Panic Flight in the Social Sciences of Disasters

Abstract

This paper reviews social science studies of emergency evacuations to point to the difficulties in associating them with panic formulations stressing irrationality and to show how the misunderstandings that how the conceptualization of one of these approaches on panic flight, which assumes the prevalence of nonsocial and self-centered behaviors and movements, has been transformed by recent studies of emergency evacuations from buildings, which show that the evacuation is best understood as social behavior in which people exhibit means-end rationality and social solidarity and act as socialized individuals moving towards sources of actual or perceived safety. The conclusion suggests first that the continued usage of the irrationality formulation by a minority of engineers and computer scientists writing on the topic of emergency evacuation and their use of “herding,” or the notion that during dangerous conditions, people follow the actions of others, leading to conformity, is not supported by a majority of findings in the social sciences, and second, that a likely solution to the disconnect between the two science communities is the adoption of transdisciplinary collaborative efforts.

1. Introduction

A synthetic emergent definition of panic would recognize it as a precipitated encounter typified by the spontaneous and synchronized collective behaviors of people pursuing new norms and or social relations while responding to perceived or actual threats under conditions of felt time scarcity. People’s responses are impacted by the size of their collectivity and its average human density, their degree of social cohesion and shared emotions, and the prevailing extent of interdependence and uncertainty. Panics vary by size, institutional context (essential to mass hysteria), and the presence of complex organizational actors, as is the case with moral panics and epidemics of deviance. Panic involves more than individuals’ behaviors, for even in the case of a panic attack or psychiatric illness affecting a person, the individual’s mental disorder links to a social context, which is a partial source of the unresolved anxiety. Quarantelli (2008) [1] and other scholars have documented that panic, referred to below as panic flight behavior, rarely occurs during disasters. However, the panic concept, when used in contexts other than disasters, requires examining the more prominent of these other conventions. The resulting typology is not intended to be exhaustive but rather an attempt to summarize the most frequent usages of the panic concept to contextualize its use in the disaster literature. One way to make sense of panic is by noting the precipitated gatherings’ size and social complexity, from persons to groups, collectivities, organizations, communities, nations, and international-level aggregates.

Table 1 gives a short synopsis of the types of panics described here. One meaning panic occurs in medical literature; it conceptualizes panic as a psychological illness or medical condition, defining a panic attack as a “(a) discrete period of intense fear or discomfort…which…reach a peak within 10 min: (with) palpitations; rapid heart rate; sweating; trembling or shaking; shortness of breath; the feeling of choking; chest pain or discomfort; (APA, 2025 [2]. Panic hysteria in individuals, a recognized condition in psychiatry. The term originates in Freud and Breuer’s “Studies of Hysteria” (1895), which led to catharsis in psychoanalysis in treating mental illness (Scheff, 1979, 26–45) [3]. Approximately 1.7 percent of the U.S. population suffers panic attacks during a given year. Women are more likely to experience them; young people less than 24 years old are also overrepresented. A second use of the concept is known as mass hysteria. It also uses medical criteria, but not in reference to individuals, but to collectivities of people claiming uncorroborated symptoms of physical illnesses (Bartholomew, 2001 [4], Section 2). An example is the mass hysteria among young women that brought about the nefarious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692–1693, in which the authorities executed twenty women from the two hundred, mostly older women, accused. Elsewhere, those impacted during the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 in Tanzania experienced uncontainable laughter, accompanied by fainting, respiratory problems, and crying. The hysteria spread from a group of schoolchildren to the entire school, neighboring schools, and entire villages. Other cases are the hysteria of “penis becoming smaller” common in Asia and Africa in 1967, and the 2012 episode of mass hysteria in Sri Lanka, when one thousand nine hundred children from fifteen different schools in the nation suddenly experienced cough-induced vertigo and skin rashes. Even more recent incidents occurred among personnel working in the American Embassy in Havana and elsewhere who exhibited a mysterious, initially unexplained illness syndrome (still under scientific exploration by federal government agencies). Other incidents are the 2011–2012 Tourette syndrome mass hysteria in New York that involved students from LeRoy High School who started showing symptoms of Tourette syndrome (Bartholomew, 2001 [4]; Wikipedia gives an extensive list of these incidents starting in the Middle Ages). Mass hysteria incidents occur in categories of people densely distributed in well-defined and circumscribed settings such as schools, religious institutions, embassies, offices, and factories, and typically involve young people. Both panic attacks and mass hysteria are straightforward usages of the panic concept. However, in cases of collective delusions described below, instances of mass hysteria may involve hundreds if not thousands of people spread over broad areas. It is possible to venture the guess, based in part on the literature collection at ResearchGate, that these two types of panic account for the majority, 75 to 80 percent of the current research literature on panic.

A third convention considers panic as flight behaviors of people’s collectivities, either in close spaces or in unrestricted (or open spaces), responding to what they perceive as a threatening force (Moss Haber 1980, 156 [5]). Panic flight in close quarters, such as during evacuations from building fires, which involves collectivities of people responding to either real or imagined dangers and impending risks, is the main topic of the subsequent sections of this report. My guess is that it accounts for a small number of science publications, 5 percent or less of the total general literature on panic. Still, it is an unresolved issue whether the participants in massive flights are fleeing away from the perceived hazard or, as affirmed among others in A. Mawson’s affiliation hypothesis (2007: 233–252) [6] is seeking safety by moving toward perceived psychological support and well-being from friends, spouses, and groups to which they belong. Such seeking implies mean-to-end rationality, rendering the widespread assumption of irrational behavior misplaced (see below). In unrestricted, open spaces, this type of panic is referred to by various names in the literature, from collective delusions (Bartholomew 2001 [4], Section 4), such as in the European mad cow panic of 2000, to the generic label of groupthink. One of the most representative examples of panic flights in unrestricted spaces is the military panic, in which an army overtaken by fear and aggression either flees from the battlefield in what is known as military routs or charges headlong, what Collins (2009) [7] called forward panic, as it happened in the First Battle of Manassas (21 July 1861) of the American Civil War in which southern troops attacked and brought about a momentary collapse of the Union troops, putting at risk of invasion Washington, D.C. Panic flight behavior is different from moral panics. The first occurs in collectivities that may not share lasting institutional memberships. In contrast, such membership is a fundamental aspect of moral panic (see next).

