Understanding Citizen Response to Disasters with Implications for Terrorism

Since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the United States, the mix of authorities attending to emergency management issues has changed. Traditionally, emergency managers were often their communities’ sole voices that were calling attention to needs for mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery planning (Drabek, 1987). Increased awareness of vulnerability to terrorist acts has both brought more actors into the arena and emphasized the need for coordination among their efforts. Thus, emergency managers at local, regional and federal government levels have been joined by law enforcement, military and policy makers in examining means of combatting terrorism. Much of this work places terrorism in the general context of understanding human behaviour under stress, logically drawing on the literature of natural and technological disasters. There have been calls for information sharing and cooperative planning among all these groups, and policy officials have added their voices to the process (Hoffman, 2001). Calls for such coordination are not new. Emergency managers and researchers have, for decades, emphasized the importance of multiagency co-operation in all phases of hazard management (Dynes, Quarantelli and Kreps, 1972). For that matter, the systematic study of terrorism as a hazard in the United States is also not new; one can minimally trace this work to the efforts of Brian Jenkins at the RAND Corporation in the early 1970s (Jenkins, 2001). What is new is the concerted effort, particularly by policy makers, to make the coordination real and to fund the necessary planning and preparedness measures. In connection with these efforts, another issue also old in origin has arisen: some policy makers and planners appear to have expectations about human response to disasters and terrorism in particular that are not compatible with known behavioural principles and with data on human behaviour under emergency conditions. In particular, apparent concern about citizen ‘panic’ and the possibility of other dysfunctional behaviour suggest that policy officials would benefit from a review of what is known about citizen response to natural and technological disasters, and how that knowledge is likely to generalise to terrorist incidents. The purpose of this article is to review what is known about citizen response to natural and technological disasters, and to extrapolate from that information to describe what might be reasonably expected in connection with terrorist incidents. Certainly there is not a direct translation of results from other types of disasters to terrorist events. Much of the variation will be based in the nature and consequences of the agents used: weapons of mass destruction using incendiary explosives, and chemical, radiological and biological agents. Over many years, the different impacts of specific threats have been studied and it is known that some agents (radiation for example) generate higher and more acute levels of fear than others (Slovic, Fischhoff and Lichtenstein, 1980). Indeed, an often-noted finding from research on the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident is that when facing a perceived radiation threat, citizens expressed higher levels of concern and much higher levels of warning co-operation than anticipated by authorities (Lindell and Perry, 1992). The fact that some agents associated with terrorist threats may elicit high fear responses, however, does not negate the utility of a range of research findings regarding human behaviour under stress.