Interest

In the field of crisis management, there is some talk of risk communication and some of crisis communication. In some documents or reports, the terms are used as synonyms for each other or are not clearly differentiated. But is this actually the case? The extent to which the term risk communication needs to be distinguished from the term crisis communication depends on the model being considered. Depending on the model, a clear differentiation may not be possible, but it must be said in advance that risk communication and crisis communication are not the same thing, so using the terms as synonyms is not correct. First of all, it should be clarified what the respective terms are: Risk communication is understood as a general warning that the occurrence of an event is basically possible. Risk communication takes place regardless of the occasion and is intended to prepare people for [...]

If a group of people finds itself in an overwhelming situation, i.e. a situation where the challenge exceeds the available resources, the whole group may take refuge in a kind of cognitive emergency reaction. What a cognitive emergency reaction is, you can read in detail in the previous blog article Cognitive emergency response - the flight into familiar action - IUGITAS. However, here is a brief summary: a cognitive emergency response is a dysfunctional protective mechanism in which everything is done to maintain a sense of competence and self-worth. Often, inappropriately, the familiar and routinized behaviors are continued in order to maintain an apparent sense of competence to act as well as control. When we talk about groupthink, we are not talking about swarm intelligence, but rather about the exact opposite of it. Groupthink does not mean that intelligent decisions are made on the basis of team collaboration, [...]

The Love Parade in Düsseldorf, tragedies in Mecca, 9/11 and, as the latest example, the Lag Baomer festival at Meron Mountain in Israel. The media quickly speak of a mass panic when many people come together, there are bottlenecks or obstacles and the need to regain freedom of breath and movement or people feel a strong fear and try to flee from a situation. All this is mostly in combination with injured or even dead people. In Meron, there was talk of mass panic quickly after the incident occurred. During the celebration at the sanctuary of Mount Meron, 45 people died and quite a few were injured. This is the largest civil disaster in the history of Israel. According to initial findings, the disaster was triggered by a situation on a sloping ramp where people started to fall. Due to the density, a kind of domino effect was [...]