Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

  Eventually, Slovic realized he was obsessing over the wrong people. Men were the ones throwing off the curve, not women or minorities. And not all men, but a small subgroup.

  As it turns out, about 30 percent of white males see very little risk in most threats. They create much of the gender and race gap all on their own. So then Slovic began to study these white men. They had a few subtle things in common. “They liked the world of status, hierarchy, and power,” says Slovic. They believed in technology. They were more likely than any other group to disagree with the statement that people should be treated more equally. Usually, they were white men, but not always. The more important factor was how they viewed the world and their place in it. If a white male felt discriminated against or marginalized by society, then he would likely switch sides, joining women and minorities in their worry.

  So does that mean it’s better to be a woman who worries than a man who doesn’t? In some disasters, worrying definitely helps. It can motivate people to evacuate before it’s too late. For example, it’s relatively easy to convince women with children to leave their homes before a hurricane. In other cases, though, worrying is not nearly enough, and other, more egregious gender differences matter more. In many countries hit by the 2004 tsunami, for example, women did not know how to swim, and men did. The survival rates varied accordingly. In four Indonesian villages surveyed by Oxfam after the tsunami, male survivors outnumbered females by a ratio of almost three to one.

  Sometimes gender handicaps are embarrassingly banal. On 9/11, women were almost twice as likely to get injured while evacuating, according to the Columbia study. Was it a question of strength? Confidence? Fear? No, says lead investigator Robyn Gershon. “It was the shoes.” Many women took off their heels halfway through the evacuation and had to walk home barefoot. Survivors reported tripping over piles of high-heeled shoes in the staircases.

  Often, other disadvantages overwhelm the effect of worry. Of all the people who die in fires each year, 25 percent are African American—twice their share of the population. The disparity is most glaring when it comes to children: African American and American Indian children are nearly twice as likely to die in a fire than white or Asian children.

  Fire, as it turns out, is mostly about money. “I never fought a fire in a rich person’s home,” says Denis Onieal, who became a firefighter in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1971 and is now superintendent of the National Fire Academy. Fires are more likely in places with shoddy construction where people use portable heaters to stay warm and where smoke detectors are absent or not working. In poor neighborhoods, then, fire is part of the hazardscape, says Onieal. “You got addicts on the corner, you got people who steal your lunch money, and you got fires.”

  The simple truth is that money matters more than anything else in most disasters. Which is another way of saying that where and how we live matters more than Mother Nature. Developed nations experience just as many natural disasters as undeveloped nations. The difference is in the death toll. Of all the people who died from natural disasters on the planet from 1985 to 1999, 65 percent came from nations with incomes below $760 per capita, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The 1994 Northridge earthquake in California, for example, was similar in magnitude and depth to the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. But the Northridge earthquake killed only sixty-three people. The Pakistan earthquake killed about a hundred thousand.

  People need roofs, roads, and health care before quibbles like personality and risk perception count for much. And the effect is geometric. If a large nation raises its GNP from $2,000 to $14,000 per person, it can expect to save 530 lives a year in natural disasters, according to a study by Matthew Kahn at Tufts University. And for those who survive, money is a form of liquid resilience: it can bring treatment, stability, and recovery.

  But in rich countries like America, where the GNP is about $42,000 per person, individual traits can make a difference. In fact, your personal makeup can be more important than the facts of the disaster. “What will eventually determine chronic stress in a discrete event is genetics and personality more than the details of the event,” says Ilan Kutz, a trauma expert and psychiatrist in Israel. All other obvious things (like gender, weight, and income) being equal, some people outperform others. They are simply hardier. The grand mystery is why.

  The Finer Distinctions

  At an upscale restaurant in downtown Portland, Oregon, two women are eating together at a table by the window. In the middle of their conversation, a drunken homeless man stumbles up to the window, unzips his pants, and pulls his penis up to the table. After a short period of gasps and guffaws, the police are called. Officer Loren Christensen arrives at the scene and finds two extremes. One of the women, he says, is “laughing her head off.” The other is slumped on a bench in the lobby with someone fanning her.

  In his twenty-five years as a police officer, Christensen noticed this kind of variance often—particularly among female victims of flashers. “One would laugh it off. Another would be enraged. Still another would be emotionally traumatized.” Christensen, who has retired from the police force and now works as an author and martial-arts instructor, has always had trouble discerning what makes one person react so differently from another—even in war, when he was a military policeman. “In Vietnam, I saw people psychologically impacted in the extreme who worked as cooks. Cooks! And I saw infantrymen who had seriously faced the dragon who appeared, at least on the surface, to be fine.”

  Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster. Dangers seem more manageable to these people, and they perform better as a result. “Trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder,” says George Everly Jr., at the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness in Baltimore, Maryland.