Yet another usage of the panic concept refers to moral panic and deviance epidemics (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994 [8]; see also Thompson 1998 [9]). This type of panic attracts 15 to 20 percent of the scientific publications on this topic. In both waves of moral panic and epidemics, a population segment clamors for protection from categories of people perceived as dangerous. They advocate for the need for state officials to adopt protective responses against presumed dangerous categories of people, claims that are often unfounded. Their success brings about punitive actions against those who ostensibly threaten them. Moral panics express the unorganized fears of communities. Very often, however, organizations and moral entrepreneurs orchestrate epidemics. In these cases, the public and organizations amplify, if not create community anxieties, transforming them into politically advantageous currents of public opinion. Thus, moral panics and deviance epidemics are like collective delusions but with the added components of culture and politics. A present-day example is a moral panic and epidemic against people seeking refuge in the U.S. through the country’s southern border. Organizations and moral entrepreneurs often create or amplify community anxieties against them, thus creating politically valuable public opinion against the would-be immigrants. The two forms commingle: moral panic often facilitates the emergence of organizations trying to bring about the desired change, or the organizations create moral panic as part of their efforts to elicit public approval for their corporate goals and actions. Moral panics and epidemics are widespread. Importantly, each shows means-end rationality irrespective of their often-harmful effects on society. A fifth and final use of the panic concept focuses on macro units such as societies and cultures. Its focal points are the environmental catastrophes and the uncontrollable hazards and disasters increasingly faced by societies in the post-industrial epoch of the world system (Giddens, 2002 [10]; see also Beck, 1992 [11]), which brings about panic as a product of people’s widespread anxieties and insecurities about the world and their places in it (Tester 2013, 11, 92–93 [12]). Examples abound (Masters, 2022 [13], such as the cow disease panic in Europe, the resulting distrust of scientists and government agencies, and the extensive fear it engendered. Comparatively, until now this type of panic has not attracted as much scientific attention as it requires given its extraordinary importance.

As ideal types, the links among these various definitions and usages of the concept of panic, offered here for heuristic purposes, have received scant attention. There are few studies of how one type of panic coexists or is transformed by another, for example, the extent to which moral panic brings about the physical and psychological effects postulated by the medical model. Similarly, except for the first two types based on medical diagnoses, there is no consensus about the relative validity of critical constructions and how to develop standard metrics to measure them. Nor are there enough rigorous comparative studies, such as the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (1945, 16) [14]. It concluded that despite considerable losses and disruptions, panic attacks, hysteria, and flight behaviors among German civilians were rare: the majority continued to participate and function as full members of their communities and workplaces amid the withering Allied bombing raids of their cities during 1944–1945.

Given these multidimensional aspects of the panic concept and the unanswered questions, rather than abandoning its study (compared to Clarke 2002, 21 [15]), it seems preferable to conduct rigorous comparative studies of the panic types. Despite the lack of sustained scholarly attention, the relation between these types of panic is worth pursuing. For example, the presence of moral panics may make possible mass hysterias, as was the case in the Salem witch-hunts, an instance of mass hysteria made possible by a moral panic and subsequent deviance epidemic among the Puritan sect occurring within the strictures of a religious organization; Puritans believed that women were prone to fall prey to the Devil—they saw the soul as feminine and women’s bodies as weaker and more vulnerable to the Devil’s designs (Reis, 1995, 13) [16]. The same is true for epidemics of deviance, in which a leader of an organization such as a political party leads a precipitated gathering of adherents to do her bidding. Additionally, mass hysterias often bring about panic flight, for example, in recent recurrent economic fears during which throngs of people congregate in front of banks and other financial institutions trying to withdraw their capital suddenly perceived at risk. There is also a relationship between governmental and civil society organizations’ current warnings about the ongoing destruction of the environment (which sometimes has justified a deviance epidemic) and fears about climate change’s nefarious impact, a type of moral panic. In this instance, both the moral panic and deviance epidemics reflect and amplify the widespread insecurities when modern culture no longer provides the means to interpret and manage the risks people face, in what Giddens (2002) [10] identified as a “runaway world”.

Table 1. Five Approaches to Panic.

Approach to Panic	Exemplar	Key Characteristics	Contexts	Examples
1. Psychological Illness/Medical Condition (Panic Attack)	Gustave Lebon, The Crowd	Palpitations, rapid heart rate, sweating, trembling or shaking, shortness of breath, feeling of choking, and chest pain or discomfort. It is a recognized psychiatric condition, with origins in early psychoanalysis.	Referring to irrationality and individual experiences of intense, acute anxiety.	Close to 1.7% of the U.S. population is estimated to suffer panic attacks annually; women and young people (under 24) are noted to be overrepresented.
2. Mass Hysteria	Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. 1986. [17] The social identity theory of intergroup behavior.	Rapid spread of physical symptoms (e.g., laughter, fainting, rashes, vertigo) among a group without a clear underlying medical cause.	Common in confined social environments such as schools, religious institutions, embassies, offices, and factories. It often involves young people.	Cases include the Salem witch trials (1692–1693), the Tanganyika laughter epidemic (1962), the 2012 mass hysteria in Sri Lanka involving children, and the mysterious illness syndrome among personnel at the American Embassy in Havana.
3. Panic Flight Behaviors of Collectivities	Schultz, Duane. 1964. [18] Panic Behavior.	People responding to real or imagined dangers and impending risks, fleeing from a perceived threatening force.	Types: in closed spaces: Emergency evacuations from building fires. Or in unrestricted/open spaces, such as the European mad cow panic) or military panic.	Examples include evacuations from building fires (e.g., Beverly Hills Supper Club fire; Station Nightclub fire) and historical military events like the First Battle of Manassas (21 July 1861).
4. Moral Panic and Deviance Epidemics	Goode, Erich, 1994 [8]. Moral panics: the social construction of deviance.	Expresses unorganized fears of communities but can be deliberately orchestrated by organizations and “moral entrepreneurs.” They show means-end rationality despite their often-harmful societal effects.	Typically involves lasting institutional memberships and societal-level concerns, differentiating it from the more transient collective behavior of panic flight.	A contemporary example is the moral panic and associated deviance epidemic against people seeking refuge in the U.S. through the southern border, often amplified by specific organizations for political gain.
5. Panic as a Product of Widespread Anxieties/Ontological Insecurity (Macro Units)	Tester, K. 2013. [12] Panic.	Panic reflects a pervasive sense of unease, distrust, and a breakdown in cultural mechanisms for interpreting and handling risks	Associated with the post-industrial epoch of the world system, reflecting broad societal-level cultural and political anxieties.	The cow disease panic in Europe serves as a prime example, leading to widespread distrust of scientists and government agencies and pervasive fear across society.

Table 1. Five Approaches to Panic.

Approach to Panic	Exemplar	Key Characteristics	Contexts	Examples
1. Psychological Illness/Medical Condition (Panic Attack)	Gustave Lebon, The Crowd	Palpitations, rapid heart rate, sweating, trembling or shaking, shortness of breath, feeling of choking, and chest pain or discomfort. It is a recognized psychiatric condition, with origins in early psychoanalysis.	Referring to irrationality and individual experiences of intense, acute anxiety.	Close to 1.7% of the U.S. population is estimated to suffer panic attacks annually; women and young people (under 24) are noted to be overrepresented.
2. Mass Hysteria	Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. 1986. [17] The social identity theory of intergroup behavior.	Rapid spread of physical symptoms (e.g., laughter, fainting, rashes, vertigo) among a group without a clear underlying medical cause.	Common in confined social environments such as schools, religious institutions, embassies, offices, and factories. It often involves young people.	Cases include the Salem witch trials (1692–1693), the Tanganyika laughter epidemic (1962), the 2012 mass hysteria in Sri Lanka involving children, and the mysterious illness syndrome among personnel at the American Embassy in Havana.
3. Panic Flight Behaviors of Collectivities	Schultz, Duane. 1964. [18] Panic Behavior.	People responding to real or imagined dangers and impending risks, fleeing from a perceived threatening force.	Types: in closed spaces: Emergency evacuations from building fires. Or in unrestricted/open spaces, such as the European mad cow panic) or military panic.	Examples include evacuations from building fires (e.g., Beverly Hills Supper Club fire; Station Nightclub fire) and historical military events like the First Battle of Manassas (21 July 1861).
4. Moral Panic and Deviance Epidemics	Goode, Erich, 1994 [8]. Moral panics: the social construction of deviance.	Expresses unorganized fears of communities but can be deliberately orchestrated by organizations and “moral entrepreneurs.” They show means-end rationality despite their often-harmful societal effects.	Typically involves lasting institutional memberships and societal-level concerns, differentiating it from the more transient collective behavior of panic flight.	A contemporary example is the moral panic and associated deviance epidemic against people seeking refuge in the U.S. through the southern border, often amplified by specific organizations for political gain.
5. Panic as a Product of Widespread Anxieties/Ontological Insecurity (Macro Units)	Tester, K. 2013. [12] Panic.	Panic reflects a pervasive sense of unease, distrust, and a breakdown in cultural mechanisms for interpreting and handling risks	Associated with the post-industrial epoch of the world system, reflecting broad societal-level cultural and political anxieties.	The cow disease panic in Europe serves as a prime example, leading to widespread distrust of scientists and government agencies and pervasive fear across society.

2. The Collective Behavior (C.B.) Tradition

In the context of the social sciences of disasters, there are several studies that examine panic flight as a form of collective behavior (C.B). The most relevant early contributors include Gustave Le Bon, Robert E. Park, E. L. Quarantelli, Ralph Turner, and Lewis Killian. These influential authors made primary contributions to our understanding of panic. The sequence in which they are listed here traces the start of collective behavior in Europe, its introduction to sociology in the United States, and its more mature phase in the 1980s. Also mentioned below are other prominent contemporary writers, including Herbert Blumer, N. Smelser, John Lofland, Clark McPhail, John Drury and J. D. Sime. We now turn to two of the field’s founding figures, a European and an American. Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) was a controversial European author reacting during the late 19th and the first decades of the 20th century against democracy and the labor movement. Le Bon’s dictum about the mental unity of the crowd, now superseded (McPhail,1991) [19], emphasized the importance of the transformation of individual identity into a shared collective identity that he presumed came about by processes of suggestibility, contagion, and regression, which incapacitated the individual to engage in reasoned action. Le Bon conceptualized the crowd sui generis as an emergent collective behavior form, never discussing the panic flight as such but subsuming all forms of C.B. into the crowd as the prototypical configuration, in his well-known monograph entitled “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1895, free from gutenberg.org). For Le Bon, the crowd’s instantiation occurs as people converge to specific places and imitate others’ behaviors at these sites through contagion mechanisms, which diffuse into a shared and unitary mental state among the crowd’s members. Le Bon claimed that crowd members lost their cognitive abilities and individuality. Instead, people adopted a shared mental and emotional state that reflected their gender, race, and national character: people in crowds experienced high emotion, were highly suggestible to others’ ideas, and did not act rationally. Other contemporary European intellectuals adhered to an extent to Le Bon’s aphorisms, among them, José Ortega y Gasset in his monograph “La rebelión de las masas” (1929) and Sigmund Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1922). Notwithstanding his continued approval by the reading public, the specialty’s subsequent writings have not been kind to these ideas. Critics point out that high emotion does not eclipse the ability to reason (Lofland, 1993) [20]. Experiencing a great deal of emotion in specific cases is highly rational, for example, fleeing when a building fire threatens people’s survival. People’s prior understandings and interests mediate the acceptance of suggestions: they do not act upon all suggestions. Furthermore, the findings of numerous empirical studies have supported neither his assumptions about the homogeneity of participants’ experiences in instances of C.B. nor that crowd members regress to shared racial, gender, and national identities. Nowadays, these claims are racist, sexist, and ethnocentric.

During the heyday of the University of Chicago’s sociology department, Robert E. Park (1864–1944), an American sociologist who obtained his doctorate from Heidelberg in 1904, became one of the department’s leading figures and a public intellectual. His dissertation (entitled “Crowd and Public: A methodological and sociological study” and the 1924 monograph “Introduction to the Science of Sociology” (with Ernest Burgess) introduced collective behavior to sociology in the United States. Park made a felicitous distinction between the crowd and the public, recognizing the importance of facts and reasoned discussion in the latter (237), and employed multiple criteria to distinguish the nature of collective behavior: it marks the disruption of established routine, challenging tradition, and it is the process of solving the persistent problems within the existing institutions. Further, it is the means through which society evolves and gradually adjusts itself more effectively to the ever-emerging problems challenging it, leading to the creation of new institutions more capable of solving the problems that individuals face. This forming and reforming of society is a permanent process of conflict and resolution (Turner, 1967, [21]. While Park’s contributions to collective behavior are many, traces of Le Bon’s ideas are also apparent in some of his writings (for the importance of imitation in crowds, see Park and Burgess (1924, pp. 18; 632, [22]); see also the importance they attributed to the suggestions of the leader (p. 237). Park is inconsistent: he accepts much of Le Bon’s negative views of the participants in instances of C.B., even as he assigns to collective behavior a beneficial effect in the evolution of modern societies. His ambivalence makes it unclear how he could logically derive from a situation of social unrest marked by behavioral and psychological retrogression at the individual level, a functional, positive effect of the same instance of social unrest at the societal level. One of his most controversial hypotheses is the notion that circular rather than symbolic interaction typifies collective behavior, in which sympathetic responses among the people involved “implies the existence in A of an attitude of receptivity and suggestibility toward the sentiments and attitude of B and C (Park and Burgess 1924, p. 893) [22]” and has the effect of removing the natural reserves that often exist between persons (p. 789).” A collective sentiment emerges, which is social and the group’s property (p. 34). Contrary to this claim, circular interaction is not a significant feature found by most subsequent empirical studies of C.B. Park coined the concept of unorganized crowds to refer to panic flights and stampedes. These were two borderline forms for which he showed great ambivalence, for he wrote that since the person in a panic or a stampede cannot cooperate with others and instead manifests a desire to protect herself even at the cost of others, then panics are not instances of C.B. (Park and Burgess 1924, p. 876) [22,23] for they lack a common purpose. In passing, Herbert Blumer, the best-known of Park’s students, elaborated on Park’s ideas about collective behavior and panic (McPhail 1989) [24]. His writings on panic belong to the introductory phase of collective behavior in the United States and are analogous to Park’s. He stated that all crowds share familiar feelings or moods, act out the impulses associated with the mood, and show varying degrees of loss of control from average community values and norms. For Blumer, panic is a subtype of the acting crowd: people in panic have outside goals, and are competitive, aggressive, and often self-destructive.

