic ones. But a lot of ones you have a chance to get out before the plane goes up in flames. But one thing that happens is people just kind of sit there, even though the plane’s on fire and they’re just acting like nothing’s going on.

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, it was a real mystery for a while when there were more plane crashes happening in the ’70s. Researchers and forensics teams would find people just sitting in their seats. They just died from the smoke, but they were on the ground. They just had to get out of the plane, and they hadn’t gotten out fast enough. But before we talk about that, let me go back to your other point, which is that actually most serious plane accidents are survivable, which is fairly shocking, right? But the statistics are very clear that of all passengers involved in serious accidents between 1983 and 2017, I think it is, 59% survived. 59% survived. And serious is defined there by the National Transportation Safety Board as accidents involving fire, severe injury, and substantial aircraft damage. So that is serious, and yet 59% of people survive. But survival depends often on the behavior of the passengers. And so that’s what these researchers have learned from these different plane crashes, is that people will, especially if they’ve been trained to become passive victims, which I think we probably have, by the time you get on an airplane, right, if you make it through TSA and everything else, you’re kind of beaten down, and you’re not in charge, and you know that, right? And so that influences our behavior. And so when something goes wrong, it’s very easy to kind of fall into this strange sort of lethargy, which researchers call negative panic, interestingly. So it’s not that we start punching each other out. I mean, that can happen, but it’s very rare. Much more likely is we just don’t move.

Brett McKay: Okay, what else is going on psychologically? So there’s the normalcy bias, there’s this negative panic, anything else going on that causes that sort of just we’re not doing anything, taking action whenever we see a disaster happen?

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, this is an interesting one because the research on this is that pretty much every mammal that’s ever been tested freezes if it faces what it perceives to be a serious threat and doesn’t know how to get out, right? So they feel trapped and they’re frightened. So the animal research on this kind of coincides with the human research, which is that we do kind of shut down under an extreme threat, especially when we feel trapped. And there could be good evolutionary reasons for that, right? You always hear that old playing dead. If you’re being attacked by a predator and the predator thinks you’re dead, then you’re less appealing. It’s hard to sort out what is causing what here and what is adaptive and what is not, except that we know in many modern catastrophes where you need to evacuate out of a city or a plane or whatever it is, that response doesn’t serve you well typically.

Brett McKay: So how do you overcome those biases of inaction whenever you encounter a disaster?

Amanda Ripley: There are at least two good answers to that and probably many more. But the first is assertive commands really help. So if you are in a situation where you know something is not right and you are very clear, sometimes yelling to other people that they need to get out, they will often snap out of it and move. People often become really compliant in disasters because evolutionarily, it’s in our interest to stick with the group. And so leadership can be really effective in piercing that lethargy. The other thing… And of course, you know, you’re counting on the leader to know what they’re doing right, because you could be led poorly in the wrong direction. But this is how they now train flight attendants if there is an emergency evacuation, they really do scream at you. And I did go through some training with them. They scream at you to not take your bags, to unbuckle your seatbelt, to get off the plane. And it does focus the mind. So that is the good news. The other thing that really helps is any kind of training or even just situational awareness.

So if you’ve counted the number of rows between you and the closest emergency exit in advance, which I just do I’m waiting for the plane to take off because there’s nothing else to do then that’s in your brain. And it might help you when you can’t see, which is how… So most plane crashes, you end up on the ground, but you have to get off really quickly. And smoke fills the plane really fast, so you can’t really see your hand in front of your face. So knowing how many rows and whether you should go forward or back is really helpful. And even better is having some muscle memory for evacuating. Let’s say you work in a skyscraper. If you haven’t taken the stairs, you should do that. At least try to take five or ten sets of stairs so you have the muscle memory for doing that.

Brett McKay: Okay. Some things you can do – assertive commands. So if you see something happening, you see people just milling about, start yelling at them. It’s for their good. And you’re good because if they don’t get out of the way, you can’t get out either. And then also practice. But if you can’t practice, just have a plan when you sit down. I do that on the plane too. When I get on, it’s kind of morbid, but I always look at the card and then I always look for the exits. And then I go through a situation like, what am I going to do if there’s an accident? And I don’t know how much it does, but it helps me at least think about it so that if that does happen, I’ll have something to do. Like, I have an action plan.

