This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: It was perhaps fitting, in a twisted, only-in-America way. Ridgway and his University of Nevada, Las Vegas, colleagues met to analyze narratives written by mass shooting survivors, a gunman killed three faculty members in the building next door.
"It's definitely something where you realize that you're not really outside of it, [meaning] the frequency and rates of mass shootings in this country," Ridgway said. Since the 1960s, mass shootings have steadily increased in the United States, with more than 500 to date and nearly 1,800 fatalities at the time of publication. Ridgway, now an operational psychologist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was interested in what survivors remember from these traumatic events and what themes emerge.
Most of what's known about memory during times of extreme stress comes from lab studies, which can't ethically produce real terror, or clinical samples that study memory in the context of posttraumatic stress disorder. "Neither really tells you what a person's mind actually does in that time that they feel that they're going to die," said Ridgway. The analysis—postponed until the next day, given the circumstances—was of the memories of 42 survivors of the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting in Las Vegas.
On Oct. 1, 2017, a man shot into a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers from a top floor of a casino, killing 60 people and injuring over 800, making it the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. For the study, published in 2026 in Psychological Science, survivors completed a survey within one month of the shooting that asked them to recount their emotions and experiences. Some people's memories were organized around escape routes, some were around a wounded stranger, some around the thought of their children learning how they died," said Ridgway.
"You have the same event, the same 10 minutes, but very different interiors." To see what similarities did emerge, a subset of 10 narratives was analyzed to create codes for the details subjects included; those codes were then applied to the remaining narratives. Four main themes emerged. Contextual memory was the most common theme, with sensory-perceptual and spatial details present in nearly all narratives and temporal distortion appearing in many.
Physical injury, either to themselves or others, was referenced by nearly all survivors, while acts of heroism (their own or others') and contemplating mortality were present in about half of the narratives. The findings suggest that survivors' memories were not globally impaired but shaped in selective and patterned ways. Ridgway was most surprised by the latter themes that speak to the human element.
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