I was in a crowded place when a fire alarm started going off. There was the typical beeping and flashing, complete with the tinny voice on the intercom saying “there is a fire emergency, please evacuate, avoid using elevators” in between beeps. It probably wasn’t a big deal but I got up to leave the building because that’s what you do and then I noticed everyone else was staying where they were. They were eating and chatting like everything was normal, people were even entering the building unfazed and continuing on to their destination. So I stuck around for a few minutes just to see if anyone else would act like there’s a fire alarm on and nobody did.
We have fire drills regularly at work and the way they ended up having to do it is that every floor has two People Who Get In Trouble If The Fire Drill Doesn’t Go Right, and those people have to run around hassling everyone into obeying the actual rules because if not they’ll get in trouble.
This works pretty well, but even when it goes flawlessly, nobody really evacuates in order to drill in proper procedure, or out of fear of dying in a fire – they just don’t want to get into an argument with the designated fire drill busybodies. I feel like this probably has implications for social policy more generally, but I haven’t figured out exactly what yet.