Two other Americans educated at the University of Chicago and both Blumer’s students, Ralph Turner (1919–2014) and Lewis M. Killian (1919–2010), authored an influential monograph entitled “Collective Behavior” (three editions published in 1957, 1972, and 1987 [25] in which they introduced emergent norm theory (ENT). ENT uses a version of Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interaction theory and represents a more current understanding of collective behavior (see McPhail’s summary and criticisms, 1991, Chapter 3) [19]. ENT emphasizes the importance of norms and social relations and posits that C.B. emerges from a normative crisis brought about by a precipitating incident. Depending upon how the participants collectively perceive and interpret the events, it may destroy, neutralize, or not allow for the preexisting normative guidelines, division of labor, power enactment, and other social arrangements to be defined as appropriate guides for action. The precipitating incident creates a sense of uncertainty and urgency, requiring a new, emergent normative structure to guide their behavior and force people to act. Compelled by the crisis to abandon their previously established social relationships and normative guidelines regarding legitimate ways of acting, people engage in C.B. to solve their problems. First, they mill about and offer alternatives to the new situation. They propose cues for appropriate action to others, evaluate their relevant skills regarding the new demands of the situation, and try out alternate schemes before they agree on what to do, which they call a shared emergent norm. The theory assumes the presence of heterogeneous actors with diverse backgrounds, perceptual abilities, and motives. Other assumptions are that people also differ in what they think is going on, how to respond to the crisis, and who is responsible for doing various things. From the perspective of ENT, then, C.B. is produced by social interaction and is rational, normative behavior. The theory postulates that panic flight is a type of crowd in which people enact parallel and competitive lines of action. As mentioned previously, this view of panic is heavily influenced by E. L. Quarantelli’s earlier writings (1954) [26], nowadays referred to as the classic model of panic (see below). Turner and Killian wrote that panics “arise when the members of a collectivity are each trying to obtain an objective whose obtainment is problematic for each of them (p. 81) [25],” and are more likely to occur in situations with a limited number of available exits for which people compete. People lacking adequate information about the threat often perceive their entrapment (such as a blocked or soon-to-be obstructed escape route) as increasing the demand for an immediate competitive response.

According to Quarantelli (1954) [26], panic is a nonsocial behavior. He writes that in panic, “the “ordinary social relationships are disregarded, and pre-existent group action patterns fail to be applied” (269). The hazards are so severe that people ignore social conventions in their search for survival (270). Quarantelli writes that panic flight behavior is nonsocial and non-rational but not antisocial (1975, 9) [27]) and that the nonsocial dimensions of panic behavior are rare and short-lived (14), opining that the “orientation of activity of the (panic flight) participant is highly self-centered, both temporally and psychologically (11).” Their flight continues until people believe they are away from danger (12). Quarantelli’s emphasis on self-centered behavior is like Kurt Lang and Gladys E. Lang’s view of panic as demoralized private behavior in the absence of the pursuit of group goals. This claim, however, is not supported by most studies of flight behavior, which show that people in precipitated encounters during emergency evacuations are deeply concerned with the welfare of others. A related difficulty is that, in the opinion of critics (e.g., Feinberg and Johnson (2001: 270) [28,29], Quarantelli’s stress on individuals’ subjective experiences in his etiological model of panic confuses the nominal and the realist levels of analysis so that individual-level descriptors are used to measure the collective dimensions of the panic flight. This error may partly be due to the analyst not making his choices explicit (but see Wenger, 1980, 215–216) [30]. According to Feinberg and Johnson the definitions that refer to panic as a collective response, sometimes referring to “mass panic” or “group panic”—are unclear as to whether the collective phenomenon is simply an aggregation of individual panic responses or is a property of a collectivity. Feinberg and Johnson also complain that in some instances descriptions of panic flight primarily use individual referents. This confusion generates many difficulties. Smith (1979, 3 [31]; see also Mawson, 2007, 235–245 [6]) mentions the need to keep these levels of analysis separate, while Moessinger (2000, 82) [32] adds that “(t)here is little chance that coordinated activities, and spontaneous organization could be explained by individual choices only.”

Another distinctive approach to studying panic flight is Neil Smelser’s (2011, xxiv; 1963) [33] valued-added theory of collective behavior, a structural-functional sociological perspective. It calls attention to four structural components of social action, e.g., facilities, motivations, norms, and values. Smelser argues that faulty, mythical generalized beliefs, a subtype of the facilities series, block or short-circuit the appropriate functioning among these four components. Panics, the simplest type of collective behavior, are thus dominated by the participants’ hysterical generalized beliefs about the presence of a conjoint deadly threat. They are facilitated by the belief in the presence of hazards, a shared sense of anxiety, and the fear of closing exits. The hysterical generalized belief is a crucial feature of Smelser’s understanding of panics, rendering it as irrational collective behavior.

3. Recent Studies of Crisis Evacuations

The findings of recent empirical studies of the precipitated encounters do not entirely support the views on panic held by Le Bon, Park, Blumer, Turner, Killian, Smelser, and Quarantelli. Their panic model is only partly supported, particularly its assertions of the prevalence of nonsocial and self-centered behaviors among the people involved in mass evacuations. Some of their characterizations of panic flight are at variance with the findings of empirical studies by Anthony R. Mawson, Jonathan Sime, John Drury, and Johnson and Feinberg, among others, who document that crisis evacuations are collective social behavior showing social solidarity. The evacuees do not cease to function as socialized individuals; instead of moving away from danger, they move towards real or perceived sources of safety, thus exhibiting means-end rationality. The following section reviews the available empirical tests of these theoretical claims.

