How School Shootings Spread – Information Cascades and Thresholds of Violence
How do tragedies such as school shootings spread? In his article, Thresholds of Violence, Malcolm Gladwell attempts to explain why. Gladwell utilizes several case studies in attempts to understand what it is that motivates someone to take the final steps to commit such an atrocious act of violence.
Gladwell writes that discovering a pattern in school shooters is not as clearly defined as some may believe. Other than the perpetrator often being a white male (and more likely to appear in the United States), often there is very little which connects school shooters together. He continues, saying, “A school shooter, it appears, could be someone who had been brutally abused by the world or someone who imagined that the world brutally abused him or someone who wanted to brutally abuse the world himself.” And yet, he acknowledges cases such as that of John LaDue who did not fit any of these profiles.
Malcolm Gladwell attempts to reconcile this situation with a proposed explanation from the work of renowned Sociologist Mark Granovetter. Granovetter believed that individuals in a group had a so-called “threshold level.” Specifically applying his theory to riots, Granovetter says those who start said riots have a threshold limit of zero. In a group environment, there will likely be other individuals who have a threshold limit of one, and would then also feel compelled to participate in said riot. Then an individual with a threshold of three, then four, and so on. As Gladwell writes, Granovetter also applied this theory “to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party.”
Gladwell takes Granovetter’s theory one step further, and proposes that it could also be applied to school shooters. He compares the spread of school shootings to that of a slowly-growing riot. Gladwell and Granovetter’s theories almost resemble the concept of information cascades we read of in Chapter 16, and touch on in Chapter 24 of the textbook.
Knowing these concepts and theories, and applying them to school shootings (and potentially, other acts of crime and terrorism) have the possibility of influencing how society can handle these issues. A central concern in the media has been whether or not to feature the shooter in such situations, with some saying that it “glorifies” the individual and can produce copycats (although Gladwell says a contagion effect is a more correct phrasing). With our understanding of information cascades and threshold levels, how should society change the way it handles such acts of violence in the future?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence