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Amanda Ripley is an American author and journalist. Her books include The Unthinkable: Who Survives when Disaster Strikes and High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Amanda Ripley discuss the pitfalls common to many survival scenarios and the psychological tools most helpful in avoiding them; whether the strength of one’s community ties or improvements in forecasting technology are of greater significance in the statistical decrease in deaths from disaster; and why we still haven’t imbibed the most critical lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Your first book was about what happens when there are catastrophes: who survives and why. What is the broader thing that this question tells us about ourselves as humans? What is it that an emergency situation does to human beings?
Amanda Ripley: This all started for me when I by chance kept covering different disasters at Time Magazine, terrorism and hurricanes and wildfires. And I just became the go-to disaster beat reporter for some reason, which I don't recommend, but I noticed that we did a lot of stories about loss and grief and blame and accountability, and those are all important stories. But there was this one kind of story that we never seemed to do—and nor did anyone else—which is what can we learn from the survivors aside from their sadness and anger and grief? Because every single survivor I've ever met, and I have met a lot of them, had things that they wish they had known, things that surprised them about the experience, good and bad, and things that they want the rest of us to know.
And guess what? Survivors want to talk about this too. So it was just this way to ask: how do we get better at this? And instead of relying entirely on experts and officials to figure this out, learn from the millions and millions and millions of Americans who are disaster experts in their own right. And generally, people become much more cooperative, polite, and courteous, almost to a fault, in disasters. So it's very different from rush hour on the freeway. People do not behave the way we expect.
Mounk: So explain that to me, right? Because you might think on a standard model that politeness is a kind of lubricant in society and we all recognize its value and perhaps even its moral status is something desirable. But when it's a question of survival, it seems like a much bigger sacrifice to say “because of my notions of politeness or because of my notions of altruism, my notions of moral obligation, I'm going to do something which may reduce the likelihood that I myself survive.” And yet you're saying that actually, in those situations, that is often how people behave.
Ripley: It's a huge and fascinating mystery, right? Because you're right, it does seem like it should be literally everyone for themselves. But the more you look at it, you start to see there is some logic to it.
Let me give you an example. After the terrorist bombings on the London transit system on July 7th of 2005, which killed 52 people, some of the survivors actually resisted leaving the Tube station. There is this very natural group formation that happens, even with strangers. And people want to stay with their people in these moments. Now, you might ask, why is that? Obviously, leaving the Tube would be a good idea in this situation. The best research I've seen suggests that it's because there is some safety in groups. Humans are social creatures. And if you even look at chimpanzees, they also will, when threatened, gather tightly, form groups, and start to groom each other; they might even embrace. So there is a sense in which banding together could intimidate the enemy.
It can also be helpful if someone in the group knows something that the rest doesn't know. There were many people in the World Trade Center on 9/11 who followed others up to the roof, which was locked, unbeknownst to a lot of people. So it really depends on the wisdom of the crowd that you're in, how helpful this is. But it is very predictable. Everyone in almost every disaster I've looked at, from plane crashes to pandemics to tornadoes, goes through three phases. And the first phase is a really profound period of disbelief, where your brain will try incredible things to talk you out of what's happening. You can lose a lot of time in that phase if you don't have any training or experience with the threat.
The next phase is deliberation, which is when you get really social, and form groups, and look to others for guidance. And people become quite compliant. So if you know something, and you know how to get out of a place, or how to protect yourselves—if you take that leadership role, people will follow you. There have been studies on miners who were in disasters, and they will stay with their groups, even when they think it's a bad idea to go in a certain direction or do a certain thing.
Mounk: I think there's a kind of philosophical question here, right? Where on the one hand, the rational thing to do is to think a lot about disasters and to be prepared for them and to have a game plan and to make sure that you follow all of the guidelines about how much dry food you're supposed to have at home at all times and all of those things. On the other hand, you might say, the likelihood that any one person who lives in an affluent country, certainly in the United States, falling victim to this kind of disaster is very low. And the likelihood that sort of being hyper-vigilant and doing all of this preparation is going to make the difference between whether you survive and die is even lower.
So how do you feel about that? Is it a matter of striking the right balance? How should we think about this?