Social science studies of crisis evacuations from buildings examining group-level processes are comparatively infrequent. The chance presence of D. D. Smith (1979) [31] at the Armor Room of the Tower of London during the terrorist explosion of 17 July 1974 allowed him to observe group-level behavior during the impact phase of the bombing and interview the survivors. Immediately after the explosion, 80 people and 21 groups (15 families and six friendship and acquaintance groups) were in the room. Smith reports that twenty individuals acted in panic and another 20 in a confused manner, and that there was panic in six groups in the Armor Room. There were also proselytizing interactions between two of the groups, leading to panic behavior. Most of the group leaders were males, but the incident lacked one. Groups indicated to their members their appropriate response, such as when they needed to stop dashing out of the room. Both institutionalized and emergent norms guided individuals’ behaviors, leading Smith to conclude that the response showed a mix of both types of norms (p. 13).

Sime (1983) [34], studying behavioral response in fire emergencies, hypothesized that human action in evacuations conforms to an affiliative model. He tested it using information from the 1973 Summerland fire and showed that social attachments to other evacuees strongly influenced exit choice, that they tried to search for the familiar in the emergency, and the victims aligned themselves with those they had a prior social connection to try to magnify their safety. Sime concluded that egress behavior is “flight behavior…characterized by the movement toward rather than away from individuals with whom one has close psychological ties…(that) attachment takes precedence over escape behavior… (in) …flight…individuals tend to move away as a group, thus maintaining proximity with attachment objects.” (702). Similarly, John Drury and his collaborators [35] contributed to the social identity tradition by studying processes of social identity change during precipitated encounters, rejecting the viewpoint of irrationality. One of their studies (2008; see also 2005) used information from ninety survivors and 56 witnesses of the July 2005 London bombings to examine the new group formed in the aftermath of this tragedy. They showed that their respondents had a sense of unity among them due to their shared experience during the bombings; helped each other in part because of this feeling of unity; took risks to help other members of the group, including strangers; and felt that after the explosions, they continued to be in danger. These authors proposed “a novel explanation for this evidence of ‘collective resilience,’ based on self-categorization theory, according to which a shared common fate entails a redefinition of self (from ‘me’ to ‘us’) and hence (an) enhanced concern for others in the crowd.” Turner and Killian (1972) [25], Mawson (2007) [6] and Turner et al. [36], also espouse similar theoretical approaches to understanding people’s behavior in these precipitated gatherings, often at odds with the earlier collective behavior writings on panic. Mawson reviewed the mass panic and crisis evacuation literature. He offers a theory of mind, hypothesizing that people have cognitive maps (internal sensorial representations of their interpersonal and physical environments) and that when an external stressor deviates from this cognitive map, it alarms them. People evacuating do not run away from the hazard but instead run towards individuals and places they perceive as sources of psychological support and feelings of safety and wellness; during evacuations, people try to locate other significant people and join them (p. 245). According to this author, the evacuees are escaping from a dangerous situation and moving toward these other places that provide them with a sense of safety (234). Mawson interprets this seeking behavior as an attempt to restore congruency to evacuees’ cognitive maps as they seek what they perceive as familiar and safe places and people. This propensity to self-organization is also evident in Connell’s (2001) [37] detailed content analysis of first-person newspaper accounts of the survivors of the WTC 9/11 evacuations. Connell documented how leaders, victims’ social locations, and increased risk perception impacted the decision to evacuate. Emergent norms operated in the stairways, such as helping behavior, moving in a single file, no talking, and not cutting in line, with evacuees acting as moving human chain conveyors passing information and supplies up and down the stairways.

Johnson studied the 1977 Beverly Hills Supper Club fire (1988 [38,39]; Feinberg and Johnson, 2001) [28,29]. They used information about the emergency egress of 1215 patrons from the Cabaret Room. One hundred sixty-four patrons died. In this incident, there was an emerging threat (fire); warnings to evacuate were given, and people trying to escape briefly encountered a blockage of exits and a dwindling of escape routes as the situation worsened. In a counter-flow produced by locked doors, people engaged in aggressive behaviors such as pushing, jumping over tables, and yelling, as predicted by an earlier set of theoretical assumptions. However, even then, most evacuees were orderly. Helping behavior was more typical, for social norms, values, and affiliations prevented aggressive actions. Johnson and Feinberg (2001) [28,29] documented group-level processes in this fire, writing that “social organization, specifically roles and status relations, endure even during the flight from calamitous fires” (293), and showed that roles and status relations continued during the evacuation from the building. In a finding duplicated by Aguirre (see below), some patrons put themselves in great danger while assisting others in their kinship groups, even returning to the burning building to search for their significant others. In these and other fires the restaurant staff also performed heroic, selfless acts to help their clients.

Even when the evacuation was norm-oriented, it did not mean it was less deadly. Feinberg and Johnson (1994; 2001) [29], see also [28] found that the greater the size of groups, the higher the probability of dying among their group members (r = 0.791). It is a statistical correlation reproduced by other studies without a present-day widely agreed upon explanation; Cornwell (2003) [40] also concluded that the extent of social links among members of the groups in the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire increased their chances of dying and that in bigger groups, people spent more time looking for other group members and in doing so exposed themselves to more significant dangers. Aguirre et al. (1998 [41]; see also Sorensen, 1991 [42]) also showed that group dynamics impacted people’s decision to evacuate the World Trade Center during the first terrorist attack in February 1993. Normative considerations impacted the start of the work groups’ evacuation, and members who knew and cared for others took the longest to start evacuating. Another hypothesis advanced by Benjamin Cornwell (unpublished manuscript; see also Cornwell, 2003 [40]) is that it is not the size but the group’s internal segmentation that determines their differential morbidity.

