Titanic vs. Lusitania: How People Behave in a Disaster

Titanic vs. Lusitania: How People Behave in a Disaster

By Jeffrey Kluger, courtesy of TIME 

It’s hard to remember your manners when you think you’re about to die. The human species may have developed an elaborate social and behavioral code, but we drop it fast when we’re scared enough — as any stampeding mob reveals.

That primal push-pull is at work during wars, natural disasters and any other time our hides are on the line. It was perhaps never more poignantly played out than during the two greatest maritime disasters in history: the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania. A team of behavioral economists from Switzerland and Australia have published a new paper in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that takes an imaginative new look at who survived and who perished aboard the two ships, and what the demographics of death say about how well social norms hold up in a crisis. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)

The Lusitania and the Titanic are often thought of as sister vessels; they in fact belonged to two separate owners, but the error is understandable. Both ships were huge: the Titanic was carrying 2,207 passengers and crew on the night it went down; the Lusitania had 1,949. The mortality figures were even closer, with a 68.7% death rate aboard the Titanic and 67.3% for the Lusitania. What’s more, the ships sank just three years apart — the Titanic was claimed by an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and the Lusitania by a German U-Boat on May 7, 1915. But on the decks and in the passageways and all the other places where people fought for their lives, the vessels’ respective ends played out very differently.

To study those differences, the authors of the PNAS paper — Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich and David Savage and Benno Torgler of Queensland University — combed throughTitanic and Lusitania data to gather the age, gender and ticket class for every passenger aboard, as well as the number of family members traveling with them. They also noted who survived and who didn’t. (See a survival guide to catastrophe.)

With this information in hand, they separated out one key group: all third-class passengers age 35 or older who were traveling with no children. The researchers figured that these were the people who faced the greatest likelihood of death because they were old enough, unfit enough and deep enough below the decks to have a hard time making it to a lifeboat. What’s more, traveling without children may have made them slightly less motivated to struggle…

Read the original story at Phil’s Stock World