The Hillsborough Disaster and Information Cascade
Reference: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19545126
About 30 years ago, the FA Cup Semi-final, one of the most prestigious English soccer football competition, took place in Nottingham on 15 April 1989. Every ticket was sold out, more than 53,000 fans from both Liverpool and Nottingham Forest occupying the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, England. The stadium had overwhelmed with enthusiasm and shouting until a disastrous event struck the stadium. The human crush occurred in the Leppings Lane stand, two standing central pens, which were allocated to Liverpool fans only. Due to an overcrowding of supporters in the central pens of the stand, an unsurpassable disaster in the football history happened at the Hillsborough stadium. Remaining as the worst reported human disaster in the British soccer history, at the Hillsborough disaster, 96 people died and more than 700 people seriously injured. While ostensibly this event seemed inevitable (just bad luck), it could have been prevented as this accident has a very close relationship with the information cascade that we learned in the class.
Information cascade is a situation in which one makes a decision based on choices or observations of other people while disregarding one’s personal information. While information cascade can sometimes drive positive results, the Hillsborough disaster is an extreme case showing how deleterious the effect of information cascade can be. At the Hillsborough incident, most of Liverpool fans behaved alike, carelessly entering the already packed stadium. Even though many of them would have noticed that the standing pens of the stadium are excessively crowded, Liverpool supporters just tried to fit in the stadium because they made decisions based on other people’s (other Liverpool fans) actions. This can also be explained via the herd behavior that is repeatedly observed during a time of danger and terror. According to the herd behavior, in such extreme situations like Hillsborough disaster, people usually stop acting based on individual rationale and become impulsive in actions and thoughtlessly imitating other people’s actions. It explains how people overlooked alternative strategies (perhaps, their logical strategies) to follow the mass evacuation trend. Had anyone been wise and confidently behaved based on his/her coherent decision, such horrible disaster could have been thwarted. The Hillsborough disaster warns people of the potential negative consequences of the information cascade if it completely goes wrong.
Im a Liverpool fan myself, thanks for the post.