Nature and determinants of social actions during a mass shooting

Abstract

If collective reactions to danger have long been portrayed as antisocial and self-preservative, research has shown that prosociality is maintained and sometimes fostered in life-threatening circumstances. In this research, we interviewed 32 survivors of the attacks at ‘Le Bataclan’ (on the evening of 13-11-2015 in Paris, France) with the aims of offering a typology of social behaviors undertaken in the context of a mass shooting in a close environment, and examining the situational factors favoring the emergence of socially supportive behaviors among hostages. Consistent with previous findings, we found that socially supportive behaviors were frequently reported, and they were more common than socially unsupportive behaviors in the narratives of the respondents. We also found that the occurrence of socially supportive actions is dependent on key contextual factors, namely the impossibility to egress, increased distance and/or minimal protection from the source of danger, and emotional fusion with other crowd members. Finally, although supportive behaviors can be served by a variety of motives (individualistic, cooperative or altruistic), we found that supportive actions were more often described by respondents as reflecting genuine altruism, i.e. involving a cost to oneself at the benefit of others. Those results bring evidence of the maintenance of socially supportive actions in the context of a mass shooting. It also calls for establishing a clear-cut distinction between the social strategies (asocial, socially supportive, or socially unsupportive) and the psychological motivations underlying them (individualism, cooperation or genuine altruism) in future research.

A Lost Idea in Psychology: Observation as Starting Point for the Scientific Investigation of Human Behavior

“…Another option we can suggest, more adapted to behaviors that are not directly observable, is the analysis of the traces of these real behaviors found in official statistics or big data (Adam-Troian et al, 2022;Harlow & Oswald, 2016;Peters et al, 2021). A third option, the most indirect one discussed here, consists in conducting descriptive exploratory studies, preliminary surveys, interviews, or collecting testimonies (e.g., Dezecache et al, 2021). Modern advances in both digital technologies and portable video recording systems make it easier to collect observations from any given field a researcher is willing to operate in.…”

The Emergency of Prosociality: a developmental perspective on altruism and human prosocial behavior in the face of disaster

“…Consequently, research takes place in a variety of timeframes within a crisis, from a handful of hours to months or even years for other situations. Whereas some studies focus extensively on behavior, or the report thereof, in the midst of an emergency (Dezecache, Martin, et al, 2020), others analyze the immediate aftermath of events, or consequences ranging in the weeks to years after a traumatic event (Masten & Osofsky, 2010).…”

“…On a final and more semantic note, the concept of prosociality itself is used differently in various fields. If prosociality is defined as any behavior that is advantageous to another individual, whether or not the behavior is also advantageous to the agent (i.e., whether it is altruistic or cooperative, see Dezecache, Martin, et al, 2020) may affect which behaviors are considered by researchers. A behavior that is immediately advantageous to a given recipient may also end up being detrimental in the longer run, making prosociality difficult to define precisely across fields of research.…”

“…Alternatively, actions considered to be prosocial may in fact be strategies that also maximize one's own immediate benefits, either because social contact is in itself reassuring and a primitive need (Dezecache et al, 2017;Dezecache, Frith, et al, 2020;Mawson, 2005Mawson, , 2017 or because we flexibly adjust behavior as the function of contextual features and use prosocial strategies when they are immediately more profitable than non-social or self-preservative ones (e.g. possible escape, see Dezecache, Martin, et al, 2020; but see also Bartolucci et al, 2021).…”

“…Two recent examples from the literature can be used to highlight the reality of these phenomena in highly life-threatening situations. In a recent study (Dezecache, Martin, et al, 2020), 32 semidirected interviews were conducted with survivors from the mass shooting at Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, in November 2015. On that day, three terrorists armed with rifles entered the concert hall and shot at the 1,500 spectators, before taking hostages.…”