Situational altruism is Russell Dynes’s term for the massive but often uneven surge of helping behavior that disasters elicit [@dynes1994].
The term matters because it explains why disaster assistance regularly contains both extraordinary generosity and serious pathologies. Too much help, the wrong kind of help, overlap, gaps in service, and inefficient delivery are not accidental noise around the response. They are part of the same social process that produces large-scale helping in the first place [@dynes1994].
Related terms
- Convergence Behavior - one process through which situational altruism becomes visible
- Material Convergence - the influx of goods that can express situational altruism in logistical form
- Supply Sorting and Resource Routing in Emergent Disaster Response - a research text on the operational practices that respond to its pathologies