Aguirre et al. (2011) [43] studied the Station nightclub fire’s evacuation in West Warwick, Rhode Island, in 2003. Very toxic and thick smoke filled the building in under a minute, diminishing visibility and creating a challenging evacuation environment. There were 465 people in the building (also found by Barylick, 2012 [44]). One hundred died, and close to 100 were injured, requiring hospitalization. At the start of the fire, most of the females were waiting for the show to start in front of the dance area, a highly dangerous zone because it was the farthest from the exit doors and windows that could be used to egress t the building. Opposite them were male members of their groups in the bar area. When the fire started, they moved in opposite directions, trying to find each other in a place that quickly became full of deadly smoke. Due to this spatial dispersion, group members in the various locations were closer to different exits from the building that went unused. The building had four exit doors and two windows in the greenhouse and bar areas facing the front. As the fire progressed, the windows were broken and used as exits. Significant crowding occurred on these exit paths. Other confined spaces also had high human densities. The gathering included many intimate social relations. Arranged in increasing levels of intimacy were fifty-four patrons in groups of co-workers; 193 were in groups of friends; 57 were with their dates; 40 were with spouses or family; and 77 were in “multiple groups” (for instance, friends and dating partners). Duplicating earlier findings, higher proportions of intimate relations among the 212 groups present in this fire increased their chances of dying. Groups of people with friends, dates, and kin had the highest percentage of deceased members. The study showed that the greater the average distance between group members at the start of the fire, the higher the proportion of group members who had not visited the nightclub before the incident, and the higher the average length of the groups’ evacuation routes, the higher the proportion of dead group members. The size of the group and the average distance among group members were positively correlated (r = 0.85), as were the size of the groups and chances of dying (r = 0.86). Patrons who were not members of groups took some of the shortest paths to exits and had the lowest death rates. In contrast, the largest groups of four or more members had the highest percentage of deceased members. As mentioned previously, it is probably the case that there is a tendency for members in larger groups to delay evacuating and instead search for members of their groups, so that when they eventually try to exit the building, they are at the back of the patrons’ gridlock in front of the doors and windows and have more difficulty escaping the fire unharmed. It is also the case that large groups traveled through more extended spaces inside the buildings before trying to escape, thus also delaying their exits. There are other unidentified factors associated with group size as well as other unrelated factors that increased the fire risks in the Station incident: the building’s widespread use of highly flammable acoustic foam, the fire’s rapid spread, exits without proper signage, absence of sprinklers, egress routes that were too narrow for multiple people to pass through them, exits blocked by staff, and the low visibility that ensued from the hefty smoke.

Survivors of this fire claimed that they did not panic but that people around them did. However, despite the conditions previously identified in the literature for panic to occur, there was no consistent sign of irrational panic flight in this fire. According to the Rhode Island chief medical officer at the fire (personal correspondence), the victims were mature individuals between 18 and 46 years old without chronic illnesses. None of them was inebriated or under the influence of drugs. In addition, the deceased’s bodies did not show signs of blunt force blows or other violent traces that presumably would occur during a panic when people struggle with each other trying to escape. This finding challenges the claim of widespread aggressive competitive behaviors among those trying to exit the building.

Films of population evacuations fleeing volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and other hazards typically show people in a hurry trying to distance themselves from the dangers that threaten them, displaying rational patterns of behavior that most often do not support the stereotypes associated with irrational panic flight. A case in point is the study of an open space evacuation that examined the departure of hundreds of thousands of people across New York Harbor on 11 September 2001, after the destruction of the twin towers. Kendra and Wachtendorf (2016) [45] emphasized that the ferries, tugboats, and other crafts’ activities that typically operated in the New York harbor formed an emergent operational group that responded to the 9/11 incident. This system helped people cross the bay and return to their homes in New Jersey and elsewhere. Their study shows how this previously unplanned group response took place. Preexisting institutional arrangements adjusted to the new situation, such as the Coast Guard accommodating these new collective activities by temporarily relaxing regulations regarding the appropriate number of passengers per craft. Their study showed the importance of previous social ties among the personnel who worked in the harbor and the adaptations to their work patterns, which made possible an unrehearsed and unplanned but highly effective waterborne evacuation. Despite the potential competition among tens of thousands of would-be WTC evacuees trying to get into crafts to navigate N.Y. Bay, this study indicated the absence of competitive flight panic behavior among them. Another open space evacuation occurred during the 19 September 2017, Mexico City earthquake. This summary comes from an incomplete, preliminary analysis conducted by this author and Dr. Jesus Manuel M. Medrano from the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Mexico D.F., of the hundreds of videos of this disaster available on YouTube. These videos show people running away from the buildings they justifiably feared would collapse. However, acts of violence and aggression are absent, showing that behavior dominated by high emotion is not necessarily irrational or violent. Indeed, only three or four of the hundreds of people in these films showed signs of being overcome with screaming and uncontrollable crying. It is also possible to observe traditional gender role differences and social solidarity among the evacuees. Men acted out the protective role, appealing for calm. They told women near them that the worst of the shaking had passed and there was no cause to worry, while women were more prone to pray, cry, and show fear. The illustrations of cooperation and social solidarity are plentiful. Examples are people spontaneously volunteering to extract pre-teen school children out of a school bus that the falling debris from a collapsed building had damaged and immobilized; small groups of people linking arms and kneeling, perhaps in prayer; people embracing, or taking their turn and helping each other as they moved in the halls and stairs during a building evacuation; and the thousands of people standing near high rise buildings, many of them waiting to find out the whereabouts of their relatives and friends who resided in them, even at the risk of being killed if the buildings collapsed.

In sum, these more recent studies carry on an earlier tradition of scholarship but abandon irrationality and self-centeredness as valuable ways of understanding the collective behavior of people involved in panic flight evacuation (Drabek,1996 [46]; Fahy & Proulx 2009 [47]; Aguirre et al., 2011 [43]). The findings of social science studies of evacuations brought about by natural and human-made disasters and catastrophes indicate that irrational behavior among evacuees is rare. The vast majority behave rationally and empathetically toward others. These studies emphasize the simultaneous presence of emergent and established norms and the continued relevance of the expectations embedded in the statuses and roles played by evacuees. They do not prefer to use the concept of the crowd because of its cultural baggage, instead favoring Erving Goffman’s concept of the precipitated encounter (1963) [48] as well as Goffman’s dramatist approach that examines the restructuring of the topics giving meanings of the occasions bringing about the emergent collective behaviors in these gatherings (Brown & Goldin, 1973, pp. 150–163 [49]). One notable example of this perspective is McPhail’s (1991: 61-102) [19,50] symbolic interactional-behavioral conceptualization and its emphasis on people’s behavior in gatherings engaged in symbolization and the distinct collective forms that are thus created. He uses vocalization, gesturing, and other synchronized movements among the participants, the direction most people face, and the activities they are engaged in to identify close to fifty of what he terms “elementary forms” of collective action. These forms are, to varying extents, emergent types of associations.

