Often, when there’s a mass shooting or stabbing spree in which bystanders didn’t intervene, indignant Internet commenters rage, “Cowards; if*** I ***had been there, I would have stopped the killer by force!”
These comments are often quickly countered by other people, who retort, *“It’s easy to talk tough when you’re sitting safely behind a keyboard. In an actual life-and-death situation, you might be paralyzed by fear and panic, and end up intervening no more than the very bystanders you criticize.”
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So - can someone **truly **know for sure what they’d do in a dangerous situation?
No, I don’t think they can know for sure, although I have a friend who says she would be calm and rational no matter what happened to the point of being scornful about anyone who acts differently than she would.
She probably would be extremely rational but I don’t think she can know.
I was once hanging with a military officer when something started to get ugly. He shouted to me, “Come on!” And goddamn if I didn’t follow him, and would have plunged right into a fight to back him up. It was insanity, but he had the power of leadership (and I have the power of followership!)
Nothing happened; the other guys just left the scene. But for just one moment, I was willing to be a fighter, as outrageously stupid as that would have been.
I know why millions of men stood up out of the trenches and marched across no man’s land to their deaths. Damn fine leadership on the part of their officers!
I think this is a very good point. In my life I’ve been in one situation where I was responsible for making life or death decisions for myself and two more helpless people. This doesn’t really inform how I’d react in a totally different situation other than assure me that I’m capable of remaining reasonably calm.
Anecdote
Mrs. Cad is trained to deal with emergencies and make life and death decisions and whom I never thought couldn’t do it e.g. black tagging someone still alive during triage.
She could not go with me to our daughter’s hospital room to tell the doctor to take her off life support.
Moral of the story: Training can help you know what to do but doesn’t mean shit about whether or not you can do what you have to do.
Some life and death situations may terrify us more than others. Water rescues and cliff or altitude involved rescues paralyze me. It would have to be a loved one involved for me to get past this. If someone is being stabbed or beaten with a weapon I have no problem intervening. I never know how I will react until I am faced with something.
Nobody can be sure what they’ll do in the future. Some people who have been through life-or-death situations may feel very confident about what they’d do based on experience.
I voted no but a more accurate answer for me would have been “No, unless you’ve experienced such a situation before”.
And I think it needs to be a similar experience. A soldier might be able to function in battle but panic if he had to enter a burning building while a firefighter might have the opposite reaction.
I mean if a gunman opens fire and you freeze and get killed you fucked up, but just because you don’t rush him and survive the incident by hiding doesn’t necessarily make you a coward.
It can be a calculated reaction, if you’re absolutely sure that you won’t be able to gain the upper hand and will surely be killed then it makes sense, it’s self preservation. I would give my life for my family if it meant they could escape and even someone else’s children. But other adult strangers, I want to stay alive to take care of my family.
Only to a certain extent. It’s an Outside Context Problem - you can certainly narrow down your possible reactions to those that make sense, but you can’t exactly scientifically test whether you’d react appropriately until it happens.
Buzz Aldrin talked about how he and Armstrong were able to keep their wits about them during their moon walk. He said their training and simulations had been very intensive and well thought out. So they did exactly what they were trained to do. Had they gone outside what they had been prepared for, he said, it might have caused problems.
I fly airplanes for a living. My training is also fairly intense and I’m confident I could handle most emergencies that might arise, so long as they were part of my training. Outside that, I have a better chance than a completely untrained person at handling an unforeseen “Apollo 13” style situation in a flight environment.
But outside that? If someone pulled a gun on me, or I was on a sinking ship? I think I’d be as likely to act foolishly as anyone else. I’m not trained for those situations, and cannot predict how I would react. I’d like to hope I’d keep my head, but I once completely panicked when my cat got lost.
Not knowing what specific actions to take to best deal with a life or death situation that comes up unexpectedly isn’t the same as not knowing what your own reaction will be. Even knowing that you will collapse to the ground flailing and screaming hysterically, worsening the situation for everyone, is at least self-knowledge.
Personally, I know that I will not succumb to harmful panic at a time when keeping a clear head matters most. People depend on me, so that is not an option.
I will note that there is a significant difference between “Can a person know for sure how’d they react in a life-or-death situation?” and “Would most people know for sure how’d they react in a life-or-death situation?” If you consider soldiers of fortune, hardened criminals/psychopaths, and transcendent Buddha-types, they all would know to a certainty how they would behave beforehand, yes. Thus I voted yes on the former, but probably would vote no on the latter.
If you’ve been trained to deal with a particular situation, and have kept that training fresh, you’ll probably follow through on your training.
You may even have a decent chance of following through on a plan if you’ve thought a lot about how to deal with a particular threat, e.g. a fire downstairs when you’re all asleep upstairs.
But for most of us that don’t have particularly risky lives, chances are that if we’re ever in a life-or-death situation, it will be quite unexpected and we will have no training, no plan, and there’s no way of knowing how we will respond.
Good thing most of us are likely to never face a life-or-death situation.
I know that I’m most likely to panic and forget everything that I’m supposed to do.
I once went snorkeling in the Red Sea, and was given extensive training about what to do if something went wrong, including specific instruction to let the rescuer bring you in rathern than flailing at him and putting both of you in danger. So when I was badly stung by fire coral and had to be brought in, I panicked, flailed at the rescuer, and generally behaved hysterically. Maybe they shouldn’t have told us that if we were stung by stone fish we would only have about 10 minutes to live.
OTOH, I was 15 years old at the time. Maybe with age and experience I’d do better now. But if I had to predict, I’m still guessing that I’d panic.
No. You can train all you want, you can learn all the information you want, you can think about it daily. But 99&44/100th of the time, when it does happen, you are going to surprise yourself in almost every way no matter what you actually do. In training you act, in real life you have to react, and those can be very different things.
You can’t know that. Even in situations you’ve encountered before you don’t really know until you get there. Anyone could have enter a panic state at any time. If you have no history of such things it’s unlikely to happen to you, but there’s no way to know for sure what will happen in any possible circumstance.
That is not to say you in particular will succumb to a harmful panic. I get the feeling you do realize that you are potentially as fallible as any human and considered that beforehand to be prepared in case such conditions arise.