Skip to main content



Can Personal Thresholds Explain the American School Shooting Phenomenon?

There have been more than 140 school shootings in the United States since Adam Lanza killed twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Unfortunately, such incidents are no longer anomalies and have become more of an American phenomenon. In his article for The New Yorker entitled “Thresholds of Violence,” Malcolm Gladwell, the noteworthy author of Outliers, claims that this geographical boundary is due largely to the accessibility of firearms in the U.S. Besides this and the trend that many of these occurrences involve white men, the shooters’ profiles do not align with a specific pattern. While some were traumatized as children, had psychotic thoughts, or habitually broke the law, others, such as John LaDue, were not disturbed at all. He played the guitar for eight years and admitted to having “good” parents and living “in a good town.” In April 2014, authorities became aware of his intention to attack his school and took him to a juvenile facility before his plan could be executed.

Gladwell seeks a rational explanation for these seemingly disparate backgrounds and intentions by turning to a study of Mark Granovetter, a Stanford psychologist whose strength of weak ties theory was examined earlier in Networks. Granovetter addresses why certain outcomes do not correlate with people’s individual preferences by examining the development of a riot. Riots, he argues, are social, not individual, processes, which are driven by thresholds. As defined in class and by the psychologist himself, a threshold is the number of people who must engage in an activity before others decide to join them. In the case of a riot, all participants have their own personal thresholds, which state the points at which they will decide to participate. The single initiator of the riot has a threshold of zero and will throw a stone through a window, for instance, without anyone before him doing so. The next person to join has a threshold of one and chooses to participate because one other person is. The rest of the participants can be described as such, with the last joining since everyone else has; this last person, the model citizen who would never throw a stone by himself, has a threshold defined by the participation of everyone else.

Granovetter’s theory has three significant implications. First, the threat of being judged or losing social status can prompt someone who would have never acted in a particular way to ultimately do so. Second, in the case of a riot, the longer it continues, the less alike the initial participants are to the last ones. Thus, the group of participants in a riot or similar happening is heterogeneous. Finally, this evolutionary quality that makes the group of partakers heterogeneous also implies that such happenings are not spontaneous.

The application of this model to school shootings is almost natural. The earlier shooters, who were plagued by a variety of grievances, had low personal thresholds and did not need to follow anyone before deciding to initiate a shooting. LaDue, who was involved in this phenomenon much later, seemed void of anger, and his notebooks suggest he was almost trying to create such grievances. He has a much higher threshold and would have been much less likely to plan this sort of attack without a number of people doing so prior to himself. This dissimilarity between LaDue and previous shooters emphasizes the extent to which school shootings is becoming a heterogeneous phenomenon. Gladwell’s closing remarks accentuate the vitality of this association: “The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

The concept of thresholds as discussed in this article relates directly to the information about cascades in Chapter 10 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets. Similarly to Granovetter’s observation about riots, the chapter shows why thresholds dictate that certain processes must be viewed as social rather than individual. At times, human behavior can be greatly guided by the decisions of others. The choice to create a Facebook profile, for instance, can be determined by thresholds; one may join this social media site only if a certain fraction of the people in his network have profiles. However, the example of a riot or school shooting differs in some ways from scenarios presented in the textbook. In the example of senior vice presidents who must decide whether to confront a CEO at a board meeting the following day, each president does not know every other president’s threshold. This absence of common knowledge can prevent the confrontation from even occurring. For instance, one president may be unsure as to how many others will participate, making it risky for him to participate. In the case of a riot or school shooting, participants do not act simultaneously, and the later participants are aware of the number of people who have already participated. Thus, they can act upon their thresholds without such risk when the right number of people have already chosen to participate.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence

Comments

Leave a Reply

Blogging Calendar

November 2015
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30  

Archives