  This makes sense. A healthy, proactive worldview should logically lead to resilience. But it’s the kind of unsatisfying answer that begs another question. If this worldview leads to resilience, well, what leads to the worldview?

  The answer is not what we might expect. Resilient people aren’t necessarily yoga-practicing Buddhists. One thing that they have in abundance is confidence. As we saw in the chapter on fear, confidence—that comes from realistic rehearsal or even laughter—soothes the more disruptive effects of extreme fear. A few recent studies have found that people who are unrealistically confident tend to fare spectacularly well in disasters. Psychologists call these people “self-enhancers,” but you and I would probably call them arrogant. These are people who think more highly of themselves than other people think of them. They tend to come off as annoying and self-absorbed. In a way, they might be better adapted to crises than they are to real life.

  Less than a year after the civil war ended, George Bonanno at Columbia University interviewed seventy-eight Bosnia-Herzegovina citizens in Sarajevo. Each person in the study rated himself or herself when it came to psychological problems, interpersonal skills, health problems, and moodiness. Then each person was rated by his or her peers. A small group of people rated themselves significantly higher than others did. And these were the people found by mental health professionals to be better adjusted.

  After 9/11, Bonanno found a similar pattern among survivors who were in or near the World Trade Center during the attacks. Those with high senses of self-worth rebounded relatively easily. They even had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva. Their confidence was like a vaccine against life’s vicissitudes.

  Several studies have found that people with higher IQs tend to fare better after a trauma. Resilient people may be smarter, in other words. Why would that be? Perhaps intelligence helps people think creatively, which might in turn lead to a greater sense of purpose a
nd control. Or maybe the confidence that comes with a high IQ is what leads to the resilience to begin with.

  The more important point is that everyone, regardless of IQ, can manufacture self-esteem through training and experience. That is what soldiers and police officers will tell you; that confidence comes from doing. As we saw in Chapter 3, the brain functions much better when it is familiar with a problem. We feel more in control because we are more in control. But in certain situations, like the one in which Shacham found himself as a rookie cop, sitting next to a violent criminal who had called his bluff, neither experience nor training could rescue him. He drew upon something else, something more fundamental.

  Special Forces Soldiers Are Not Normal

  The U.S. military has spent millions of dollars trying to figure out how to profile people like Shacham—people who will stay lucid in life-or-death situations and then remain resilient afterward. Charles Morgan III is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University and the director of the human performance laboratory at the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. He has spent the past fifteen years studying differences in how people react to extreme stress. He started out studying Vietnam and Gulf War veterans. The ones with posttraumatic stress disorder behaved a lot differently from the ones without, as you might expect. The vets with posttraumatic stress disorder were jumpier. They also dissociated more, reporting that colors appeared brighter or things moved in slow motion, even in normal life. It was as if their brains, having once entered crisis mode, remained perpetually stuck there. They even had higher levels of certain stress hormones in their blood than other people.

  In the 1990s, the consensus among most scientists was that these people had been damaged by their experiences. Their brains, their blood, and their personalities had been altered by trauma. But a handful of researchers were not satisfied with that theory. “We were making assumptions,” says Morgan. “We really didn’t know.” Which came first, these scientists wondered: the trauma? Or the person susceptible to being traumatized?

  To find out, Morgan needed to study people before they were exposed to the trauma. At the Military Survival School at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he found a laboratory for stress. After a period of classroom training, soldiers at the school are released into the woods to try to avoid capture. They have no food, water, or weapons. Instructors hunt them down, fire on them with blanks, and, eventually, catch them. Then they take the soldiers, hooded and roped together, to a mock prisoner of war camp, where they are systematically deprived of food, control, and dignity. The conditions are meant to resemble the experiences of U.S. POWs in World War II Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. Over seventy-two hours, the soldiers are only allowed to sleep less than one hour.

  Survival School is so realistic, it’s actually frightening. When Morgan took the soldiers’ blood, he found that their stress levels exceeded previously recorded averages taken in extreme situations. The soldiers had, for example, more cortisol in their system than people who are about to jump out of an airplane for the first time. On average, Survival School participants lose fifteen pounds during the course.

  Right away, Morgan noticed big differences between the soldiers. The Army Special Forces soldiers, also known as Green Berets, consistently outperformed the other, general infantry soldiers. “They seemed to remain more mentally clear,” says Morgan. “They didn’t get as stupid as fast as the rest of us under stress.” That’s not surprising. Special Forces are an elite population; less than a third of those who try to join get selected.

