Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (15 page)

One day, Shacham made contact with one of the most dangerous criminals in Jerusalem, a major dealer who had been linked to multiple murders. “He was a psychopath by definition,” says Shacham. After their meeting, the dealer asked him for a ride downtown. Shacham’s cover story was that he worked as a messenger in an office and sold drugs on the side. In the car, the dealer suddenly asked Shacham to show him his office. It was a test. Shacham headed toward the large building where he was supposed to work. He had never been inside. No one there knew him. As he drove, he tried to control his fear. His mind raced through all the possible outcomes, all of them bad. He had no training for this scenario.

When they pulled up to the building, the parking garage was blocked by an electronic gate requiring a code. Next to the gate was a guard. Shacham didn’t know the code. “What am I going to tell him, this guard?” He slowed the car to a stop and paused. Then he flashed his headlights. The guard opened the gate. “It was a miracle.”

Now what? How would he get inside? Where would he go if he did? Shacham had another idea. He stopped the car next to the guard and asked, “Is John inside?” The guard looked bored. “I don’t know. Go inside and check,” he replied. It worked. The dealer in the passenger seat had seen enough. “Let’s go,” he said. Shacham turned the car around. He had passed the test.

There are people whom psychologists call “extreme dreaders”—people who have a tendency to live in a state of heightened anxiety. Then there are people like Shacham. What makes him able to negotiate extreme fear so well? How does he navigate through the fog of deliberation without a map? When I ask him this question, he says it’s not that he doesn’t feel fear; he does, every time. But a calmness resides just adjacent to the fear. “You have to be very cold-blooded,” he says. But what makes someone “cold-blooded”? Is it genetics? Experience? A chemical imbalance? What makes the difference?

The Profile of a Survivor

The answer is out there, I was told by trauma psychologists and other disaster experts in Israel and the United States. But it is slippery. We all have ideas about what we might do in an emergency. But we are probably wrong. There are ways to predict behavior under extreme duress, and they aren’t what you might expect. People who are leaders or basket cases on a normal day at the office aren’t necessarily the same in a crisis.

But before behavior even comes into play, our basic profile can dramatically alter our odds. Our handicaps tend to be the same ones that plague us in normal day-to-day life. If you are very overweight, for example, you will almost certainly have a lower chance of survival in most disasters. In car crashes, we know that heavy people are more likely to die than thin people. That’s partly because very overweight people have more health problems in general. So they have a harder time recovering from any injuries. Their bodies also have more difficulty handling intense heat. For the human heart, the strain of a crisis can be far more deadly than the actual threat. That’s why more firefighters die from heart attacks and strokes than from fires.

There is the cruel reality of physics, too. Overweight people move more slowly and need more space, so they have more trouble escaping. On 9/11, people with low physical abilities were three times as likely to be injured while evacuating the Trade Center. This problem has gotten worse as Americans have gotten bigger. Body fat even changes crowd dynamics. When people walk down a staircase, they sway slightly from side to side, taking up more space than their actual body width. The heavier people are, the slower they move and the more they sway—and the fewer people can fit down a staircase.

Sex matters too. It is far better to be a man in certain disasters, and a woman in others. Men are more likely to be killed by lightning, hurricanes, and fires. Nearly twice as many men die in fires, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. That’s partly because men tend to do more dangerous jobs. But it’s also because men take more risks overall. They are more likely to walk toward smoke and drive through floods. “Women tend to be more cautious,” says Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Research Laboratory at the University of South Carolina. “They are not going to put themselves or their families at risk. They are going to be out of an area before the rains come.”

Remember that equation for dread? It’s different for men and women. Almost every survey ever done on risk perception finds that women worry more about almost everything—from pollution to handguns. On a superficial level, this makes sense. Women are physically weaker, on average, and traditionally more responsible for caring for others. Maybe they should worry more. But when risk expert Paul Slovic tried to explain the gender gap this way, he ran into problems. The stereotype didn’t quite fit. For example, African American
men
worried just as much as women generally did. So unless African American men are born nurturers, nature didn’t entirely explain the difference. Slovic tried other variables. Are women and minorities less educated and so more emotional in their risk assessments? Well, no. When Slovic controlled for education, the sex and race differences persisted. In fact, when he asked scientists who study risk perception for a living to rank hazards, women scientists still tended to worry more than their male counterparts. Maybe women and minorities just have less faith in government authorities. Do they worry more because they don’t trust other people to do it for them? But there again, when the researchers controlled for such attitudes, it didn’t fully explain the worry gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Finer Distinctions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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