Whether it is "women and children first" or "every man for himself" in a shipwreck  may depend on how long it takes the ship to sink, researchers said recently.    When the Lusitania was torpedoed  by a German ship in 1915, it sank in 18 minutes and the majority of the survivors were young men and women who responded immediately to their powerful survival instincts .    But when the Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912, it took "three hours to go down, allowing time for more civilize  behavior to take control--and the majority of the survivors were women, children and people with young children.    Economist Benno Torgler of the Queensland University of Technology in Australia and his colleagues studied the two sinkings in order to explore the economic theory that people generally behave in a "rational"  and selfish manner. The two tragedies provided a "natural experiment" for testing the idea, because the passengers on the two ships were quite similar in terms of gender   and wealth.    The major difference was how long it took the ships to sink. They suggested that when people have little time to react, instincts may rule. When more time is available, social influences play a bigger role. But psychologists  noted that many factors other than following social norms could come into play in a disaster, including an evolutionary urge to save the species, attachments  that are formed between individuals during the event and the leadership of authority figures. The extent   of altruism   and how it occurs "is a very controversial issue," said Anthony R. Mawson, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.He thinks the dominant  response was attachment behavior.  Psychologist Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan, US thinks that the answer lies less in social norms and more in our evolutionary heritage. Human beings have a deep instinct to preserve our kind, he said, and that means "people are more likely to save those who have higher reproductive value, namely the young and women in child-bearing years".  Kruger also stressed the importance of leadership during a disaster, noting that the Titanic's captain appeared to have greater control than the Lusitania's. According to Benno Torgler, what led to the different results between the two shipwrecks?
The survival instinct. The civilized behavior. The leadership of the captain. The length of time.