Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

  These days, Gallup works at the State University of New York in Albany, where he does research and teaches evolutionary psychology. I visited him there in the spring of 2007, two days after the Virginia Tech shootings. He wore a black T-shirt, jeans, and white sneakers. He set up an old slide projector to show me a picture of one of his early immobilized chickens and one of his son with an immobilized cow. Slide after slide, of a paralyzed gecko, a rabbit, a Mississippi Gulf Coast blue crab, flashed by on the screen.

  Here is what we know about an animal in paralysis: the heart rate drops, as does body temperature; respiration goes up; and the body becomes numb to pain. The eyes tend to close intermittently, but when they are open, they stare ahead in an unfocused gaze. The pupils are dilated. Sometimes the body shakes with occasional, Parkinsonian-like tremors. But all the while, the brain is consciously taking in all kinds of information about what is happening around it.

  In his writings, Scottish missionary David Livingstone described what it is like to be paralyzed: on a hunting trip in South Africa in the mid-1800s, he had fired at a lion about thirty yards away and hit him. As he was reloading, the lion lunged at him, clamping his shoulder in his jaw and knocking him to the ground:

  Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening.

  The other hunters drew the lion away, and it soon collapsed from its injuries. Livingstone was left with a broken bone and eleven neat teeth wounds on his upper arm.

  It might seem like a bad idea to go limp and calm while a lion is mauling you like a chew toy. To an observer, paralysis can look a lot like a failure—as if the paralyzed animal has simply gone into shock or given up. But that would give the victim too little credit. After decades of study, Gallup has come to have enormous respect for the paralysis strategy.

  Animals that go into paralysis have a better chance of surviving certain kinds of attacks. But why? Why would surrender lead to survival? Wouldn’t it tend to lead to certain death? Well, the explanation, as with all of our fear reactions, goes back to evolutionary adaptation. A lion is more likely to survive to pass on its genes if it avoids eating sick or rotten prey. Many predators lose interest in prey that is not struggling. No fight, no appetite. It’s an ancient way of avoiding food poisoning. And, in turn, prey animals have evolved to try to exploit this opening—by simulating death or illness when they are trapped. It’s not a sure thing; many animals will still get killed this way. But when there are no other options for escape, it’s a reasonable strategy. Paralysis, like heroism, may be more adaptive than it seems.

  The Disaster Default

  After Cho left the Virginia Tech classroom, Violand noticed that his whole body felt numb, as if all his limbs had fallen asleep. This feeling likely came from the natural painkiller that his body produced as part of the paralysis reaction. But Violand had no way to know this. So he figured he must have been shot. “I didn’t know how it felt to get shot. I remember saying to myself, ‘Man, this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.’” But he kept trying to move and eventually found that he could break through the numbness. “I kind of wiggled around, and I thought, ‘OK, I guess I didn’t get shot.’”

  The classroom was quiet except for some muffled crying. Someone muttered, “It’s OK. It’s going to be OK. They will be here soon.” But Violand wasn’t confident of a rescue. He lifted his head off the ground just enough to let that voice inside his brain address the students around him. “Play dead,” he said. “If he thinks you’re dead, he won’t kill you.”

  Rape victims sometimes undergo something similar. About 10 percent of female sexual assault victims later report that they experienced extreme immobility during the attack, according to multiple studies by Gallup and his colleagues. A stunning 40 percent said they remembered having some kind of symptoms of paralysis—feeling “frozen,” or oddly impervious to pain or cold, among other symptoms. That’s actually slightly higher than the percentage of sexual assault victims who report that they tried to fight back or flee their attackers. In other words, paralysis may be a more common response to rape than fight or flight. Unfortunately, rape victims do not usually understand what they did. Many go on to experience extreme remorse because they think they simply surrendered to their attacker, Gallup has found. “They don’t realize that what they did may have been a very adaptive reaction.” Paralysis can also make prosecution of the rapist much more difficult, since the lack of struggle may look a lot like consent.

  Strangely, we have tended to dismiss our own paralysis as a kind of embarrassing meltdown, while ascribing all kinds of more interesting motives to birds. But everything we have learned from animal research suggests that it is a hardwired, adaptive response that serves a very specific purpose.

  In researching this book, I kept stumbling across anecdotes about human paralysis in unexpected places. Everyone, from firefighters to police officers to driving instructors, seemed to have a story about a frightened person who froze. They didn’t always understand the behavior, but they had all seen it. Even Nassim Taleb, the trader and risk expert, told me he has seen stock traders freeze—while they are losing all of their money. “They just stand there, doing nothing,” he says.

  I met “U.,” the commander of an elite Israeli undercover operations unit, at a rest stop outside of Jerusalem. For security reasons, he liked to arrange meetings at anonymous places. He requested that I identify him only by the initial U. because of his undercover status. Like most professional killers, he didn’t look like the part. He was slightly built and wore a black T-shirt and jeans. He had a kind smile and spoke fluent Arabic. It wasn’t hard to imagine him melting into the Palestinian territories. We talked over sodas about the six years he had spent running hundreds of operations under extreme stress. Sure enough, when I asked him if he had ever seen anyone freeze, he had a story too.

