Gallantry ruled on the day the Titanic went down. As the vessel’s orchestra played soothing music to calm the passengers, women and children were escorted to the limited supply of lifeboats, leaving healthy young men to go down with the sinking ship.
Three years later, the sinking of the Lusitania by a German torpedo was an altogether different affair. As the civilian passenger ship keeled over in a matter of minutes, young healthy men scrambled to the lifeboats, leaving women and children to drown.
These dramatic differences in behavior aboard a sinking ship may all come down to time, a new study suggests. The Titanic took 2 hours and 40 minutes to sink beneath the waves. The Lusitania, in contrast, went down in 18 minutes. The new results, appearing in a paper to be published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that in extreme situations social norms — codified here as women and children first — require time to appear.
Scientists led by economist Benno Torgler of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, examined the ships’ survival records to see how humans act in extreme situations.