How do people behave when disasters strike? Popular media accounts depict panic and cruelty, but in fact, individuals often cooperate with and care for one another during crises

Catastrophe Compassion: Understanding and Extending Prosociality Under Crisis. Jamil Zaki. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, May 14 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.05.006

ABSTRACT: How do people behave when disasters strike? Popular media accounts depict panic and cruelty, but in fact, individuals often cooperate with and care for one another during crises. I summarize evidence for such “catastrophe compassion,” discuss its roots, and consider how it might be cultivated in more mundane times.


Roots of Catastrophe Compassion

Psychologists have pinpointed a number of mechanisms that might underlie catastrophe compassion. One pertains to the powerful nature of social identity. Each of us identifies with multiple groups, for instance based on our generation, ideology, and profession , and commonly expresses loyalty, care, and prosociality towards members of our own groups .

Social identity is also malleable. You might be an Ohioan and a tuba player, but those identities will vary in salience depending on whether you’re at band practice or a Buckeyes game. Even new identities created in a lab can take on importance, and shift one’s tendency to act prosocially towards people in novel groups. Identities also tend to matter most when they contain certain characteristics, including shared goals and shared outcome s .

When disasters strike, victims might suddenly be linked in the most important de novo groups to which they’ve ever belonged. Strangers on a bus that is bombed might experience a visceral, existential sense of shared fate, and might thus quickly not be strangers any longer—but rather collaborators in a fight for their lives. As described by Drury [8], an elevated sense of shared identity is indeed common to disaster survivors, and a potent source of cooperative behavior .

A second source of catastrophe compassion is emotional connection. Empathy—sharing, understanding, and caring for others’ emotional experiences —predicts prosocial behavior across a range of settings. Consistent with this connection, a recent study found that individuals’ empathy for those affected by the COVID -19 pandemic tracked their willingness to engage in physical distancing and related protective behaviors, and that inducing empathy for vulnerable people increased intention to socially distance [9].

Emotional connection can also comprise mutual sharing of affect across people. After disclosing emotional experiences with each other, individuals tend to feel more strongly affiliated to one another. Such disclosures are also a powerful way to recruit supportive behavior in during difficult times and thus buffer individuals against stress [10]. However, individuals often avoid disclosing negative experiences —for instance because they imagine others will judge or stigmatize them—and thus miss out on the benefits of affect sharing [11].

Disasters thrust people into a situation where their suffering is obviously shared with others. This could in turn lower psychological barriers to disclosure, thus creating opportunities for deeper connection, mutual help, and community. Consistent with this idea, in the wake of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, individuals frequently talked about the disaster and its effects on them for about two weeks [12]. A similar elevation in emotional conversations was found among Spaniards following a 2004 terrorist bombing in Madrid [5]. Researchers further found that that sharing one week after the attacks predicted increases in solidarity, social support, as well as decreases in loneliness, seven weeks later.


Extending Catastrophe Compassion

As Solnit [2] observes, although few people would want a disaster to befall them, many survivors look back on disasters with a surprising amount of nostalgia. Floods, bombings, and earthquakes are horrific, but in their aftermath individuals glimpse levels of community, interdependence, and altruism that are difficult to find during normal times. Then, normal times return, and often so do the boundaries that typically separate people. Might catastrophe compassion outlast catastrophes themselves, and if so, how?

Some suggestive evidence emerges from the study of individuals who endure personal forms of disaster—adverse events such as severe illness, family loss, and victimization by crime. Such adversity often generates increases in prosocial behavior, which Staub and Vollhardt [13] have termed “altruism born of suffering .” Positive effects of adversity appear to extend in time. For instance, individuals’ experience of lifetime adversity reportedly tracks their willingness to help strangers and their ability to avoid “compassion collapse ,” by maintaining empathy even in the face of numerous victims [14].