The Wisdom of Crowds in flames

NYT

A Hero in Every Aisle Seat

ONE survivor of the Air France crash in Toronto on Tuesday described the "panic" of his fellow passengers. Yet these people had just evacuated a burning plane in about two minutes. While they had had critical help from the plane's crew members, those trained professionals were busy assisting people with limited mobility, not providing psychotherapy. Thus what the passenger observed was clearly not "panic" in the sense of an unthinking crowd acting irrationally and abandoning the norms of civilized behavior. Indeed, it was the exact opposite.

The Air France evacuation required an extraordinary degree of social coordination - which emerged among a group of strangers with virtually no time to prepare. Once out of the wreckage, they were aided by other strangers who, on the spur of the moment and with no expertise in emergency situations, had pulled off a nearby highway and calmly charged into the scene, despite the risks posed by an exploding plane.

While this sort of behavior is often described as remarkable, it is actually what researchers have come to expect. Studies of civilians' intense experiences in the London Blitz; the cities of Japan and Germany in World War II; the 1947 smallpox outbreak in New York; the earthquake in Kobe, Japan, in 1995; and even fires have found that people, however stressed, almost always keep their wits and elevate their humanity.

Indeed, the critical first responders in almost any crisis are ordinary citizens whom fate has brought together. As Kathleen Tierney, head of the University of Colorado's Natural Hazards Center, has noted, "The vast majority of live rescues are carried out by community residents who are at the scene of disasters, not by official response agencies or outside search and rescue teams."

...What the passenger called "panic" was a normal response to stress. Although unpleasant, that stress is typically productive. It focuses people on solving the problem at hand or identifying those among them who can do so. In a plane crash, those solutions might come from people who paid attention during the preflight announcements. In London last month, such problem-solving was evident among those who surmised that the darkness in the subway tunnel meant that the third rail posed no risk of electrocution....

[Writer] Baruch Fischhoff is a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and president of the Society for Risk Analysis.

Considering the topic of the last post, this is a nice bit of serendipity outlining the "freakonomic" truth underlying conventional ill-wisdom about safety and security. Reminds me of a study I participated in back in the early 90s. The point of it was to determine how leaders emerge from groups, in both dynamic/chaotic situations, and in more ordinary ones. The characteristics that determined their "rise" were, perhaps, strangely obvious:

• If you kept your head while those about you were losing theirs--even if you had no immediate answers, you were ahead.
• If you could get what was inside your head in the form of an assessment and a plan quickly and credibly OUT of your head and into those of others, you were three steps ahead.
• If you gave people things to do and could relate their necessity to the overall plan--gave them a definition of mission success and the parameters for success and failure were clearly stated, you were 4 steps ahead.

An Act 2 and 3 in the shape of visualizing contingencies for progess, and workarounds for failure, made you Pope.

In the end, a base of knowledge, and resourcefulness, and a tendency for inclusion--utilizing idle hands--overcame the "paper tigers."

In crisis situations, many people don't need a "why" as much as a "how" or, at least, suggestions on how and perhaps, the freedom to improvise along the way. In the more ordinary, day-to-day situations, snap-confidence and appraisal was a victim of a leisurely pace--social politics and pecking order replaced what Gladwell, in Blink, calls rapid-cognition, or thin-slicing, with what Suroweicki in Wisdom of Crowds warns against: professional bias, social prejudice and peer pressure.

Heroes are our leaders; leaders are our heroes

As they often say, heroes are made, not born. But that skews the point: Many of us have the heroic in us, but "professional heroes" have much to gain from dispelling that reality, and in pumping up their own indispensability. The situations Fischoff describes above draw out that latent heroism in many of us. And, by inference, he also points out the truth that the hardest job of leading is precisely when life is in "hobby-mode," not survival-mode. Indeed, at those times of safety, our left brains do their damndest to rationalize away collective wisdom, or just the wisdom of a select other, in favor of purely self-interested and self-agrandizing ideas and answers--often, the wrong ones, that unfold their wrongness slowly, a la the Frog in the pot. At those times of ease, power-point and feasibility studies become the tools and weapons of choice, for dramas we cook up in our heads, against "enemies" and threats we fabricate out of R-complex boredom.

Yeah, we become the arsonist who thinks he's a firefighter. And oddly (or maybe not), that person is often most useless when real conflagration threatens.

UPDATE: Was flipping through Freakonomics this morning and lo and behold, a tuning fork. Pg 89-90:

It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase "conventional wisdom." He did not consider it a compliment. "We associate truth with convenience," he wrote, "with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem." Economic and social behaviour, Galbraith continued, "are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding."

So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting--though not necessarily true. It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true. But noticing, perhaps, the contrails of sloppy or self-interested thinking--is a nice place to start asking questions.

Empahsis mine.