Can We Agree on Panic?

This paper intends to review social science studies of emergency evacuations to discuss the difficulties in understanding them as panic and to point out the continued misunderstandings in several computer and engineering science publications when panic is used to model them. The paper first presents five usages of panic in social science literature. It then shows how the conceptualization of one of these approaches on the panic flight, which assumes the prevalence of nonsocial and self-centered behaviors during crisis evacuations, has been transformed by recent studies of emergency evacuations from buildings to show that they are best understood as social behavior in which people exhibit means-end rationality and social solidarity, and as the behavior of collectivities of socialized individuals moving towards sources of actual or perceived safety. The conclusion suggests first that the continued usage of the irrationality formulation by a minority of engineers and computer scientists writing on the topic of emergency evacuation and their use of "herding," or the notion that during dangerous conditions, people follow the actions of others, leading to conformity, is not supported by a majority of findings in the social sciences, and second, that a likely solution to the disconnect between the two science communities is the increasing adoption of transdisciplinary collaborative research designs.