The 'Petrol Panic' - playing with our psychology?

The last couple of weeks have seen considerable worry about the possibility of approaching fuel tanker strikes. Organised by the trade union Unite, the strike is over disputed issues on safety and 'terms and conditions'. While the media is full to to the brim with hyperbole and hysteria one BBC article answers the factual issues at hand.

But the problem here is not the strike at all. A shortage of petrol would indeed be incredibly inconvenient and in some cases unpleasant, but contingency plans lie in place both to provide petrol to those members of society fulfilling roles in vital services, and even to intensively train the army and navy to take the place of striking tanker drivers. So why the worry?

Psychologeek has been exceedingly careful to avoid words such as 'crisis', 'panic' and 'insanity'. The problem is, the media have widely adopted these words. Psychologeek searched the web for articles to use as an example and found almost every source began with 'strikes have sparked panic buying this week'. This article is especially extreme, repeatedly including 'madness', 'chaos' and the need to bring back 'sanity'. But where did such extreme reactions come from?

There is much debate on the place of the government in inciting such worry. They have been accused of sending mixed messages, and in the case of Francis Maude even of directly encouraging the use of jerry-cans to collect and store extra fuel.

By using words such as 'panic' and 'madness', an image of collective and crowd degradation of sanity is formed. Crowd psychologist John Drury explores use of such phrases here. The explanation so often used in the media is the loss of sanity and clear thought, and the beginning of 'deindividuation' that takes place in crowds and collective situations, causing a loss of individual rationality. But research has moved on from Le Bon's theories. As John Drury talked of in his article, and as Dr Cliff Stott speaks of on the BBC news, deindividuation is no longer at the forefront of crowd psychology. It has been replaced by Cliff Stott and Stephen Reicher's Elaborated Social Identity Model. The model outlines not a loss of individuality, but a merging of separate identities, without a loss of rationality. The model also leads to thoughts that perhaps sometimes police, and here government and media, behaviour can lead to 'panic' and rioting.

What the psychologists are now saying is that in the 'petrol panic' case unrolling currently, people are acting very much selfishly and indeed, therefore, individually. They are also acting logically as they realise they need petrol to go about their daily lives.

The problem at hand is not really the petrol strike. It is unclear whether it will even happen, and will surely pass without too much of a hitch to our smooth-running society. (perhaps, charmingly the solution lies in the problem). The real issue here is inconsistency in government advice and as seen so often, new psychological advances being ignored in favour of the sensationalist approaches that can be taken with outdated, disproved theories.

Don't panic over petrol. Stop and think, just for a minute, who is playing with your psychology?