In light of these findings, computer scientists and engineers involved in the study of social evacuations should consider including in their simulations the emergent, supra-individual dimensions and the environmental conditions affecting would-be evacuees, such as: a. the availability of exits; b. degree of visibility and likely coordination among the evacuees, c. their access to accurate information and credible warnings; d. the extent of factors creating higher likelihood of danger to the evacuees, such as the sociocultural heterogeneity and demographic density of the gatherings of people participating in the evacuation; size of the evacuating group; the extent to which the people in the gatherings are free of physical disabilities and able to move; the familiarity of the evacuees with the physical environment in which the evacuation will occur; the extent of social and familial relations among those exposed to the hazard and the absence of previous conflicts among them, and the characteristics of the hazard creating the danger to the evacuees, such as the rapidity of the onslaught; availability of trained personnel among the evacuees capable of helping the people impacted by the hazard; and the effectiveness of rescue personnel. Despite first appearances, it is not the individual but the collective and ecological dimensions of social life that need to be included in these studies. Without the incorporation of these often-ignored social organizational dimensions, many computer simulations, e.g., [51,52,53] of these forms of social organizations will continue to be less than entirely useful.

4. Irrationality and Herding in Computer Science

Despite the consistent finding that instances of panic flight seldom impact crisis evacuations and that panic is social and rational rather than irrational in most cases, some authors in engineering and computer science literature examining evacuations from buildings on fire or collapse assume that panic behavior is dominated by irrationality. Another popular analogous concept is herding, which states that people follow the movement of others, disregarding their understanding of what is going on. It is used frequently. Haghani et al. (2019) [54] examined the use of the panic concept in the social and physical sciences and found no agreement on defining panic and irrationality among these scientific communities. Instead, anticipating the present argument, they point out that panic flight and herding continue to be popular concepts used by many scholars in the physical science disciplines. In this vein, it is possible to use a very rough indicator of the extent of the use of this term from a search in SCOPUS that used (as of March 14, 2021, the terms (TITLE-ABS-KEY (building AND evacuation AND computer AND simulation). It found 1580 documents; a quarter of them (401)) included panic. However, the use of panic as nonsocial irrational behavior cannot always be assumed. For an example among many, Wirth and Szabó (2017) [55] used simulation models to study evacuations that are devoid of any discussion or awareness of the social science background of panics.

4.1. Panic and Herding

Helbing et al.’s (2000) [56] prominent social force model of simulated pedestrian and evacuation flows represents humans using the analogy of gases, fluids, and granular flows. They write (p.14) [56], in a close paraphrasing of Gustave Le Bon’s long-discredited crowd transformation hypothesis, that individuals in certain conditions of danger “transfer control over their actions to others, leading to conformity. This herding behavior is, in some sense, irrational, as it often leads to overall bad results.”. Their description of the transition to crowd turbulence in the main overlooks the socio-psychological dimensions involved. Wang (2020) [57] tries to rescue the Helbing et al. social force model by identifying several socio-psychological dimensions embedded in the model’s equations, reinterpreting the original meanings with mixed results. Wang points out that contrary to what was initially stated by Helbing and colleagues, the equations in their model do not “imply any irrational behavior aroused by fear, but (instead) describe a kind of rational mechanics that govern an individual’s motion.” Wang adds that “the general use of the term panic is not essential to the social-force model (4).” This author proposes that “stress, produced by an individual’s interaction with an environment, is a more accurate conceptualization of the social-force model than panic.” Wang also correctly adds that stress is related to the time pressure that is an intrinsic part of any emergency and results from the discrepancies between the person’s psychological needs and the environment as impacted by the hazard’s demands. These stressful outcomes are the fight or flight response and the emergence of conflict or cooperation among the people involved. Less satisfactory is Wang’s treatment of herding, which states (2020, 10) [57] that emergencies bring about time pressures that “weakens the ability of logical thinking and reasoning (making people) more inclined to follow others (such as neighbors) rather than make decisions by themselves.” This assumption is doubtful, for as mentioned earlier in the appraisal of Le Bon’s approach, a good deal of information disproves that people “lose their minds” during emergencies or that emotion is opposite to mean-to-end rational thinking. Nevertheless, the use of the concept of herding continues even when the study results refute the term’s common-sense meaning. Thus, in an otherwise methodologically ingenious and worthwhile study, Mehdi et al.’s (2016) [58] findings show that pedestrians have a higher tendency to follow “their neighbors when stress was high, simply because the neighboring individuals were more numerous due to the increased density level.” However, they add that “herding, therefore, resulted from the crowdedness and not from a change in the individual tendency to imitate neighbors.” Nevertheless, if, as they claim, human density and not imitation of others is involved, then why insist on using herding since by convention it means that irrespective of individuals’ opinions about how to proceed, people will abandon their appraisals about what to do next and instead follow others near them and copy what they do?

Helbing et al.’s social model (2000) [56] posits that the more people move towards a specific goal, the more influence their collective decision will have on a prospective evacuee’s behavior and the more likely she will join them. Nevertheless, the most recent and thorough empirical study that we are aware of, based on a controlled experimental design (Haghani and Sarvi, (2019) [54]; see also [58]) finds that the opposite is the case, for people evacuating prefer to use the exits that attracted fewer people. Haghani and Sarvi find that humans do not tend to imitate the direction of movement of the majority. On the contrary, they tend to avoid the majority’s direction. These authors also find that their high-urgency treatment, associated with higher degrees of stress, did not increase or decrease this avoid-the-majority tendency and write that the number of people in the person’s vicinity amplified the avoid-the-crowd tendency in specific scenarios. If there is uncertainty about what is happening, people are also likely to evacuate away from the majority. Of course, environments that permit only one or a few directions of movement, when high human density renders difficult multiple directional choices, or when high social cohesion makes people feel that they should move in the same direction as their groups, limit choices and make it appear as if people are engaging in herding. A good example is when the very dense numbers of attendees to the Hajj in Saudi Arabia are said to behave in a herd-like fashion [59] even if they have no option other than to follow the dense throng of people surrounding them as they try to complete their pilgrimage, or when they try to survive during the recurrent mass fatality incidents that have taken place in this annual religious gathering. However, these other issues are logically irrelevant to evaluating the explanations of the social force model.