Ripley: I totally agree. Fixating on a “go bag” and having storage of things, that's fine. You can do that. It's not that interesting to me, and I don't think it's that useful if that's all you do. I definitely think the philosophical approach is the best approach. So for me, there's not a lot of preparation I do unless it's dual-use. So in other words, I'm going to get something positive out of it regardless.
Let me give you an example. One of the things we know for sure is that the health of a community before a disaster is more important to its recovery than the disaster itself, like the facts of the disaster, especially in a rich country like the US. So how much we know and trust each other really, really matters. And this is something that I cannot stress enough. I mean, it is just painfully obvious right now because we're in a low trust moment. But always, the people who will help you, who will save you in a real disaster, are your coworkers, your neighbors, your family members, and strangers sitting next to you on the bus. It is not professional first responders. They are going to take days and days to get to you (if they get to you at all).
The people around you really matter. So what does that mean for preparedness? I will tell you: ever since writing this book, if there's a block party in my neighborhood, I'm going to be there. First, because it is good to have connections with humans, to watch little kids blow bubbles and run around. That is good. And also, I'm getting to know my neighbors better; I know that there's an elderly lady five houses down, that this guy up here has a generator, that this person's a registered nurse. Those are really important things to know. And you need to have those relationships before you need them. And they should be real, not just transactional. But that's the kind of thing that I think is hugely important not just to our present day happiness, but also to recovering from and surviving a disaster.
There's a kind of really interesting paradox, which at first is going to sound scary, but it's going to get hopeful. So bear with me. From 2011 to 2021, 90% of US counties went through a federally-declared disaster. So that means 90% of the population, about 300 million people, lived in or very near a disaster zone. And that's not even including the pandemic, which we know everyone was affected by in some way or another (about half of Americans know someone who died). We know that weather disasters have increased 400% over the past 50 years. So I don't say this to scare people, but more to say that if you haven't been affected by a disaster, you will be, even if it's just severe flooding and storms and a tree falling on your neighbor's roof. That is becoming very, very normal. Many millions of Americans have gotten to be professional at evacuating every year for wildfires, hurricanes. So even if you're not going to die in a disaster, it is good to know what to expect and how to prepare for it.
Now, at the same time, over the past 50 years, when these weather events have gone up 400%, the number of deaths from disasters has dropped by about two-thirds, which is wild. So disasters have gotten more survivable and less disastrous, but all of that progress continuing depends on whether we can trust each other and our institutions, because then all of that progress will not continue and we will regress because a lot of it has to do with forecasting disasters, getting out of the way in the nick of time and trusting people in charge enough to take their advice and take vaccines and that kind of thing.
Mounk: So I think that paradox you point out is really important. I want to discuss that. But in the meantime, I want to sort of keep thinking through the process of disaster. So we're sort of still at step one: something weird is happening, you start off denying it. A lot of the time, denial is actually a good recipe, because it turns out that the fire alarm really is just a drill. But sometimes it's not. Sometimes, it’s the real deal. We're actually facing a disaster in this case. So you're saying that at that point you have deliberation. What does that look like? What's the promise of deliberation? What are the pitfalls?
Ripley: That disbelief and denial phase can be interrupted quickly by the deliberation phase if there's someone around you who knows something. I talk about a woman who was in the World Trade Center on 9/11. And the first plane struck the building just a handful of floors above her. It obliterated four floors immediately. And the whole building lurched violently in a way it never had before. But everything in her body and brain told her it was okay, it was fine, it was nothing, right? And you hear this again and again. Even from pilots whose passenger airplanes are about to go down. So it is important to know, I've noticed this in myself now.
But anyway, at that point, thank God, someone else, one of her coworkers, yelled to get out of the building. And if they hadn't, she is convinced she would have stayed much longer. On average, World Trade Center occupants stayed about five or six minutes before beginning to evacuate. There were a lot of reasons for that, including the fact that many of them heard an order from the Port Authority to stay put, which was the protocol for skyscraper events. But in any case, it's very confusing at that moment and deliberation isn't always gonna serve you well, right? But in this case, in fact, no one I've interviewed who survived from high up in the World Trade Center on that day got out alone. That's just not how it worked. It was a group collective response. There were people who knew where the stairs were. There were people who didn't—a shocking number. Most Trade Center occupants that day did not know where the stairs were, which is a travesty. But the more you know about your environment and how to get down and how long it's going to take, the more you should step into that role. So if you are in an event and you see that people are just kind of frozen, that is very common, probably the most common reaction. And it's not that they're idiots, it's that this is an evolutionary response that all mammals do when they're very frightened and feel trapped. But if someone yells at you with very specific guidance, you will tend to snap out of that stupor.
