When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, Nicole M. Stephens didn’t think the media, government officials, or even relief workers understood the plight of the people left behind. “The question everyone asked was, ‘Why did those crazy people choose to stay?’” says Stephens. She also noticed that no one actually bothered to ask this question of the so-called stayers.
As a graduate student in psychology at Stanford University, though, Stephens decided to ask the stayers herself. In her new study of the stayers, the leavers who evacuated, the aid workers who helped both groups, and the lay observers who watched from a distance, she and her coauthors reveal that the stayers did not think they had a choice, because they did not have the resources to get away.
Yet the stayers did not see themselves as passive victims, either. Instead, “they viewed themselves as being strong, actively helping each other, being connected to others, and showing their faith in God,” finds Stephens. Meanwhile, however, “many observers and relief workers thought that the stayers were just being foolish and lazy, and so tended to blame them for their suffering,” she says.
Stephens and her coauthors tie the widespread empathy failure to deeper cultural and material differences between the mostly black and working-class stayers on the one hand, and the mostly white and middle-class leavers, aid workers, and observers on the other hand. Compared to the stayers, the leavers, aid workers, and observers have more education and income, greater access to news, more reliable transportation, and widerranging social networks. Reflecting their greater resources, these wealthier Americans generally believe that the right way to act is to be an influencer—that is, to make choices, to exert control, and, when necessary, to seek more hospitable situations.
Meanwhile, reflecting their more modest endowments, the stayers generally believe that the right way to act is to be an adjuster— that is, to draw upon their inner strength, to reach out to others and God, and to make the best of bad situations.
“The assumption among the rescuers and observers is that everyone could have chosen to evacuate,” says Stephens. “But you need a lot of resources to be that kind of person.”
For their research, Stephens and her team first asked 144 Katrina aid workers (including Red Cross volunteers, police officers, and FEMA officials) and 317 online survey respondents to use three words to describe leavers and three words to describe stayers. In a second interview study, the researchers invited 38 leavers and 41 stayers to describe what happened to them before, during, and after the storm. Assistants who were blind to the researchers’ hypotheses then classified the participants’ answers according to themes such as influencing, adjusting, and overall positive or negative tone.
Although rescue workers described stayers more positively than did lay observers, their responses were still quite negative, as well as different from how the stayers described themselves. “You might expect that people who volunteer or go into a helping profession would have more empathy and a better understanding of the people to whom they are giving aid,” says Stephens.
“There was some percentage of the survey respondents who did use words like ‘stupid,’ ‘passive,’ and ‘inflexible,’” acknowledges Russ Paulsen, executive director of the Hurricane Recovery Program at the American Red Cross. “But it wasn’t clear to me that those were rescue workers. I’ve never heard a Red Crosser refer to people who stayed as stupid or any of those other adjectives. We do ask people to tell their Katrina stories as part of the healing process, but [whether they stayed or left] doesn’t affect how we treat them.”
Read more stories by Alana Conner.