Some evidence against a bias is that groups don’t seem to be consistently less concerned about risk than individuals, in the wild. For instance, ‘panics’ are a thing I often hear that it would be bad to start.
I suspect this too is somewhat based on myths. In 2020, I briefly investigated how much mass panic/hysteria you might expect to see in historical pandemics, and how bad they were, and the stylized answer is “not much, and not often, except maybe with cholera.”
Of course a) I didn’t investigate as closely as I could have, and b) I’m not sure how well this could generalize from pandemics to other events in human history. But overall I updated somewhat against mass panics being a particularly frequent or salient feature of the social territory during disasters, given that my prior evidence for their frequency/intensity wasn’t very strong to begin with.
(I also have a just-so story that believing in mass panics is awfully convenient for authority figures to justify their authority, but upon reflection I’m not sure how much I believe this story)
I suspect this too is somewhat based on myths. In 2020, I briefly investigated how much mass panic/hysteria you might expect to see in historical pandemics, and how bad they were, and the stylized answer is “not much, and not often, except maybe with cholera.”
Of course a) I didn’t investigate as closely as I could have, and b) I’m not sure how well this could generalize from pandemics to other events in human history. But overall I updated somewhat against mass panics being a particularly frequent or salient feature of the social territory during disasters, given that my prior evidence for their frequency/intensity wasn’t very strong to begin with.
(I also have a just-so story that believing in mass panics is awfully convenient for authority figures to justify their authority, but upon reflection I’m not sure how much I believe this story)