There are also teacher and pupil affiliations in schools, it is common in particular with people in the 'caring' professions to put themselves at risk by staying with a patient. Fire safety management plans should be developed with an understanding of dependencies and affiliations that may exist between occupants of premises. Crowd movement (individuals and in groups) Evacuating premises or an area during a threat of fire can cause individuals and groups to act in an irrational manner, even if the person does not reach a state of panic. It is the irrational nature of the crowd movement that increases the risk of injury from the action of evacuation and can actually increase the risk of becoming injured from the fire itself. It is the fact that crowds will act irrationally that can make the prediction of their actions very difficult, even if following a safe and managed route, elements of the crowd can act in totally dissimilar manners, the two extremes of which are offered as examples: • Some participants in a crowd attempting to escape from a fire will be more likely to see and treat each other as competitors and will then engage in selfish behaviours that hinder the exit of the crowd as a whole (through door blocking, etc.) if they have little sense of group membership with the rest of the crowd. • The opposite of this is where a sense of shared group membership, (or social identity) is high. People will be more likely to show consideration and helping behaviour, which in turn will allow the crowd to move away from the fire threat to exit in a more coordinated and effective manner. Either sets actions are totally based on the individual 'make-up' and their reactions at that time and therefore are subject to inherent variables, it is this variability that underlines the need for evacuating crowds to be “managed”. The following is an extract from previous research and suggests that people in evacuations tend to assist each other more, rather than acting alone: "Collective 'panic', as seen in crushes and the jamming of doors as people compete to escape, has been blamed for deaths at a number of public venues. The research, which is being funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, intends to determine the conditions under which mass evacuation takes the form of collective coordination rather than panic" . "Previous dominant theoretical approaches to emergency mass evacuations have tended to point to irrational 'panic' as a generic response. However, the research evidence suggests that such individualised, personally selfish, and collectively ineffective behaviours are in fact uncommon. Indeed, in many evacuating crowds there is clear evidence of altruism, mutual helping behaviour and effective coordination, even in personally life-threatening situations ". (Ref. The research of Economic and Social Research Council). One theory is that, when people share a social identity, they will be more likely to see the threat to another person as a threat to oneself. Therefore, they may want to help others in danger, even when they are in personal danger themselves.
In a crowd emergency, the greater the social identity between people: • The less pushing or competition for the exits
©SHEilds – All rights reserved FCV 4 JUN 2021
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