Amanda Ripley: Right, right. So you don’t just become a passive recipient of the disaster. I think that’s right. And I think even looking at the card is interesting. My husband does that too. And I think it always makes people around him wonder what’s going on because no one looks at the card, the safety briefing card. But they are interesting, and it is funny how different they are one from the next depending on the airline. And some of them are really clear and effective, and some of them are hilarious, and some of them are confusing. But I do recommend that. And there is actually research that shows that people who have done that and/or paid attention during the safety briefing do have a better chance of survival because it’s just like you have something to work with.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I like to look at the card, not only for preparation, but the illustrations are often funny.

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, they are.

Brett McKay: There’s this one. They had this baby that looked like Bobby Hill from King of the Hill with the inflatable thing.

Amanda Ripley: Yes. Yeah, some of them are really classic. So that’s good fun.

Brett McKay: Okay, so besides this normalcy bias that causes us to not take action when a disaster strikes, another thing that contributes to us not taking action is we miscalculate the risk involved in the situation. And you talk about how that played out during Hurricane Katrina. So what went on there?

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I mean, in general, we don’t look at risk as a sort of rational assessment. That’s not how humans are wired, right? So we actually use an emotion that is called dread, which I think is well-named. And we sense how much dread we feel for any given risk. And that dread equation is based on a bunch of different factors, if you break it down in the research. And some of those factors are how unfair the threat feels. If it feels like particularly unfair for some terrible thing to happen, like a plane to drop out of the sky, like just nothing you can do, that’s very scary. That’s a lot of dread there. Or if it feels like at scale, right? A bus crash is scarier to us than an individual car crash, right? Even if you had 20 of them. So scale matters, the familiarity matters, our experiences in the past matter, how much pain and suffering we think would be involved matter. That’s why cancer seems to feel like more dreadful than maybe a heart attack. So it’s worth just noticing the different variables that go into that. I don’t think we should expect that we would be totally rational, but it’s worth noticing that and noticing if you want to dial down the dread factor for a given risk that you just want to get more comfortable with, breaking it into those pieces can be helpful and seeing if you can lower any one of those variables as opposed to just gutting it out.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that was interesting because that dread idea explains why we don’t find driving in a car scary. That’s a good risk to take. But airplanes, oh man. Even though the research shows, it shows that you’re more likely to die driving in a car than flying in an airplane.

Amanda Ripley: Right, and we see this happen after major disasters like after 9/11 and during the pandemic, a lot of people choose to drive instead of flying places because it feels so much less dreadful.

Brett McKay: Yeah, because when you’re driving, you have control. I’m driving my car. When you’re in a plane, it’s like, I’m in this tin can and I can’t do anything.

Amanda Ripley: Right, yeah, exactly. So control is another important piece of it, right? How much control do I have?

Brett McKay: And then the scale of destruction in an airplane crash just seems bigger than a car crash because you see what a plane crash looks like on TV. It’s oh my gosh, it leaves a big giant hole in the ground and there’s fire everywhere. A car crash, your car just looks smashed up. That’s it.

Amanda Ripley: Right, right. And so we can make a lot of mistakes that way, right? I mean, I always try to remind myself and my family that driving to the airport is the scariest part of the trip, from a risk perspective. And just trying to remind ourselves of that so that we’re a little more awake and vigilant. But it’s hard to do. I mean, and we do make a ton of mistakes around… I mean, we know from the research that after 9/11, because driving felt safer and many people made that exchange, about 2,302 additional Americans were likely killed because they drove instead of flying somewhere. And that’s a study by three Cornell University professors. So again, understandable, but that’s a good example of how our risk perception doesn’t always lead us to safety.

Brett McKay: Well, going back to Hurricane Katrina, you highlight that there’s a lot of people who, even though they got the warnings to evacuate and there was actually, yeah, you got to get out. It was an order. You got to get out of here. They decided to stay put. Why did those individuals decide to stay put? And how did a miscalculation of risk contribute to that?

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, so it’s interesting. I mean, one of the frustrating things about disasters is that the really good research doesn’t come out until years later when the news cycle has totally moved on. But we now know that age was the most important risk factor for Katrina in particular. People, older people, I mean, obviously other things mattered. Poverty mattered, race mattered, but age mattered most. Older people did not evacuate. And there were lots of reasons for that, or they were less likely to evacuate, I should say. Lots of reasons for that, but one reason is that they’d experienced a lot of really bad hurricanes before, so they assumed that this wouldn’t be worse, and they were right, which is important. They were not wrong. Hurricane Katrina was not the strongest storm that the Gulf Coast had experienced. It’s just we had changed the shape of the Gulf Coast. We had dense vertical cities. We’d removed a lot of the buffer that used to protect us from those storms from the coastline. So the storm was not more dangerous, but we were more vulnerable because of the way we’ve developed these cities. So yeah, in that case, their risk analysis made sense. And in many cases, maybe they didn’t have a way out in some cases. In other cases, they just didn’t want to sit in a car with six other people and a dog for 12 hours. They’d had bad evacuation experiences, which also is very salient, right, in the mind, in the memory. So they had different reasons, but age was a real clear risk factor there.

