Once a panic is under way, almost any action will only serve to fuel the fire
Perhaps the two most dangerous words in crisis management are "don't panic".
When trying to keep the public acting as if it's "business as usual" – like during the current petrol panic – the window for action is particularly short, as once a panic is under way, almost any action will only serve to fuel the fire.
The riots which spread first across London, then England in August last year are a good illustration.
After two nights of unrest, a Twitter user noticed a shop in Hackney closing early, pulling down its shutters at around 3pm.
This was quickly picked up by Sky News and the BBC, who despatched reporters to the street. The press and social media attention spurred other shops to close – and the cycle continued.
Hackney was indeed one of the areas hit by trouble that evening. It's impossible to tell whether the focus built up on that street was a cause in that particular flare-up, but rioters often cited seeing TV footage as a reason they took to the streets.
The difficulty found during the riots – and repeated again with petrol – is that once a panic is under way, even reassuring actions become a signal of more trouble: putting police on the streets warns of trouble expected that evening. Warning that people panic-buying petrol could lead to shortages only serves to highlight that shortages are possible.
So it proved with government advice this week. (Bad) advice to fill a jerrycan with fuel served to raise rather than lower panic at the crucial early stage.
A calming clarification, that the only precaution needed was to fill your tank when it was half-empty rather than two thirds empty, furthered the panic.
Police are closing petrol stations with queues, news outlets are running maps of shortages, and petrol is big news – despite there being, at the time of writing, no planned strike actions whatsoever.
The root cause of such panics lies in a branch of economics and mathematics known as game theory.
The reasoning works a little like this: we all understand that the best situation is to avoid a shortage of petrol, and that if none of us panic buy petrol, we all have a good outcome.
The worst outcome, however, is that there is a petrol shortage and we haven't stocked up. So each of us has an incentive to try to persuade everyone else there's no need to fill up – while sneaking to the petrol station to stock up ourselves, just in case.
It's a variation of one of the most famous games in existence – the prisoner's dilemma – and shows the challenge anyone trying to calm the situation faces.
Not only do they have to overcome previous bad advice, blanket media coverage, and (now) real shortages of fuel in some areas – they have to overcome a deep-wired part of human nature itself. Not the easiest of tasks.