From Wikipedia
Stampede events that involve humans are extremely rare and are unlikely to be fatal.[5] According to Keith Still, professor of crowd science at Manchester Metropolitan University, “If you look at the analysis, I’ve not seen any instances of the cause of mass fatalities being a stampede. People don’t die because they panic. They panic because they are dying”.[5]
Paul Torrens, a professor at the Center for Geospatial Information Science at the University of Maryland, remarks that “the idea of the hysterical mass is a myth”.[5] Incidents involving crowds are often reported by media as the results of panic.[16][17] However, the scientific literature has explained how panic is a myth which is used to mislead the attention of the public from the real causes of crowd incidents, such as a crowd crush.[18][19][20] […] [M]ost major crowd disasters can be prevented by simple crowd management strategies.[22] Crushes can be prevented by organization and traffic control, such as barriers. […] Such incidents are invariably the product of organisational failures.[4]
Por que no los dos? Crowd crush incidents don’t require panic (see: 2015 Mina “stampede”), but it’s hard to imagine that e.g. the Iroquois Theater Fire wasn’t significantly worsened by the (justifiable) panic of the crowd.
Of course the primary reason in both cases is related to the spaces that the crowds were inhabiting… But the effect of panic pretty clearly multiplies the effect IMO.
This is talking about the cause I think. Panic can worsen the situation, but it almost never is the cause. And the panic is nearly universally justified.
The most recent US based example might be Astroworld. And there 10 people died right in front of the concert stage while the thing kept going on. Entire groups of people yelled “stop the show” and climbed up trees and fences to make space. Someone even made it up the TV operator tower and was pleading the operator to notify the authorities people were dying but was completely ignored.
I generally agree with the idea that “stampede” is usually the wrong concept to describe these events, and probably the wrong approach to understanding them. Even in the Iroquois Theater case, I think if you eliminated the panic component, the death toll would have been significantly lower (maybe zero), but it still wasn’t really the same dynamics as a stampede.