Brett McKay: So what do we do about our poor ability to calculate risk? How do we overcome that?

Amanda Ripley: Well, this is where I think we need to do a better job helping each other. At this point, we have a lot of data that could help us really rank the risk based on where we live and how we live and what’s important to us. So it’s a little frustrating to me that still I don’t see, certainly the federal government has not done a great job of helping us with this. There are some siloed examples of some flood maps and different things that can help you, but there’s not one place you can go and plug in your information and know, okay, here’s what I should be most worried about. Here’s what’s most dangerous, but least likely. Here’s what’s most likely. And just kind of help you sort out that risk if you want that help. And there are lots of reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that typically the work in this area is very siloed. So it’s there’s people who study floods and then there’s people who study earthquakes and they’re in separate worlds. And so even though really they should all be talking to each other, and again, the public should be part of that conversation, it’s sometimes hard to find. But there are some resources out there and I include some in the book, but it’s not as easy to find as I think it should be. Because you can’t just rely on your intuition, particularly when we live in such a densely populated interdependent world. You just can’t go with your gut.

Brett McKay: Whenever I think about risk and thinking how to calculate better, I often wonder if I should start studying probability. Be like Nassim Taleb, we’ve had him on the podcast and you interviewed him for your book. Should I study statistics? Would that make me better? Did you go down that rabbit hole? I’m going to learn probability so I can be better at risk analysis.

Amanda Ripley: It sort of depends on your personality. My dad is a computer scientist, a mathematician. People like that, for certain things, they can do that and just really go with the data. But even they have huge blind spots, things that they’re more frightened of or less frightened of. I think it’s tricky. I will say interviewing people who study risk analysis did help me a little with that because you just start to notice… I would just ask every single one of them, given what you know, what do you worry most about? And the answers were often aligned with their actual risk. So what is most dangerous for most people? Well, it’s pretty clear. It’s car accident, stroke, heart attack, cancer, or suicide. Those are the things. And then what about  “natural hazards”? Floods are a huge problem. Extreme weather, extreme storms. So those are the things. And they’re not always the same things that haunt us, the same things that occupy our imagination. But those are the things that they tend to worry about most. And I will say those interviews left me much more anxious about driving, regular driving in a car, than I was before, which I’m not sure is great, but I’m more aware of that threat. Whether that’s translated into better behavior, I don’t know. Because if you’re more nervous about something, that can lead to worse performance.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So that’s the denial part of this survival arc. So we have a tendency whenever we see a disaster or part of a disaster to resort to a normalcy bias. We’re just, ah, everything’s fine. I want everything to be fine. And we act like everything’s fine. We’re bad at miscalculating risk. So that can also lead to inaction. Let’s move to the deliberation phase of the survival arc. And you started this section talking about the fear response. We kind of talked about it a little bit earlier, how all mammals have this fear response. What’s going on physiologically in our body, in our brain when we experience the fear response?

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, so for that part of the book, I kind of tried to do a slow motion analysis of a shooting hostage taking event at an embassy because I was able to talk to people on both sides of it, the hostage takers and the hostages, because it happened a while ago and kind of help piece together what they experienced because it turns out the experience is very similar, even though you’re on opposite sides of that fight. I mean, the human fear response is very primal. So the first thing that happened in this case is that one of the diplomats who was taken hostage, he’s at this party and it’s a fancy event, and all of a sudden he hears gunshots. And so when he detects that sound, even before he realizes what’s happening, a signal travels to his brain and the signal reaches his brainstem and passes on this information to his amygdala, which we’ve probably all heard about at this point, which is sort of central to managing threats. And the amygdala then sets off a bunch of changes throughout your body. You kind of transform into survival mode without any conscious decision-making. And there are pros and cons to everything that happens next.