The effects of supra-individual realist dimensions impacting panic flight need much greater attention than they currently receive [60]. For example, writings on panics and herding during evacuations usually ignore (but see Harding et al., 2008) [61] the potential formation of “knots” that immobilize aggregates of people amid collectivities evacuating in buildings and other closed or space-limited environments. These “knots” do not result from individual and group-level volition but represent short-lasting, emergent collective assembles. They are not created by people acting irrationally (panic) and copying what other people do (herding). Nor is high human density sufficient to create these knots, for many examples of dense but well-regulated and organized gatherings exist. The likelihood of their occurrence probably increases in rapidly changing contexts, such as when evacuees become frustrated by blocked exits and unexpected movements occur, for example, when they inadvertently press others who fall to the ground and then others stumble in front of them. They are also formed when people race in different directions, and their paths intersect. Contra-flows in which two or more segments of a collectivity move in opposite directions in straining environments may also bring about the occurrence of these knots, but only if such flows lose their prior coherence (as happened briefly in the evacuation of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City in the aftermath of the terrorist explosion on 19 April 1995). The victims’ location at a fire’s start is the most potent predictor of experiencing the blocking effect (or supra force) produced by these knots. Hypothetically, those in the middle of the space where the evacuation is taking place are most likely to experience it, while the people at the periphery of the evacuating collectivity are least liable to suffer its effects even if they help create the conditions for knots to form. By implication, such knotty subareas will involve only a fraction of the evacuees and the space they use, pointing to the heterogeneity of victims’ experiences. Literature often misconstrues these knots’ effects unknowingly when it folds them into terms such as human avalanches, stampedes, and crowd exuberance, miscomprehending their effects. The resulting misattributions of evacuees presumed irrational behaviors ignore alternative explanations based on poor visibility, insufficient information, or the contextual effects of the immediate environment of the evacuees. They do not help us understand these knots’ effects and the dynamics of the precipitated encounters.

To summarize, the first section of this paper presented five usages of panic in social science literature. It then reviewed how one of these approaches, focused on panic flight, has been understood in the C.B. scholarly tradition, concluding that the classic view of panic is not entirely supported by the results of more recent empirical studies. It examined engineering and computer science literature on evacuations from buildings and indicated that probably less than 20 percent of these studies continue to assume that panic behavior is irrational and then argued that panic and herding are not an accurate description of how collectivities of people in conditions of danger give control over their actions to others. This paper’s next and last section then argues that transdisciplinary research may help solve this incoherence between the social and the physical sciences.

4.2. The Emphasis on Transdisciplinary Collaboration

The continued use of the panic flight and herding concepts in some computer and physical science publications, despite the results of social science studies showing their rarity, is probably due to the traditional divide between the two science traditions. Current social science research efforts typically use multiple methodological approaches, including qualitative methods such as content analysis of documents, observations, life histories, in-depth interviewing, and key informants, as well as quantitative methods such as surveys, random sampling, and statistical techniques. The emphasis is on using multi-methodological designs to take advantage of the relative strengths of these various approaches and increase the validity of the findings while controlling for their known difficulties and the reactive nature of human responses. On the other hand, the physical sciences concentrate on accurate measurements. They are typically dependent on experimental designs and quantitative methodologies, which are seen as “real science,” while only a few of them use qualitative methods. Thus, the continued use of irrationality and herding perspectives may reflect a lack of understanding and trust in the current methodologies used in the social sciences, as well as incredulity about the validity of the findings of this body of studies. However, the traditional understanding of science based on disciplinary silos has not proven optimal in responding to the urgent need to find solutions to the tremendous increases in the costs of the damages produced by disasters worldwide, as documented among others by Munich Rex and the National Center for Education Statistics, which showed that for the United States alone, the cost of natural disasters during 2020 was $2.215 trillion: by 2024, there were 27 individual weather and climate disasters with at least $1 billion in damages, close to the 28 events that occurred in 2023. This high cost is one of the reasons that research efforts in the field of hazards and disasters are moving, particularly in China, Japan, and India, towards novel methodological approaches to the study of risk, disaster, and hazards based on transdisciplinary collaboration (Aguirre and El-Tawil 2020) [62], as well as the methodological integration among the disciplines interested in the study of disasters and crises. New transdisciplinary university curricula, science groups, and research funding agencies actively encourage multidisciplinary research into common interest problems. These changes in scientific practice are marking a new phase in disaster-oriented science disciplines. Figure 1, developed from information collected from SCOPUS (August 13, 2025), documents that interest in this new approach is increasing rapidly in various scientific fields. There were very few publications containing the words disaster, interdisciplinary, or interdisciplinarity in no. 1 below, representing the years 2011 to 2015 (see Figure 1), but this is no longer the case during the 2020s and the most recent year examined (2025). The implications of this change are far-reaching, for the study of disasters is bound to change rapidly and advance very significantly as fields that in the past showed comparatively scant interest in the subject, such as criminology, international relations, geoarchaeology, coastal engineering, mainstream sociology and social and economic development, become centrally concerned with disasters and ways to ameliorate their effects [63].

Relatedly, in a broader acknowledgment of the need for this type of integration, recent writings in the philosophy of science challenge the traditional definition of science and offer a new, broader understanding. Hoyningen-Huene’s (2013) [64] recent contribution contests the traditional understanding of the scientific enterprise, abandoning the effort to identify what constitutes science. Instead, his emphasis is on a broad spectrum of human efforts to make sense of nature and society by examining the extent to which the activity in question is systematic. Instead of defining what science is, Hoyningen-Huene offers ten dimensions of systematicity to compare humanistic, social, and physical science disciplines with dissimilar epistemologies. For example, he compares the extent to which biblical studies and other religious disciplines are systematic relative to social and biological subject areas. Math and physics score very high in their systematicity components, while the social sciences are highly systematic only in some dimensions. It is a new scientific approach that may help clarify the characteristics of different disciplines interested in studying disasters and crises, and it will hopefully encourage fruitful collaboration across disciplines as it becomes the norm.

5. Conclusions

This study argued for the continued relevance of panic as a type of collective behavior for scholars interested in studying social change and disasters. It advanced a new definition of panic to the effect that it is the collective behavior and emergent action of people revolving around new norms and social relations, and impacted by their average human density, cohesion, uncertainty, shared emotions, synchronized behaviors, and size while responding to perceived or actual threats. It then indicated five main ways scholars understand panic: psychological, mass hysteria, moral panic, deviance epidemics, and ontological insecurity. The paper showed the evolution of the understanding of panic behavior among social scientists and their consensus that during emergency evacuations, people continue to exhibit means-end rationality and social solidarity and function as socialized individuals moving towards sources of actual or perceived safety. It documented the continued use of the irrational panic flight and herding model in some computer and physical science publications despite the results of social science studies showing their rarity and conjectured that the disconnect may be due to an erroneous impression of the weakness of the methods used in the social disciplines trying to understand how people behave in disaster situations. This essay then advocated for using a “systematicity” understanding of science, which would facilitate transdisciplinary studies of panic, crises, and emergencies and integrate the social and physical science research groups. Authors, reviewers, and journal editors should work together to minimize these issues. Authors for one should define the term panic when they use it and stop assuming that panic is an inevitable occurrence during disasters and emergency situations without citing any supporting evidence. It is clear to this writer that panic flight is partly an important form of norm-oriented collective action that is rational and worthy of sustained study using transdisciplinary collaboration.