WASHINGTON — When the ship is sinking and lifeboats are insufficient, is it women and children first or every man for himself? The answer might depend on how fast it’s going down.
When a torpedo sent the Lusitania to the bottom in just 18 minutes in 1915, claiming 1,198 lives, most survivors were young, fit people age 16 to 35 who could rush to a spot in the lifeboats and hang on to it.
Three years earlier, it took 2 hours, 40 minutes for the Titanic to slip beneath the waves, time for people to do more than just react. There were 1,517 deaths, and the survivors tended to be women, children and those accompanying a child.
“In the environment of the Titanic, social norms were enforced more often,” said researcher Benno Torgler of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. The findings are reported in today’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