So you get certain superpowers and you lose certain powers. So you probably don’t feel fear at this point. He doesn’t remember feeling afraid yet, but your body is subconsciously responding to this threat. And that means the chemistry of your blood literally changes so that it’s able to coagulate more easily if need be. Your blood vessels constrict, so you’ll bleed less if you get hurt. Your blood pressure, your heart rate shoot up. You get a bunch of hormones, a cocktail of hormones, particularly cortisol and adrenaline, that surge through your system and give your gross motor muscles a sort of boost. So that’s important. But again, for every gift your brain gives you in danger, it takes one away. You have limited resources. So yes, your muscles become taut and ready and your body is creating its own natural painkillers, but you lose the ability to reason and perceive your surroundings. So you just cannot think. Cortisol interferes with the part of the brain that handles complex thinking. And by complex, I mean basically any thinking. So we suddenly have trouble solving problems, how to put on a life jacket or unbuckle a seatbelt. Often survivors would tell me about losing certain… They lose peripheral vision, that’s almost guaranteed, but sometimes they lose all vision, they go temporarily blind or they lose their sense of hearing. So it’s a really mixed bag, but all these things are happening without your control, but it’s a way to keep you alive.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the tunnel vision, that’s one thing that happens. Everything, your focus narrows. Sometimes people, they don’t hear things. They can’t even hear loud bangs, like guns that are fired right by the ear. They don’t hear it.

Amanda Ripley: Which is wild, because we don’t think of hearing as something you can turn off. I mean, you can’t close your ears, right? But it turns out your brain can if it’s motivated.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and then complex motor skills go out the window. So I know this is a problem with soldiers or law enforcement officers. Once they get into that sort of freeze mode, they have a hard time manipulating their gun and things like that, and that can cause problems.

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I talk in the book about a police officer who was running from someone with a gun and he actually dropped his weapon. He has no memory of it. It’s just, you lose eye-hand coordination. So there was a study of 115 police officers involved in a serious shooting, and 90% reported having some kind of dissociative symptom, like numbing or loss of awareness or memory problems. Sometimes it feels like you’re having an out-of-body experience. And again, there’s understandable reasons for that, but it’s sort of your brain’s last line of defense, and it’s trying to help you survive, but sometimes it can be a liability.

Brett McKay: Is there any variability in demographics and how people respond to highly stressful situations? Are some people more prone to have the freeze response than others?

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I mean, there’s some research on this and not a ton, but from what we can tell, there are some people who are just weirdly immune. It’s not that they don’t get afraid. It’s not that their heart rate doesn’t go up. They still get those things, but they’re able to recover more quickly and they don’t go as far down that path. So a little bit of stress we know is good for you, wakes you up, gets you going, but too much and then you start to get those negative side effects, right, where you can’t think, you can’t operate. So there’s this green zone you want to be in that’s somewhere in the middle. And the military has found that there are certain people, especially people who end up in special operator roles, who seem to be able to get into that zone, even under really extreme situations. And there’s a lot of speculation about why and how. But at the end of the day, for most of us, what we need to know is that relevant experience and training can really help you get into that green zone. You don’t need to be a Navy SEAL, but if you have a little bit of experience or training, that helps a lot so that you can stay in that zone.

The other thing that really helps, and this is something the military uses, law enforcement, is practicing when you’re not under stress, practicing box breathing or different techniques. The only way that we know of to control your automatic fear response is through intentional breathing. And so that’s something that is worth keeping in mind, that if you want to find a way in the moment to control that fear response, it’s good to have practiced some form of rhythmic breathing, box breathing, which you may know. It’s just you breathe in for four counts, you hold for four counts, you exhale for four counts, hold for four counts, and then you just keep repeating it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we’ve talked about box breathing on the podcast before. I think it’s a really useful tactic to keep yourself calm whenever you have that initial fear response. But how do you practice for disasters? Because you had the opportunity to go to Oklahoma City where they have the FAA plane crash school where they study plane crashes, and you got to do a simulated plane crash. How do you do that if you’re just a regular person?

Amanda Ripley: Well, I used to have this dream that there would be a national disaster museum where everyone could try those things, play with the stuff, because there’s really amazing simulations out there.

Brett McKay: Oh, you mentioned this in the book. There was someone who had the idea before you get on the plane, have a little area in the airport where you could practice going down the yellow slide and putting on the vest.

Amanda Ripley: For kids.

Brett McKay: For kids. But they were like, no, we don’t want to do it because that’ll just freak people out.

Amanda Ripley: Right, which is such a shame, because people are already scared. A lot of people are really scared of flying, and they don’t always talk about it because there’s shame around it, but it’s a real fear. So not talking about it doesn’t help, but I think there could be a lot more creativity in helping people train for this stuff so it’s less daunting. Going down those escape slides from planes are quite steep. So if you’ve never done it before, it can really give you pause at the top. But I think if you’ve done it even once in your life, I really think even once gives you that muscle memory. And so you just jump. But look, to answer your question, in the meantime, until we get the cool museums and the playgrounds at the airports, I think it’s first thinking about two things. What do you feel the most dread about? What are you most afraid of? And then second thing, can you figure out what your biggest risk is given how you live your life, where you live? Because it’s different, right, depending on different places. And then trying to find ways to, if you can’t train, then at least really learn more about those threats so that they’re less terrifying.