  In 2002, U.’s unit was following two suspects from Nablus, a city under Palestinian control in the West Bank, to Jerusalem. The men were suicide bombers, and they were believed to be carrying a bomb with them. Along the way, they stopped at a crowded parking lot. From a nearby vehicle, U. watched them through video surveillance from a drone device. Although the area was crowded, he decided that a better opportunity might not present itself. He gave the order to take the men out. The operation lasted just seconds. Four of U.’s men, dressed as Palestinians, descended upon the suspects, wounding one and killing another. A bomb was found in one of their bags, U. says.

  Among the innocent bystanders in the parking lot, U. noticed two distinct responses. As the gunfire and shouting broke out, a small number of mostly younger people started to run. But there wasn’t an obvious escape route, since the parking lot was surrounded by large piles of dirt. So what did everyone else do? The rest of the crowd dropped to the ground and froze exactly where they were. They did not move, even after the danger had receded. One hour later, U. remembers, many were still there, uninjured but not moving.

  It’s always possible, of course, that these bystanders were suffering from shock or despair. But the lines between these experiences are not distinct. We don’t either go into shock or freeze. These behaviors are most likely connected. Much more research needs to be done, but we can say that it is a mistake to underestimate the complexity of doing nothing.

  “I Wasn’t a Human Being”

  Cho came back to the French classroom, just as Violand had expected. When he returned, Violand lay perfectly still once again. But this time, the gun fired too many times. “He began unloading what seemed like a second round into everyone again. It had to be the same people. There were way more gunshots than there were people in that room. I think I heard him reload maybe three times.” Violand waited to discover what it would feel like to have a bullet tear through hi
s body. He thought about his parents. At one point, as the shots kept coming, he locked eyes with a girl lying in front of him. He didn’t know her name, but they stared at each other, unflinching, under the desks.

  Finally the gunshots stopped. Cho had killed himself last. The police pounded on the door, shouting directions that Violand does not remember very well. He remembers getting up and going directly to the door, with his hands up. He doesn’t remember seeing his teacher, dead on the ground, or anyone outside of the immediate vicinity of his desk. Later, Violand would learn a startling fact. Of all the students in the French classroom that day, the only person not to be shot was Clay Violand.

  After Violand answered my questions, he had some questions for me. “Do you know what makes one person respond one way and another a different way? I mean, is it your personality or what? Do they know why some people do this?” I told him I didn’t know for sure, and then I gave him one of those true but unsatisfying answers. I told him that our behavior is almost always a product of our genetics and our experience. He politely disagreed. “I don’t see how life experience has anything to do with this situation. You’re not a person with experiences anymore. You’re just surviving,” he said. “I wasn’t a human being when that was happening.” I asked him what he meant. He had a hard time explaining it. “I don’t even know what emotion I was feeling. I wasn’t crying.”

  Human beings think, reflect, and make decisions. We don’t always realize how much other work our brain is also doing all the time, with or without us. In retrospect, Violand has created a narrative, as all survivors do, about what he did. “If I had to sum it up in one word, it was all about movement. I wasn’t really playing dead to convince him that I was dead so much, but just so that I wasn’t moving.” But at the time, he adds, it didn’t feel like he was making any choices at all. “Only now that I think about it a month later, I guess I had a strategy. The week after, I would have said it was chaotic, I didn’t know what I was doing.” When I asked Gallup if Violand’s story resembled all the thousands of paralysis cases he has studied in animals and humans, he said, “It sounds like a textbook case.” Violand was attacked by a lethal predator, and he experienced a radical and involuntary survival response. It may or may not have been the reason he survived.

  The summer after the shootings, Violand decided to stay in Blacksburg, Virginia, where the university is located. When we spoke, he said he was doing well so far. He found himself crying about once a week, but otherwise he felt OK. His friends seemed to expect him to be doing worse than he was. Three survivors of the World Trade Center had e-mailed him, for which he was grateful. They warned him that he might go through a more difficult period six months or a year from now. He didn’t know what to do with that information, so he decided to stick to his original plans. He spent the summer break playing in his band and working. Then he planned to spend the fall semester studying in Paris, speaking French in a place where no one knows what happened to him.

  A Cigarette Break on a Sinking Ship

  Certain kinds of disasters, like shootings or rape, closely resemble the predator-prey encounters we evolved to survive. In those situations, paralysis may effectively deter a predator. There is always that chance. In other cases, paralysis becomes a tragedy unto itself.

  The sinking of the MV Estonia ferry in the Baltic Sea on the night of September 28, 1994, was the worst sea disaster in modern European history. It was followed by years of official reports, conspiracy theories, and recrimination. But one mystery has received relatively little attention: in the horrific final moments aboard the ferry, witnesses reported later, a surprising number of passengers did exactly nothing.

  The Estonia had left its home port in Tallinn, Estonia, on a routine fifteen-hour trip to Stockholm, Sweden. The massive roll-on, roll-off automobile ferry was fancier than most. It had a pool, sauna, casino, and three restaurants. It was a symbol of the newly independent, free-market nation of Estonia. Almost all 989 people onboard had sleeping cabins. Although the weather had been stormy all night, the crew did not expect serious problems. A band was playing in the Baltic Bar, and the ten-deck vessel churned through the inky waters as it had for fourteen years. It had passed two inspections earlier that month. And it carried the required number of lifeboats and life jackets.

