Cascades and Bomb Threats: Student Panic in the Wake of Violence
Disclaimer: I recognize that I am looking at this event with hindsight on my side, and realize that the situation is far more complicated than I make it out to be. I am simply comparing my experiences and the articles I have read online to our class.
This Sunday, students on Cornell’s Ithaca campus were sent into a frenzy regarding rumors of bomb and shooting threats. As a student at Cornell myself, I experienced first hand the way in which those around me and I reacted to the threats of violence mere yards away from where we were studying.
Due to a lack of information provided by Cornell’s administration, students resorted to places like Reddit, where “rumors swirled online and among Cornellians huddled together.” Regardless of our reactions to the texts on our phones, after an hour of speculation on the internet and with our peers, we all experienced one feeling in common: panic.
This spread feeling could in part be the result of our own speculation with our peers online, as we watched one person panic, and then another person panic, and once ten people in our vicinity were panicking, we began to panic. Similar to the discussion of cascades in the textbook, where the text describes a study where the experimenters were looking at the response to passerby depending on the number of people standing in the street looking at the sky. With one person looking up, only “a few passerby stopped.” When five people were staring up at the sky, more passerby stopped, but “most still ignored them.” Finally, when fifteen people were standing in the street, looking up at the sky, the experimenters found that “45% of passerby stopped and also stared up into the sky” (484, Kleinberg and Easley). The textbook describes this sociological phenomenon as a cascade, demonstrating how reliant many of us are on the actions of others to determine our own.
Connecting this study back to my own experience in Olin library, I watched as two students ran out of the library, but no one else seemed to move. When four or five students left, more students began to move, and when finally many of us received the official alert to leave Goldwin Smith Hall, even though we were all in Olin library and would not receive a notification to leave central campus for another 45 minutes, at least half of the students in my vicinity left the building (including myself), many of us panicking as we checked online speculation on Reddit and Twitter. In essence, the more times we checked online spaces and spoke with each other, the more students left the buildings on central campus, the more our fear and panic increased.
This experience used both our private information, such as news of previous false bombing threats at Yale and Ohio University(https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Officials-Bomb-threat-at-Yale-University-prompts-16596033.php, https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/bomb-threat-at-ohio-university-deemed-not-credible-threat-made-other-universities-across-the-country/530-c7fb8189-9561-4385-9ada-a16c92912f2a), and the public information of those around us speculating in online and real life spaces, and the vague and alarming texts which gave us no information about what the danger even was. In a way, we were making a decision whether to Accept or Reject (panic or not to panic), based off our own private High or Low signals (the information we had about past bomb threats), and the actions of the students who panic or not panic before us. Once more and more students began to panic, it became clear that regardless if we had information about previous bomb threats at Yale or Ohio, it seemed logical to panic, starting a cascade of Accepting the state of the world (that you should panic). If everyone else was panicking, the concept of cascades entail, then there must be private information that they have which trump your own private information, and thus it is perfectly reasonable to be afraid for your safety and the safety of your friends even if you have information about previous bomb threats which suggest the contrary.
Sources:
Course Textbook
After Five Hours of Waiting, Campus Sighs in Relief After Bomb Threat Lifts
https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/bomb-threat-at-ohio-university-deemed-not-credible-threat-made-other-universities-across-the-country/530-c7fb8189-9561-4385-9ada-a16c92912f2a
https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Officials-Bomb-threat-at-Yale-University-prompts-16596033.php