If you know something, if you are aware of your environment, if you know how to get out of a building or a plane, whatever, it can be very effective, especially in that initial moment, to step into that leadership void and be quite assertive.
Mounk: In the case of the World Trade Center, presumably there weren't that many options and it was obvious that just getting out of a building was the course of action to take if you were going to take action. But there are going to be situations when it's much harder to know what cause of action to take. What does deliberation look like in those situations, and who ends up getting trusted? Is it the people who actually have concrete knowledge who make sense or is it the people who just have high status in that particular community, irrespective of whether they're making the right calls? How often do people end up making the right calls and how often do they end up following a plan that's really just the wrong one to follow?
Ripley: I think the best example of that confusion, that fog of war, is the pandemic. It was very hard to know whom to trust, what to do. I don't know about you, but I found myself sort of vacillating between underreacting or overreacting, going in and out of denial and deliberation over and over. And it's exhausting and it's very tricky to know whom to trust. That said, we know for sure that people cannot survive without trust, that you need trust to get through the day. But it's a question of who and is it wise—and is it based on fear, affinity, and threat, or is it based on some actually sound reasons? All this research has shown very clearly that you need to tell people what you know and what you don't know. You need to tell them over and over again—more words, not fewer. You need to treat them like they are intelligent. Tell them that you're probably going to have to change as you learn new things. But you want to be as consistent as possible, which requires trust. Here's where polarization is the beast that consumes everything. Because as soon as it got politicized, then it became a tug of war: the teachers unions don't want to go back to school because Donald Trump is saying go back to school. I mean, this kind of nonsense, I don't need to tell you, is so diabolical and just causes infinite suffering that we didn't need. We have suffering we need to have and suffering we don't need to have. So that distrust really poisons things from a communication point of view.
Don't assume that you know why people are not masking or they're going to spring break or not taking a vaccine or taking a vaccine. Don't assume that you know. You don't know. And so you have to listen to people. And we have the technology to do this at scale. It is not that hard. And we were not doing it. And we were not treating people with the respect that they deserve at a national level.
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Mounk: So this gets us to where I think the most interesting ground is, I think. Because from the perspective of somebody who reads about a natural catastrophe, of course, it's natural to think, well, how can I survive if something like that happens today? What are the tips and tricks that might help me get through this powerless moment? From a social and political perspective, the more interesting question is, well, how can we set up societies that are collectively resilient to the kind of natural or man-made disasters that we can expect over coming years and decades? And this is where we return to this paradox we pointed out earlier, that the number of disasters that we record has gone up significantly, but the number of deaths from those disasters have actually gone down a lot.
I have two questions about it. One, is this count accurate? But irrespective of that, if the total number of people who have died in these disasters has gone down, clearly we're doing something right. So what is it that our societies have done and learned to prepare ourselves for disasters and increase the number of people who survive them?
Ripley: Let's first talk about what we're doing wrong, which is how we got to this level of frequency, and then what we're doing right, which is how we're getting to a place where disasters are less disastrous. At least from a survivability point of view, I am pretty confident that these stats are reliable. The definition has been fairly consistent over time. And so the reason they've gone up to the degree that they have is because we've put much more of our civilization at risk by developing on coastlines, stripping away natural buffer zones that used to protect us from weather. So we see the same weather, the same kind of hurricane, doing much more damage than it did in the past. Also, we're seeing from climate change that higher temperatures lead to drought, which then leads to wildfires. You get into these kinds of vicious cycles of disasters. And then after the fires die out, you get this barren landscape, which increases the risk of flooding and mudslides. Some of these things are interacting, which is part of why this is what we're seeing.
Now, what are we doing right? Humans have gotten dramatically better at working together to predict disasters and get out of harm's way just in the nick of time, which is why disasters have gotten less deadly. So for example, in 1990, the National Hurricane Center could predict the path of a hurricane only about 24 hours in advance. Now, they can do it 72 hours beforehand. And the same with forecasts in general. Forecasts have gotten wildly better further out than they used to be. But all of these warnings about tsunamis, wildfires, floods only work if they are trusted and trustworthy. So this is where all of these inventions and improvements in technology only matter if we can collaborate. And we have not collaborated well when it comes to development and climate change.
