Hollywood's big lie about disasters: In crises like the blackout, the natural reaction is generosity, not panic.

A plane crashes into one of the tallest towers in the world. The situation is a total emergency, and employees on numerous floors have to evacuate the building in single file and via the stairs. How would a Hollywood movie portray that scene? Screams, shoving, heartless people stamping on each other's heads to save themselves. What happened on September 11, 2001, in New York? The entire building maintained the calm necessary for almost everyone to be saved. The evacuees actively helped each other, carrying injured colleagues or guiding strangers through dark stairwells. In emergency after emergency, this is the norm: extreme selfishness doesn't emerge, but rather those affected act generously, if not heroically, toward strangers. In crisis situations, such as the massive blackout on the Peninsula last week, people don't take a baseball bat to their neighbors, but rather hand them a pack of batteries even though they've never exchanged a word. Why do we continue to believe that the opposite is natural?

“ Disaster movies and the media continue to portray ordinary people as hysterical or ruthless in the face of calamity. We trust those voices that present us as victims or savages more than our own experience,” summarizes writer Rebeca Solnit in her essay A Paradise in Hell , in which she portrayed all the positive behaviors that have emerged in the face of catastrophes. Apocalyptic scares and real-life disasters crowd our recent memory: the blackout, the floods in Valencia, the La Palma volcano, the global computer system failure, Storm Filomena, the COVID lockdown… In all these cases, scenes of solidarity like those of October 28 were experienced. And a CIS survey translated this into a statistic : 88.2% of Spaniards saw people behaving well or very well; only 5.3% saw them behaving average, badly, or very badly.

“Reality shows us that in the first moments of a crisis, people tend to help each other; solidarity emerges. It helps us regain control, find meaning in what's happening, and cope emotionally with the experience,” explains psychologist Lidia Rupérez , a specialist in emergencies. And this isn't just a trait of Spanish kindness; it's human nature itself.

“The problem with the panic myth is that it assumes a deliberate overreaction to an emergency. Scientific literature shows that more people die in emergencies due to underreaction,” says Stephen Reicher, a social psychologist specializing in collective behavior. This professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has been studying the phenomenon for decades and remains fascinated by the persistence of this misunderstanding, which experts call the“disaster myth,” which obscures a solidarity that should be considered a valuable asset .

After the attacks in Oklahoma City in 1995, in Madrid in 2004 , and in London in 2005 , when shock and fear still reigned, and while emergency crews waited for emergency services, bystanders improvised stretchers and applied tourniquets to strangers. The zero responders in these and other similar tragedies are other victims and perfect altruistic strangers: it's a global phenomenon with local roots. "What is shown in many previous studies and in disasters that have occurred in Spain, such as 11M or the La Palma volcano, is that cooperation is more of a human norm. In Spain, there is a strong muscle of social cohesion," explains sociologist Celia Díaz of the Complutense University.

“Shared identity arises from a sense of common destiny, that we're all experiencing the same thing. The biggest challenge is maintaining it over time,” Reicher notes. This sense of belonging drives mutual aid, spontaneous coordination, and trust in others. It's described by social psychology and is written into our evolution as a trait that was ingrained very early in humanity : we care for those in need because we depend on each other for survival.

Paleontologists have found the remains of Tina, a Neanderthal girl with Down syndrome , near Xàtiva. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, in the most adverse conditions imaginable, these first cousins ​​of sapiens cared for that girl until she was six years old, with no expectation of return. The paleontological record is full of such cases: toothless individuals who had to be fed, amputated, deaf, with arthritis, with very serious bone fractures that healed, and whose survival can only be explained by the fact that they were cared for day after day, because they decided not to leave anyone behind. Humanity learned to make lanterns, but long before that, it learned to support those left in the dark.

And after the shock?

The blackout only lasted a few hours. What would have happened if it had gone on for a long time? After the initial heroic phase, an awareness of the losses sets in, but cooperation remains. For a couple of decades, a mantra has existed that all that humanity collapses in 48 hours, in four meals; a phrase attributed to the British secret services with no empirical basis, but rather a logistical simplification. “It wouldn't be surprising if the security services tend to see the worst in human nature, but they would do well to look at history more closely,” Reicher notes.

The massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011 was followed by weeks of dire shortages, with the entire infrastructure in ruins and the threat of a nuclear disaster. But in the food lines, solidarity soared and looting was minimal. In 1998, a snowstorm devastated much of Canada , leaving millions of people without electricity for days or weeks—a cross between the Monday blackout and Filomena. Authorities recorded a notable drop in crime, neighbors took in entire families without heat, and the previously woven solidarity networks, such as cooperatives and parishes, were strengthened. Effective public intervention, from military mobilization to aid checks, fostered trust.

However, during World War II, discontent with rationing in the United Kingdom escalated because the wealthy, able to buy on the black market, continued to indulge in luxury spending. “People revolt when they perceive injustice: some have food and others don't; some hoard to drive up prices… If we want to avoid unrest, the state should focus its attention on the elites, prevent profiteering, and ensure fair distribution,” Reicher warns.

“A characteristic pattern is high levels of immediate solidarity and mutual aid, which are then undermined by government intervention,” he adds. When unrest erupts, the problem isn’t “human nature,” but political management, which saps citizen energy instead of channeling it when official management is late or creates grievances. “Many governments are paternalistic. They see the public as children or animals to be cared for. We saw this during COVID, when they treated the public as part of the problem to be managed.”

The lack of information can exacerbate the situation: 60% of Spaniards felt the need for it during the blackout, according to the CIS (National Statistics Institute). "In Spain, there is a very high level of interpersonal trust, which we already saw influence vaccination during the pandemic, but trust in different governments is much lower," Díaz points out. Therefore, the sociologist explains, "it didn't break anyone's heart" that the government took so long to inform people "because there wasn't much hope."

That doesn't mean people don't suffer acute stress, but the social collapse so often marketed as a movie is the exception, not the rule. And there are preconditions that influence much more than the passing of hours without a solution to the problem: New York City was the perfect laboratory. During the massive blackout of 2003, the police reported fewer problems than on a normal day. During the 1977 blackout, when it was a city in ruins, ravaged by crime, poverty, and racial tension, looting spread rapidly.

“The persistence of the free-for-all myth also has to do with the fact that in recent decades, our imaginations have been dystopian: wars, the assault on the Capitol, all these images that remain more etched in our retinas than happy ones,” explains Díaz. And of course, there's the role of the media in spreading this perception of chaos. Which brings us to the favorite example of this narrative, the mass purchase of toilet paper . A very sane collective madness, according to Reicher: “If you're told that others are behaving irrationally and buying a product, the rational thing to do is to join the line before it runs out.” A long line is more newsworthy than two neighbors sharing candles on the stairs. But it will be the neighbor who saves us from the apocalypse.