Plane crash
The Catastrophe Psychology: Why Do You Grab Your Bag When Running Off a Burning Plane? (link to NYTimes article on Aeroflot Jetliner Crash, 2019)
I was wondering if there is a name for this kind of phenomena, where individuals prioritize retrieving their belongings during a life-threatening situation like an airplane emergency evacuation. It can be attributed to several psychological factors, but it doesn't have a specific, widely recognized name in psychology. However, it can be understood through various psychological concepts:
Self-Preservation Instinct: This behavior aligns with the instinctual drive for self-preservation, where individuals prioritize their own survival, sometimes even at the expense of others, when faced with imminent danger.
Fight-or-Flight Response: The fight-or-flight response is a physiological reaction to a perceived threat or danger. In such situations, people may experience heightened stress and make impulsive decisions, which could include grabbing personal belongings.
Loss Aversion: Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that makes people value avoiding losses more than acquiring gains. In this context, passengers may retrieve their belongings because they fear losing valuable possessions.
Disorientation and Panic: In high-stress situations like emergencies, individuals can become disoriented and panicked, leading to irrational actions, such as focusing on personal items.
Normalcy Bias: This bias can cause people to underestimate the severity of a situation or believe that things will return to normal, leading them to take actions that might seem inappropriate in hindsight, like collecting belongings during an evacuation.
Sunk Cost Fallacy: People may also engage in this behavior due to the sunk cost fallacy, where they feel compelled to continue an action because they've already invested time or effort into it, even if it's no longer rational (e.g., retrieving luggage they've already grabbed).
This is 05 Flow of images that had been on my mind recently.
