Researchers find survival instinct trumps good manners

Mar 8, 2010, 4:51 GMT

Sydney - You are on a boat that is sinking. Do you disobey the crew and fight your way onto a lifeboat, or follow their orders and wait your turn in the queue?

Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia say that whether you let the instinct for survival take over or think of the good of the greatest number might depend as much on how fast the vessel is sinking as it does on your personality.

Brisbane-based behavioural economists Benno Torgler and David Savage based their hypothesis on comparing and contrasting sinkings that took place a couple of years apart and where the survival rate, age, proportion of women and classes of passenger were almost identical.

They looked at the Titanic, which went down in the Atlantic in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, and the Lusitania, which foundered after being torpedoed by a German submarine off the Irish coast in 1915.

They picked these two disasters because they were very similar and because the manifests and survivor lists were accurate. 'The similarities between the two vessels are uncanny,' Savage said.

On the Titanic, women and children really were allowed off first. Consequently, their rate of survival was twice that of the men.

'A lot of the testimony in the enquiries is that the menfolk ushered their women up to the boat deck, got them onto a lifeboat, then stood back and let other women get onto the lifeboat,' Savage said. 'If you had a child in tow that made you 20-per-cent more likely to survive.'

By contrast, the notion of survival of the fittest held true on the Lusitania.

'Those with the best chance of survival were aged 16 to 35, with little difference between genders - and first-class passengers actually fared worse,' said Torgler. 'This suggests that competition was the strongest driving factor influencing survival.'

The big difference between the sinkings - and a likely explanation of the marked difference in behaviour - was that the Titanic was afloat for 2 hours and 40 minutes after it was struck, whereas the Lusitania was gone in 18 minutes.

'The shortened disaster time favoured instinctive fight-or-flight behaviour, whereas the lengthier disaster led to the appearance of social norms,' Torgler said. 'We know the first is driven by the rush of adrenaline to the brain, but we don't know exactly when the altruistic behaviour takes over.'