Where did the notion of multiple channels and a corroborative environment come from?
A lot of work has been done in Boulder at the National Hazards Research Center, and by Dennis Meliti. The social science shows that people almost never act on the first warning. In order to get people to act, you have to create a corroborative environment. Isn’t it rational to seek corroboration? By multiplying the channels of distribution for a single warning, don’t you subvert this rational skepticism and increase the risk of panic? That’s a fair question, but it is somewhat misguided. No matter how much research is done disproving their assumptions, people insist on believing in panic. Panic actually occurs only in specific circumstances – this is all pretty well understood. Some of the research goes back to the Second World War, when there was attention paid to the behavior of sailors trapped in submarines. The research shows that where there is a dreaded hazard shared equally, panic almost never occurs. Reasoned flight is not panic. When people were running away from the collapse
