What particularly interests me is why, in the face of this endlessly well documented fact, the opposite view persists - that violence and exploitation are "human nature". I see two possible reasons. One is what psychologists call the figure-ground effect - what you see as the "figure," the important thing to look at, and what the "ground," the uninteresting background. And it seems to me that we notice violence and competition because they are uncommon, and stand out against the background of everyday peace and co-operation.

And the other possible reason is that violent and exploitative people have largely controlled the world for the last few thousand years, and naturally they teach us all that the way they are is normal (see any text on sociobiology) and the rest of us are inferior for not fighting and competing as ruthlessly as them - and that we need them to rule over us, because without their rule we'd all kill each other.

Because one of the aspects of disasters that Hari doesn't note is that in addition to shared danger, what people often experience is the absence of authority figures to regulate and organise them. And as a rule, they organise themselves both effectively and fairly, just when the authoritarian model of human nature would expect them to mill around like lost sheep.