A lot of this is exposure therapy, right? The more you can, in a contained, safe way, expose yourself in small doses to these things by learning about them, the less terrifying they might be. I mean, that doesn’t mean you go watch a horror movie about a virus destroying everyone and think that’s going to help you with a pandemic. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying immerse yourself in sober, reliable, trustworthy research that’s different than the Hollywood approach to this. So I think that’s something to think about is what is the thing you’re most afraid of? And what is the thing that is most likely to threaten you and what you hold dear? And trying to learn more about what those things have looked like in the past, how you can prepare for them and what to do and what are the mistakes you make? I mean, the good news is the behavior is the same. It’s the same mistakes no matter what the threat is. It’s the delay and the denial. Those are the things that are going to trip most of us up. So just knowing that, even if you don’t know what the threat’s going to be, can be helpful.

Brett McKay: So yeah, if your office does fire drills, take them seriously. If they don’t do fire drills, take the stairs instead of taking the elevator to your office to get out of the office.

Amanda Ripley: Thank you, Brett, for giving us a practical answer to that question. I’m going on and on, and there’s the answer. Do the things that you can do. Take the drills seriously, because your body needs some muscle memory for this stuff. And if you’ve never been in the stairwell, even when I’m in a crowded theater or a crowded event, I’m noticing where the exits are. And that’s helpful. So I think taking those opportunities is really important. And in the longer term, taking every opportunity to build relationship and trust with the people around you, because those are going to be the people that you’re with. Those are the people who will save you or you’ll need to save. It’s the people you work with, the people you live with in your neighborhood, strangers on the bus, the people in your community. It’s not going to be first responders because they just can’t get there in time. So knowing that, I think, has helped me also invest a little more in the place where I live and in those community gatherings, because I see them as short and long-term investment.

Brett McKay: Let’s start with this one. I always think about this incident that you talked about in the book, the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire. Now, for those who aren’t familiar with supper clubs, this is a thing in the Midwest where it’s basically a private dinner club for middle-class people, is what I’ve gathered. There’s this one that was a little fancier called the Beverly Hills Supper Club. Big fire there. I’m going to use this to explore the sociology of disaster. How do we behave in groups whenever there’s disaster? So what can the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire tell us about groupthink and disasters?

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, so this is a good example of how people behave when they’re in a crowded place and not expecting anything bad to happen. So you’re just not, again, your brain is going to try to fit everything that’s happening into what’s happened before. And it was studied pretty carefully by some sociologists, so it’s a really useful example. But on the night of May 28, 1977, this Beverly Hills Supper Club, which was just south of Cincinnati, a very regal place filled with ballrooms and fountains and gardens, and it was hosting many different events. There was a wedding, there was a big dinner happening, all different things happening in this place, all of which were sort of the opposite of a disaster. And that’s important because, again, your brain doesn’t see it coming. But this fire, it was an electrical fire, had started in one room, and it really tore through the whole complex very quickly. And at the time, there were almost 3,000 people packed into the club, because I think it was Memorial Day weekend, so it was really crowded. There was a dog owner’s club in one room having a banquet in the crystal room, and then doctors, a group were together in the Viennese room, all these different groups. There was 400 people for an awards banquet. And then most of the remainder of the guests, most of the guests were in the cabaret room, which was a ballroom. And most of the people who died would die in that room. In all, the fire killed 167 people.

And so it became this mystery, what had happened here? What could have gone differently so this wouldn’t happen again? And became very closely studied by safety engineers to try to understand how did this happen? And there were some really hopeful lessons. One that really stands out to me is that the waiters and waitresses went to incredible lengths to get people out on average. I talk about a busboy who really put himself at risk over and over again, going back into the smoke to pull people out. Cooks, busboys, all these people, men and women. And that’s partly because when your role is to be helpful and be the host in a situation, and then a disaster happens, you tend to still obey according to that role. So if your role, though, is to be a guest at a banquet, you’re in a more passive position and you also continue to play that role in the disaster. So it’s interesting to see how that continues. Now there was also denial. There were people who were just not reacting, but many of those employees just behaved magnificently above and beyond what you would expect. The problems included the fact there were just not enough exits in the club and they were really hard to find. And that was true of the World Trade Center. That’s true of a lot of places. These places aren’t really designed for humans often. They’re just mazes. And so it created, in addition to denial, it created dangerous delay. So these sociologists Norris Johnson and William Feinberg, who were professors at the University of Cincinnati nearby, they got really curious about what happened here and they just dug into the research and found that an estimated 60% of the employees had tried to help in some way, but only 17% of the guests had helped. So again, your role at the time really matters.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you talked about when guests did help, they had a social role as a helper. They’re either a doctor or a nurse or an EMT. If they were that in their daily life, then they were more prone to be a helper. But if they weren’t, they weren’t going to do anything.

