Explaining a collective false alarm: Context and cognition in the Oxford Street crowd flight incident Collective false alarms – where people wrongly believe that there is a terrorist attack happening – can cause significant disruption, costly emergency response, and widespread distress. Yet an adequate psychological explanation for these incidents is lacking. In this presentation, I describe some new research in which we develop a new model which we argue provides a better explanation than ‘panic’ and cognitive bias for three key features of such events: (1) When and why do false alarm flight incidents occur (why do people interpret innocent sounds as signals of hostile threat?); (2) How fear and flight behaviour spreads through a crowd; and (3) How members of the public behave towards each other in these incidents. We carried out a systematic review of ten years of news reports of such incidents and carried out a multi-source case study of the 2017 false alarm in Oxford Street, UK, including interviewing 39 participants. There was evidence that the wider context of (marauding) terrorist threat lowered the threshold for interpreting ambiguous signals as signs of hostile threat, particularly where previous genuine threats were collectively self-relevant. In this context, the meaning of others’ perceived fear responses (including the emergency services) influenced spread of fear and flight behaviour in the public. Cooperative behaviour was sporadic and was associated with an emergent sense of groupness that occurred in limited locations. The analysis suggests that crowd behaviour in even the most dramatic false alarms has more in common with that in real emergencies than with the image of mass panic portrayed in the news media. Our analysis has implications for policy in preparing the public for terrorist attacks. ON SITE & ZOOM MEETING https://unige.zoom.us/j/64777198874?pwd=bzAJOfWKwexXzoo12IlB4lxFZbnajx.1 Meeting ID: 647 7719 8874 Passcode: 682841