  What was more surprising was how different the Special Forces soldiers were chemically. When Morgan analyzed their blood samples, he found that the Special Forces soldiers produced significantly more of something called “neuropeptide Y,” a compound that helps you stay focused on a task under stress, among other things. Even twenty-four hours after a mock interrogation, the Special Forces soldiers had returned to normal levels of neuropeptide Y, while the other soldiers remained depleted. (In civilian life, people with anxiety disorders or depression tend to have lower levels of neuropeptide Y.) The difference was so marked that Morgan could literally tell whether someone was a member of the Special Forces unit just by looking at their blood results. So then the question was, which came first? Were Special Forces soldiers just inherently different? Or did their training make them that way?

  Let’s pause to acknowledge that Special Forces soldiers are not normal. They seem to have certain immunities to extreme stress but, on average, Special Forces soldiers don’t tend to be the he-man types, either; they tend to be the ones with the beards who speak Arabic and can melt into a foreign population. “They like the challenge and the thrill but not in a thrill-seeking way. They’re pretty quiet and meticulous and focused as a group,” Morgan says. “If you’ve ever seen that movie Black Hawk Down, it really does portray Green Berets accurately. They really are different kinds of animals.”

  But it was surprising how predictably—and even biologically—different they appeared to be from other soldiers. In fact, Morgan discovered, he didn’t even have to take their blood to tell the difference. It turned out a simple questionnaire could predict who would produce more neuropeptide Y.

  He asked the soldiers questions from a standard psychological test measuring dissociative symptoms. For example, thinking back over the past few days, he asked, have you ever experienced any of the following symptoms?

  1. Things seemed to move in slow motion.

  2. Things seemed unreal, as if in a dream.

  3. You had a feeling of separation from what was happening, as if you were watching a movie or a play.

  That’s just a sampling of the questions, of course. If you answered yes to all of the questions above, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will perform poorly in a crisis. It depends, as is so often the case, on the crisis.

  Over the past several years, Morgan has administered the questionnaire to more than two thousand soldiers before they began Survival School. He wanted to see which ones had a habit of dissociating—even under normal conditions. On average, about 30 percent scored high on the test. Even without extreme stress, about a third said they had felt some kind of detachment from reality. This is higher than Morgan might have expected, but he has repeatedly found the same ratio among military populations. And those soldiers who had scored high on the dissociation test were consistently less likely to make it through the school.

  One day, soldiers may routinely pop pills to help them deal with extreme fear. Synthetic neuropeptide Y may be handed out to soldiers with their boots. The hormone oxytocin, released in mothers after they give birth and also available synthetically, has been shown to calm the brain’s fear hub and promote trust. In one study, men who sniffed oxytocin before undergoing a brain scan exhibited less amygdala activity than they did without oxytocin.

  But before we get too carried away with the pharmaceuticals, it’s worth mentioning that dissociation is not always a bad thing. During the worst moments of the Survival School, all of the students—even the Special Forces soldiers—experienced dissociative symptoms. Some dissociated more than people taking hallucinogenic drugs. As Zedeño learned during her escape from the World Trade Center, dissociating can be a highly adaptive response to trauma. Jim Cirillo, a master gunslinger, dissociated as he shot a man for the first time. In Chapter 7, we’ll see how an extreme form of dissociation might actually be an ancient survival mechanism.

  There are different kinds of resilience. If all you need to do is walk down the stairs, moderate dissociation might be a perfectly fine response. If, however, you need to manipulate equipment or solve problems, you might have more trouble. “Military folks have to actively engage in their environments to go find an enemy or do something. So the tendency to pull away impairs their performance,” Morgan explains. When we dissociate, the parts of our brains that handle spatial mapping, working memory, and concentration start to fail. If you are, say, a Special Forces soldier in a hostage rescue
unit—tasked with entering buildings undetected, navigating in low light, and shooting the hostage-takers, not the hostages—losing these particular skills is problematic.

  Before, during, and after the mock captivity, Special Forces soldiers reported fewer and less-intense dissociative symptoms than everyone else. The correlation was clear: the less a soldier dissociated—especially under normal conditions—the more neuropeptide Y he produced, and the better he performed.

  Strangely, Special Forces soldiers also reported more trauma in their backgrounds overall. They reported a greater incidence of childhood abuse, for example. This was unexpected. Normally prior trauma predicts worse performance under stress. Among Special Forces soldiers, however, previous trauma hadn’t left them any less able to handle future trauma. In fact, it seemed to have left them more capable. How could this be? It was a sort of paradox. In one group of people, trauma led to an unraveling. In another, it seemed to instill coping mechanisms.

  Every year, about nine hundred soldiers apply to join the Army Special Forces. They are weeded out through a three-week assessment program that tests physical endurance, problem solving, and leadership abilities under stress. It is more physically demanding than Survival School, but a little less psychologically stressful. Only about a third of the candidates actually finish the course.