Cohesion in calamity; why tough times bind us 
together 

David Winsborough 
Winsborough Limited 

From the earth shaken ruin that was the Christchurch CBD emerged humbling 
reminders of how extraordinary humans can be in the face of devastation and 
disaster. On television one Christchurch nurse described her two memories of the 
immediate aftermath. “The carnage was beyond anything I’d seen” she said. “But 
what I’ll always remember was the way we worked so closely and smoothly despite 
the conditions. People came through those doors in waves and we worked non-stop 
for days. I looked up and nurses who had left the hospital years before were right 
back in their places and working as a team . . .” 

While we might expect the highly trained teams of nurses and urban search and 
rescue professionals to work with seamless efficiency, the spontaneous coordination 
amongst strangers was more remarkable. In the hours after the quake strangers 
formed teams to shift rubble, to ferry injured survivors to hospital, to bring in 
blankets and to supply rescue crews with refreshments. Why should this be? Why 
do some people in dangerous situations help others even at increased risk to 
themselves? 

Actually, this behaviour in crisis doesn’t surprise us. After all, as a species we have 
evolved over 2.5 million years to thrive together rather than alone. Group living 
allowed our ancestors to cope with an environment well supplied with predators, 
but poorly supplied with food and water. Collective foraging and hunting, group 



defences and communal parenting provided a buffer against external threats; 
cooperation is literally in our DNA. 

In fact adversity and crisis probably trigger collective cooperative responses 
automatically, as long as three conditions have been met. 

The first condition that creates cohesion and coordination is termed shared fate. 
Living through a genuinely life threatening event with others produces the strong 
shared identity felt by survivors. Surviving the Christchurch the earthquake ensures 
you know, deeply and viscerally, what others have also gone through. It produces a 
sense of connection and kinship; meeting a stranger who lived through the same 
traumatic event as you even years later triggers instant camaraderie and a felt 
emotional bond. 

The second is the presence of a clear and present need to act. Under pressure and 
stress most humans experience attentional narrowing – we close out peripheral 
concerns and focus on the source of danger, accompanied by the urge to physically 
act. Humans also seem naturally to respond to tasks that require collective action – 
laboratory studies show that given even a meaningless task without reward 
strangers will begin to coordinate and work towards a shared goal. 

The third condition is the lessening of one’s own identity and the strengthening 
identification with the group as a whole. People begin to talk in the collective (“we” 
and “us”) and researchi from other disasters shows that helping behaviours 
outweigh personal selfishness more than 2:1. For groups who already have a shared 
identity (in this case the parochial Canterbury local identity) these effects seem even 
stronger. Seeing others cooperating and helping is contagious; people fall into line 
and cooperate. Most people remain surprisingly calm and ordered in the crisis. 
Anecdotal reports that norms of politeness and deference are even enhanced: on 



the stairwells of the World Trade Centre people didn’t push and shove, and instead 
took the time to say “after you”. 

Are there lessons about human bonding and teamworking from calamities that apply 
in other spheres of life? 

In clear-cut crises these elements of human psychology may seem obvious. Yet the 
underlying dynamics are in play in all social settings and help explain why tyrants 
thrive but nearly always fall, and why it is hard to sustain tight team cohesion in 
ordinary work over any length of time. 

Warlords, dictators and tyrants naturally exploit the human tendency to defer to 
authority and act collectively in crises. Robert Mugabe, who stole the 2008 election 
in Zimbabwe, first came to power by uniting the disenfranchised country behind an 
overthrow of a white dominated government. Thirty one years later he remains in 
dictatorial and ruinous power by repeatedly conjuring the threat of foreign 
intervention to rally his supporters. Yet Mugabe – as with ex-president Mubarak in 
Egypt and ex-president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia – long ago found that 
sustaining mass cohesion against an invented, external threat is impossible. 
Inevitably tyrants like Mugabe must pay off cronies with wealth looted from the 
diamond mines and deploy violent coercion to suppress opposition. But tyrants 
rarely last for ever; in spectacular examples like Egypt, Tunisia or Georgia, people will 
throw them out. 

This also explains why workplace teams will bond when a project runs off the rails 
and needs rescuing, or when a free-riding co-worker is finally sacked. A common 
problem, or a shared enemy, creates cohesion. Yet sustaining it beyond the 
immediate crisis may be all but impossible. 



Paramedic teams experience a well-known phenomenon called ‘the slump’ after the 
sustained effort of a rescue is over. Trying to sustain high levels of coordination 
leads to the emergence of negative group behaviour – colleagues begin to turn 
inwards and snipe at each other, grow less tolerant and begin to assert their 
individual needs over the group. A crisis bonds, but it does not sustain. 

Managers and leades should begin to think about working in waves of effort. 
Generating momentum and effort as milestones and deadlines emerge is easier than 
trying to push it all the time. Allowing teams to slacken and regroup afterwards is 
essential. 
Teams can learn from the nurses and urban search and rescue crews. When not 
deployed they invest time in training, and in improving individual skill. Managers 
should take time in non-crisis or off-peak work times to build individual competence 
and practice teamworking. 

Managers should also reflect on how the three elements of shared fate, a need to 
act and group identity can be usefully employed to produce cohesion. 

But remember that humans, for the most part don’t need leadership to perform 
most of the tasks of daily life. In the right circumstances—when collective action 
needs to be coordinated and such coordination is beneficial to the group—people 
effortlessly adopt leader-follower patterns and cooperate. The rest of the time they 
will prefer looser bonds and to operate more individualistically. 

i Drury, J., Cocking C. & Reicher, S. Everyone for themselves? A comparative study 
of crowd solidarity among emergency survivors. British Journal of Social Psychology (2008), 00, 1–21