Mounk: All of this sounds plausible to me, but I have one cause for confusion, which is that it seems to me a lot of what is keeping us safe in these disasters is technology. It is presumably things like building codes and the technology to build houses that will withstand certain kinds of weather events in a way that was not possible in the past. There's a really instructive set of comparisons between the same hurricanes at similar strengths hitting Florida and some of the Central American or Caribbean islands, and they end up just killing way, way more people in the Caribbean or in Central America because these are much poorer societies.
So all of those answers actually seem to be about technology, policy, and so on. But a lot of the emphasis you had in the first part of the conversation was more about sort of the quality of community, how well you know your neighbors, how much you can trust each other. But those don't seem to be things that have gotten better over the last 30 years. Perhaps they have, and that's a good news story that we're missing. But intuitively, I would have said, well, those things have actually gotten worse. So if they're really what's most important, then more people should be dying from these disasters than in the past.
Ripley: I think there are many different dynamics happening at once. So it's a little bit hard to separate them out. Certainly, you're hitting on the central kind of tragedy of all of this, that while disasters have killed fewer people, we have got way too many disasters happening and way too many deaths and harm is happening already. And given this technology, where might we be if we had more connection and trust? But I think the reality is there were, last year, 28 major weather and climate disasters costing a total of $93 billion. So this is a recurring nightmare for millions and millions of people, not to mention a massive tax on our economy and well-being. So I don't mean to suggest that because survivability has increased that everything is good. We could be doing much, much better if we had kept up. So we have technology and sort of forecasting and expertise increasing, but I don’t think this social piece, sociological piece has kept up—and that's not the fault of regular people, by the way. We've talked about what individual people can do—knowing their neighbors, knowing where they are, like having a sense of how to get out of places and just being more prepared for how your brain will react. But what can leaders do? What can emergency planners do? What they can do is enlist regular people in their cause and listen to the public because they are your biggest ally and you have to build trust and advance and level with them in the moment.
So as we've built ever more impressive vaccines and stronger buildings and warning systems, we are doing less and less to build better survivors.
Mounk: As a final question, you said rightly that we don't seem to have learned the lesson from the pandemic, that in a weird way this was this all-consuming event with huge stakes and many, many millions of people who died. And then we kind of memory-holed it immediately. We memory-holed the significant mistakes that public authorities made. But we also memory-holed some of the lessons for what we might be able to do. In fact, I think in some ways we may be worse off when the next pandemic comes. Even if it turned out to be much more rational in the next pandemic, I think there would be immense resistance to going through all of those protocols again. So what steps should we take now in order to actually prepare for the next pandemic or perhaps to avoid the next pandemic happening entirely?
Ripley: One question that government officials and people who run schools and hospitals should be asking the public all the time is, what can we do to earn your trust? And there are going to be different answers for different people in different places, but I don't see that happening enough. Maybe I'm missing it (if so, please let me know, because I'd love to write about it). But that is something that we can do more of right now.
We see with hurricanes that people tend to refer to their experience from the last hurricane in deciding whether to evacuate for the next hurricane—very understandably, even if, in fact, things have changed. And you should not assume anything about the next virus. There's been no national conversation about this here. And that's not true in every country. The UK had public hearings about this that were relatively serious, and other countries did as well. So I think having a national reckoning that isn't about blame or rage or vengeance, but is more about getting better for the next time would be great.
And I think the media could do a better job of covering those stories as well. In every city and every town and every state, there were outliers, standouts, leaders, institutions that performed really well and ones that performed terribly. And so that is something that I think, obviously there's an exhaustion from it. Nobody wants to think about it, because it just went on and on. But eventually, hopefully soon, we can put on our big girl pants and ask what went wrong, what went right and how we can do better.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Amanda discuss her last book, High Conflict; why so many conflicts—from gang wars to homeowners association feuds—are intractable; what it takes to break out of high conflict; and how these lessons should inform Americans during a deeply polarized election season. This discussion is reserved for paying members...
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