(This post originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on December 2, 2015.)
How should we behave in response to terrorist attacks and similar dramatic disasters? At the risk of oversimplifying the obvious, we should try to avoid panicking in fear, anger, and ignorance and try to act on reliable knowledge about human effectiveness under conditions of great stress.
But what do we actually know about human behavior in disastrous circumstances? At the risk of oversimplifying again, we should look both to ancient wisdom and contemporary behavioral science. Starting with the behavioral science, we know the following:
We know we are all wired for generosity and altruism. We have to be, since individual human beings at birth are absolutely helpless; and over the whole life cycle, we are heavily dependent on each other. The instinct for generosity and altruism, however, can be undermined by abuse and neglect in the earliest years and by dysfunctional ideologies later on.
We know we are also wired to fear other people who seem different from our family, our friends, and ourselves. We are quick to form and then bolster communities of US versus THEM. We can counteract this tendency through education, communication, and collaborative experience, but it’s not easy.
We know that fear and anger undermine effective decision-making. We can manage the instinctive fear-anger cycle, but that’s not easy either. It’s actually fairly simple, but not at all easy.
We know that fear, ignorance and lack of time to think foster panic. Those who bluster and bellow that we must act aggressively right now in response to disaster or the fear of disaster are usually in panic mode.
We know that courage is not the absence of fear, but the recognition that something else is more important than fear. We also know that cowardice is often a triumph of fear over love.
We generally spend as little time as possible making effective decisions. We need to develop the habit of thinking at least twice before acting. Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in economics for clarifying this issue. (See Thinking Fast and Slow, 2011.)
In 2011, Steven Pinker demonstrated how much more civilized we have become over 20 millennia or so, thanks to the influence of government, commerce, religion, literacy, and women’s expanding power. (See The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.)
It may seem that people are getting worse, but that is an illusion arising from the 24-hour news cycle bringing horrific mayhem into our homes, featuring a teeny percentage of the human population with powerful weapons and desperate beliefs. This is not a new normal; by definition, if it’s newsworthy, it’s not normal.
The scholarly field of “disaster studies” echoes Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (2009):
In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. . . . But belief lags behind, and often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism.
As for ancient wisdom, the Golden Rule suffices. That universal principle of empathy and reciprocity – “treat others as you want them to treat you” – is celebrated by all the world’s religions, and it affirms the most sophisticated behavioral research.
Our collective failure to heed that universal moral imperative and to understand what we actually know about human behavior keeps getting us into these appalling disasters. Getting out of them starts not with emotional outbursts clamoring for safety or revenge, but with a conscious pause to think at least twice before we act.