Amanda Ripley: Yeah. Remember I said, there were those doctors dining at the club. They started administering CPR and dressing wounds and nurses did the same thing. There was even a hospital administrator there who began organizing doctors and nurses. So the overarching lesson from the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire is how well most people performed. They thought they were going to find pushing and chaos and selfish behavior, but actually it was really orderly almost to a fault. People were staying in line, not pushing, queuing up to get out and helping each other, particularly when they were in that role going into the event. So it was not what they expected. And it was one of the big eye-opening moments where we started questioning the Hollywood stereotype about how people behave. In fact, if anything, the problems with the World Trade Center evacuation included the fact that people went too slowly. We tend to get very polite to strangers in these situations because we’re scared and we need each other.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So I mean, maybe the lesson there is if you are in a disaster scenario, you have to remind yourself, I will probably default to my social role in this situation and that might not be the best thing to do.

Amanda Ripley: Right.

Brett McKay: Yeah. If you’re in an official role or in a helper type job for your day job, you may default to stepping up and taking action. But if you’re a guest somewhere, a customer, know that you are apt to be passive and compliant and you may need to make an extra effort to snap yourself out of just being passive. Another way your social role in a situation can affect your behavior, and I think about this all the time, let’s say you’re in a restaurant or in a grocery store and there’s an active shooter situation. The closest exit might be through the kitchen or through the back of the grocery store. But because you’re in customer mode, you’re thinking, I can only go through the front door. I can’t go through the employee exit. But then you have to remember that in an emergency, social roles are off the table. I mean, you can break social norms. You got to get to the nearest exit, whether you’re an employee or not.

Amanda Ripley: Right. The sort of rule bound folks in the room are going to have to overcome that. And it’s even true in very small ways. Just a few months ago, I was walking around Washington, D.C., where I live in DuPont Circle, which is a pretty safe, affluent neighborhood. And it was on a Tuesday afternoon and just sunny day, nothing big going on. And I was just walking down the street and I heard a gunshot at pretty close range. And I looked around. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. But what was weird is everyone around me just kept walking. And people were sipping their coffee and people were chatting and people were on their phones. And it was like it hadn’t happened. And then I remember I’m like, okay, just because no one else is reacting doesn’t mean they’re right. It’s just they don’t expect it here. In this neighborhood, it’s not your brain is just moved right past it. So, again, I couldn’t figure out where it come from, but I knew I’d been around enough guns that I knew that was a gunshot.

And so I just knew it wasn’t coming from the subway. So I just went down into the subway to leave the area. And it was, in fact, one driver had shot another. Anyway, what I did not do was start screaming for everyone to run and clear the area. I didn’t take it that far. Maybe I should have. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I didn’t hear additional shots. But it’s like you’re in the moment trying to balance am I right or am I overreacting here? And you just usually don’t know until it’s too late is the thing. You don’t know.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s another reason people don’t take action is they don’t want to be the weirdo.

Amanda Ripley: Right. Overreacting. You don’t want to cause people to think you’re just hypersensitive or, and I think the reality is if you’re going to be that guy or that woman who does say we got to evacuate for this fire drill, even though you all think it’s a joke, people are going to think you’re the weirdo. And that’s probably worth it. But there is a little bit of social pressure that you will face in that situation. So you don’t want to make permanent mistakes there that put people in more jeopardy. But it is worth taking on a little bit of that peer pressure and pushing through.

Brett McKay: We’ve been talking about how most people in a disaster, they’re actually very polite, they’re docile, but occasionally panic does happen. And you look at the Muslim Hajj, what that can teach us about panic and why it happens in groups. So tell us about that. I thought this was really fascinating.

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, so it’s not that panic never happens. And sometimes it’s annoying because researchers on this will constantly downplay. And I think that’s a mistake because I know that what they’re trying to do, they’re trying to make us less prone to assume there will be panic. But that doesn’t mean that it never happened. So it’s important to talk about when it does happen and why. The research on this is basically yeah, panic rarely happens. But I think people feel panicky in disasters. That’s true. When you’re afraid, your heart races, your palms sweat, your breath is short. That feels panicky. That’s not the same thing as mobs of people freaking out. So it’s almost like the word is inadequate to the task. But when we’re actually looking at, okay, when do groups of people behave in an antisocial way? It’s usually when they feel trapped and they might get out, but they might not. And they also are in a system that they think is corrupt. So there’s certain conditions that have to be met. They don’t trust the setting and they think they may not get out.

So there’s a zero-sum situation. But in the Hajj, so the Hajj that you mentioned, there’s been a series of really tragic crowd crushes that have happened in the pilgrimages that happened to the Hajj. And for a long time, some of the people in charge would blame the victims and say that they had misbehaved. And this is something you hear a lot after crowd crushes. And the research on this is pretty clear that that’s not what happened. That basically, usually in crowd crushes and stampedes like that, first of all, it’s just too dense. There are too many people in too small a space. So the design and management of the crowd is a problem. And then what happens is you lose control over your bodily movements because it’s so tight.

And then someone falls down up ahead of you. And then that causes other people to sort of surge forward, right? Because they don’t know that someone’s fallen down. So it’s a lack of communication on top of everything else. The way most people die in crowd crushes is asphyxiation. It’s not that people are trampling you, although that happens, but it’s that you don’t get enough air. And the compounding force of many rows of people behind you in big crowds, it’s like a Mack truck. I mean, the pressure on the people in front. And if they don’t know that people have fallen, they just keep moving forward in the direction they were already moving. And then that compounds that pressure. So this might look like panic. And then, of course, people are struggling to breathe and to get to the top of the pile. It might look like panic, but it’s not like people are punching each other out and misbehaving. It’s people are getting really pressed to death. And so that’s a design and crowd management problem. It’s not really that the people themselves misbehaved.

Brett McKay: And it sounds like they’ve taken measures to reduce or prevent those type of things happening during the Hajj, right?

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, because they’ve learned it’s a physics problem. That is a physics problem. You need to design and manage the crowd differently. And a lot of big crowd events, if you look at Times Square in New York City on New Year’s Eve, they are managed really well. You want a square meter around you of space. And if you have less than that, you can get in trouble. So the advice to individuals is, look, if you’re in a really crowded situation, try to slowly, gradually move to the edge of the crowd where you have a little less, a little lower odds of getting crushed. But the best advice is to the organizers of these events, right? You really have to be able to communicate with the crowd and keep people from getting into too dense of a scenario. And that’s what they’ve gotten much better at at the Hajj, although there are still problems.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we’ve talked about the first two parts of the survival arc. There’s denial. People often don’t immediately recognize the danger or downplay its seriousness. They may freeze, delay action, just carry on like nothing’s wrong. Then there’s deliberation. And that’s when people begin to assess what’s happening and consider their options. And sometimes if people are overwhelmed by stress or if they’re unprepared, they get stuck in deliberation. But hopefully, maybe if you’ve rehearsed the scenario before, you can stay calm and then you can enter into the third part of the survival arc. And that’s decisive action. And one thing you talk about in this part of the book is that some people don’t just take action to save themselves, but they try to save others. And we talked about this a little before, that people sometimes help others in an emergency. But let’s talk more about when people are out-and-out heroes. They may not even be directly involved in the situation that’s going on, but they may jump in and risk their lives to save someone else. What did you learn about that? Why would someone who doesn’t even know the person who’s in the freezing cold water drowning, why would they jump in and try to save that person?

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I mean, the research on this is really frustrating. It’s very hard because one person’s hero who jumped in and saved someone else can be another disaster’s victim or fool. If you jump into a really threatening situation and die or make things worse, then it’s a different storyline. So it’s really tricky. But I did try to find research that is out there. And first of all, I interviewed a lot of people that other people have called heroes. And if you ask them why they did what they did, they invariably say the same thing. They say they had no choice, which is interesting. They’re universally uncomfortable with the label hero. They attribute their actions to the situation rather than their own profile. So they say, how could I watch a man drown or starve or burn to death? So for them, the fear of not acting is worse than the fear of acting. And both are scary. So it’s not like they’re not scared. It’s just, given their training, given their background, given their identity, who they think they are in this world, they can’t live with themselves if they don’t try.

