Crowd Behavior in Evacuation and Other Settings: Prof. John Drury

Public behaviour and perceived hostile threats: From psychology to practice and policy

This talk will describe a recent programme of work that has investigated public flight incidents in response to perceived hostile threats. In the UK and Europe in the 2010s there were a large number false alarm incidents – some of them involving injury or fatality as well as being disruptive and distressing. The same period saw a significant rise in marauding terrorist attacks. However, the relation between these two trends, and public behaviour in these incidents, have not been investigated until now, despite their importance to emergency planning. I will describe a new analysis of ten years of false alarm incidents in the UK and a detailed case study of the 2017 Oxford Street false alarm to address two questions: (1) When do false alarms occur? (2) How do members of the public behave in these incidents, that are commonly characterized as ‘panic’? I will use the research to derive a series of practical recommendations for practitioners and policymakers.

Bio:

John Drury is Professor of Social Psychology and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Sussex. His work focuses on collective behaviour – in emergencies, protests and social movements, and less dramatic crowd phenomena such as at festivals, music and sports events. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles on these and other topics, including events such as the 2011 English riots, the London bombings of July 7th 2005, the Hillsborough disaster, and the 2010 Chile earthquake. He teaches crowd psychology to the UK Fire and Rescue Service and to crowd safety managers around the world. His research on collective resilience in mass emergencies has informed the training of stewards across the UK and European football clubs and informs the Civil Contingencies Secretariat’s National Risk Assessments. As part of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, he participated in the UK government SAGE behavioural science subgroup SPI-B and is a member of Independent SAGE. He is a former editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology.

Host or Publisher Christian Regenhard Center for Emergency Response Studies (RaCERS)