Increasing or decreasing safety amongst crowds
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-sunday-some-churchgoers-may-choose-to-pack-guns-with-their-bibles-1510488001
Given the recent discussions on information cascades, and the choice of whether to follow the crowd in its selections (assuming they are rational decision-makers and must have some additional information) or choosing to do something out of one’s own volition and interest, the question of carrying firearms to public places and even in churches is a critical one. Given what has happened with the shooting in a church in Texas recently, this has put many churchgoers in southern U.S. states on edge.
As one of the church parishioners in a church in Plano, Texas, said “I would never have even thought of a gun in church, but if someone would walk in, I’d hope that we would be prepared.” This has made the question of bringing firearms into church similar to the initial dilemma we would encounter in a network, since there is more opportunity to imitate the decisions of others. For instance, in this case, there are two choices: follow the crowd, or follow one’s own private info. In the first choice, there may be safety in numbers, and to feel that many people are protective enough about their own safety to bring firearms into church, in order to prevent another shooting of such devastation to occur. In the second choice, bringing a firearm into the church along with one’s bible would create a rather distracting atmosphere, and likely part of the focus would not be on scripture but rather on being alert at the sign of any noise or disturbance, as the parishioners mentioned in their interviews. In such a case, the direct benefit of carrying a firearm may be to protect oneself in the event of an attack, although that is also a benefit resulting from seeing others carrying firearms and therefore saving you the need to do so as well. An information cascade can easily be created from such a case: one person will decide to act on his own information (the first person) and perhaps choose to carry firearms, then people will observe him and assume a variety of information, perhaps such that it is now socially accepted to do so, or whether the first person believes that this church has an increased likelihood of being a future target for terrorism, and then the second person may decide to follow the first person or not, but should the second person do so, then the third person will believe that it is in his/her best interest to also follow suit and bring firearms, assuming the previous two have some sound reason or possess better information for taking this action, and thus it would be easy for an information cascade to begin and suddenly an entire church is fully armed in case of attack. The key question is: does this create more paranoia or does it actually going to church safer? Hard to say with given information.