So that’s some of what we know is that on average, again, this research is really thin, but from what we can tell, a lot of people who are celebrated in the media as heroes from events like this are much more likely to be young, single men. That could be partly because they don’t have families. So maybe they have less at risk. It could be because men are more likely to work outside and in situations where these types of things happen that get a lot of media coverage. They might be they have an identity that they’re someone who’s not supposed to just sit quietly by and watch someone else die. So there’s a lot of possible reasons there, including there’s some evolutionary reasons about why young men would do that, because it raises their status in the group. And that would make sense. But it’s a lot of speculation right now.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it sounds like to the people who have this idea that they couldn’t not act, they had to do something. It sounds like from what you talk about in the book, when they were growing up, they really had a good relationship with their parents and their parents always impressed upon them. You’re a helper, you’re always going to do what you can for others. And then they carry that over into heroic situations.

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, it could be like the doctors and nurses, right, from the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire. If you’ve got the mindset that you’re a helper, then you’re going to carry that with you.

Brett McKay: So you end the book talking about this guy named Rick Rescorla. He worked at the World Trade Center. And you use him as this is the guy that we should look at to see how to really prepare ourselves and others for the unthinkable. So what can Rick tell us or teach us about that?

Amanda Ripley: Yeah, Rick Rescorla is a really interesting person who was the head of security for Morgan Stanley, which had a massive presence at the World Trade Center. He was a former soldier who worked on security and spent many years at Morgan Stanley. He had fought in Vietnam, earned a bunch of medals, and eventually settled into this role. But he still brought with him that mindset that he had learned in the military. He knew that Morgan Stanley was vulnerable, it occupied 22 floors of Tower 2. That’s like a small city, basically. And after the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, he got really focused on the threat of a terrorist attack at the Trade Center. And so he brought up one of his buddies to New York City who did counterterrorism work in 1990 and asked him, where are the vulnerabilities that you see here? And his friend saw the Trade Center’s garage and he said, oh, well, this is a no brainer. I would just drive a truck full of explosives into the garage and walk out. So Rick and his friend wrote this report to the Port Authority explaining their concerns and trying to get more security in the parking garage.

Not a lot of things happened, according to Rick. Nothing happened, really. The Port Authority did not respond to my requests for comment. But in any event, three years later, Ramzi Yousef drove a truck full of explosives into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. And that was the first terrorist attack at the Trade Center that led to a really disastrous evacuation. So while it wasn’t very deadly, it was truly traumatic for a lot of people because it took many hours for people to evacuate. The stairwells were not well lit and ventilated. So now Rick had real conviction that things needed to change. And he didn’t trust the Port Authority, which ran the Trade Center. So he did something that almost no one else did, which was he trusted the people in the company to save themselves. Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center. And so he decided they were going to have to take care of each other. And so from then on, no visitors were allowed in the office without an escort. And he made sure they knew where the stairwell was on their first day. So they knew how to get out of there.

He told his employees not to listen to instructions from the Port Authority in a real emergency because it had lost all legitimacy for him. And most importantly, he started running the entire company through frequent surprise fire drills, which remains extremely unusual. And he actually had people go down the stairs two by two, go down several sets of stairways. And he insisted that the highest floors evacuate first and not let the lower floors in in front of them, which is actually a big problem, a lot of evacuations because it takes forever. So this is someone who had advanced understanding of human behavior and also incredible faith in his colleagues, in the public basically. He knew that if people had the training, they can become really expert in getting out of places and helping each other. And he was right. So, on the morning of 9/11, he knew that another plane had hit the other tower and he grabbed his walkie-talkie and he started to order an evacuation and it had already started. The Morgan Stanley employees knew not to wait for someone to tell them to go to safety and it already started.

They knew where the stairwells were, which was pretty unusual in the Trade Center. It was confusing for different reasons. And then when people started getting scared in the stairwell because another plane hit, he started singing songs through his bullhorn, which is something he had done to calm his soldiers in Vietnam. And he sung songs in the stairwell and there’s a picture of him doing that in the book and people remember that. And when the tower collapsed, only 13 Morgan Stanley employees were inside. The other 2,687 were safe, which was quite extraordinary. And unfortunately, Rick and a handful of his security colleagues had gone back in to get some stragglers. So, they were killed that day. But it’s an incredible story of what can happen when you trust regular people to train for bad things to happen and to help each other.

Brett McKay: Well, Amanda, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Amanda Ripley: You can check out more about the book and my work at amandaripley.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Amanda Ripley, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Amanda Ripley: Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Amanda Ripley. She’s the author of the book, “The Unthinkable”. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at our website, amandaripley.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/disaster, where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to use your new podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.