  Kent Härstedt, now a member of Sweden’s parliament, was a passenger on the boat that night. He was then twenty-nine, and he was there because he had helped to organize a “peace conference” to bring together businesspeople from around the Baltic Sea. In the aftermath of the cold war, the conference, sponsored by the Swedish government, was meant to foster peace through economic codependence. “The idea was that if we had more trade, more business, we wouldn’t so easily want to have war,” he says now. The conference was going well. It had started in Estonia and then continued on the sea onboard the giant ferry. During a break in the itinerary that afternoon, Härstedt took a sauna on the ship. It was then that he noticed the water in the pool sloshing back and forth. “Normally, these ferries are so huge that you can barely notice that the boat is rocking,” Härstedt says. “But to see that in the pool, that was the first [clue].”

  Later, Härstedt went to dinner, but he felt seasick. He left to take a nap in his cabin. He woke up around 10:30 P.M. to the sound of a slamming noise. Later, he would wonder if this was the beginning of the disaster. But at the time, he figured that some piece of cargo must have been improperly secured. Feeling rejuvenated from his nap, he went back to the restaurant to join his colleagues. He sat down and ordered a Coke. This particular restaurant had a band and a dance floor, and Härstedt remembers how he and his colleagues amused themselves by watching people try to dance on the tottering boat. “They had to hold each other and run from one side to the next, with the waves. It looked really quite funny. I started to joke with my friends. I said, ‘This is almost like the Titanic. Soon they will give us champagne.’” Once dancing became impossible, and people started to leave the restaurant, Härstedt and a colleague moved to a bar in another part of the ship. The bar was full of about fifty people, he remembers. “All the people were having quite a good time. There was karaoke music. My friend and I sat down on two stools at the bar. We were in a good mood. Everybody was laughing and singing.”

  Just after 1:00 A.M., the Estonia suddenly listed starboard a full thirty degrees, hurling passengers, vending machines, and flowerpots across its passageways. In the bar, almost everyone fell violently against the side of the boat. Härstedt managed to grab on to the iron bar railing and hold on, hanging above everyone else. “In just one second, everything went from a loud, happy, wonderful moment to total silence. Every brain, I guess, was working like a computer trying to realize what had happened.” Then came the screaming and crying. People had been badly hurt in the fall, and the tilt of the ship made it extremely difficult to move.

  Though no one knew it, everyone onboard the Estonia had just ten minutes before the starboard side of the vessel would be submerged and the tilt would become almost impossible to negotiate. Härstedt began to strategize. “I started to react very differently from normal, a little bit like I’d learned in my military service. I started to say, ‘OK, there is option one, option two. Decide. Act.’ I didn’t say, ‘Oh, the boat is sinking.’ I didn’t even think about the wider perspective.” Like Zedeño in the World Trade Center, Härstedt experienced the illusion of centrality. “I just saw my very small world.” Härstedt considered trying to crawl through a window before noticing that it was bolted shut. Then he decided to make his way into the corridor.

  But as Härstedt worked through the deliberation phase, he noticed something strange about some of the other passengers. They weren’t doing what he was doing. “Some people didn’t seem to realize what had happened. They were just sitting there, totally apathetic.” Not just one or two people, but entire groups of people seemed to be immobilized. They were conscious, but they were not reacting.

  Härstedt climbed up the stairwell,
fighting against gravity. Out on the deck, the ship’s lights were on and the moon was shining. The full range of human capacities was on display. One man stood to the side, smoking a cigarette, Härstedt remembers. Most people strained to hold on to the rolling ship and, at the same time, find life jackets and lifeboats. Some reassured each other. Härstedt helped an injured woman find a life jacket. Others grabbed life jackets off the backs of fellow passengers, survivors would later tell investigators. To complete the nightmare, the passengers and crew had severe problems unhooking the lifeboats. They could not find directions for the automatic releases nor could they force the rusted manual parts to work. The life jackets—mandatory in fifty-degree water with waves up to twenty-eight feet high—were also maddeningly hard to use. The straps were too short—or at least it seemed that way. Many were tied together in bundles of three, further slowing the process. As the ship continued to capsize, the water around it filled with floating, empty life jackets.

  But here, too, there were people who did nothing. In the middle of this frenzy, certain people seemed petrified. British passenger Paul Barney remembers groups of people standing still like statues. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Why don’t they try to get out of here?’” he later told the Observer. “They just sat there…being swamped by the water when it came in,” one passenger said. Another passenger saw about ten people lying on the deck near the bulkhead. He threw life jackets to them, but they did not react. One passenger was seen entering a lifeboat, which was still secured in place, and then calmly lying down inside, making no effort to launch it.

  Later, when interviewed by the police, some survivors would say they understood this behavior. At some point, they, too, had felt an overwhelming urge to stop moving. They only snapped out of this stupor, they said, by thinking of their loved ones, especially their children.