Explaining a collective false alarm: Context and cognition in the Oxford Street crowd flight incident

Abstract

Collective false alarms can cause significant disruption, costly emergency response, and distress. Yet an adequate psychological explanation for these incidents is lacking. We interviewed 39 participants and analysed multiple secondary data sources from the 2017 false alarm in Oxford Street, UK, to develop a new explanation of this phenomenon. There was evidence that awareness of recent collectively self-relevant terrorist attacks lowered the threshold for interpreting ambiguous signals as signs of hostile threat. Interviewees also fled and hid after inferring threats from others’ fear and flight responses. Cooperative behaviour was sporadic and was associated with an emergent sense of groupness that occurred in limited locations. The analysis suggests that crowd behaviour in false alarms has more in common with the meaningful behaviour typically found in real emergencies than with the image of uncontrolled ‘mass panic’ portrayed in news media. These findings have implications for policy in preparing the public for terrorist attacks.