Social Death Proof

I've been neglectful of this blog. Last week I produced nothing, despite a couple of aborted attempts at entries. It's not that I have no new ideas to express - the opposite is probably closer to the truth - but simply because the act of finishing always seems so much more arduous than the act of starti...

I'm going to break with a couple of self-imposed conventions to this blog. Firstly, I'm going to comment on something 'topical' - something that's happened recently rather than years, decades or centuries ago. Secondly, I'm going to attempt to be terser. I'm a fan of terseness, but academia isn't. (I'm also a qualified fan of ambiguous writing: there's a beauty in linguistic ambiguity - in double-meaning, aphorism, allusion, inference and innuendo - which becomes lost as, in academic writing, words come to take on more consistent meaning. Still, phrases like "broken down by age and sex" make me smile wryly.) Much of the motivation for this blog is to train myself to write more 'like an academic'. Generally, the contents of this blog are meant as a middle-ground between the more focussed and directed work of academia, and the more undirected and, in the broadest possible sense, 'philosophical' (and impractical) leanings of my own mind...


I'm going to break my first self-imposed convention, not talking about something topical, twice: firstly, in mentioning this, and secondly, in mentioning this.

According to this book, these two types of event - car fatalities and media coverage of suicides - are often linked. The link has a name: "The Werther Effect", named after this.

In the book, Cialdini summarises research by a sociologist called David Phillips. Cialdini uses Phillips' research to illustrate what Cialdini calls 'Social Proof': the propensity for people to behave as others (who are like themselves) behave. (See this.) "After a suicide has made front-page news, airplanes", writes Cialdini, "- private places, corporate jets, airliners - begin falling out of the sky at an alarming rate." [pp. 143-4]

And not just airplane crashes, but also cars. Crashes occur more frequently, but also become more fatal. Phillips suggests that, just as Goethe's book over 200 years ago, about a young troubled soul who commits suicide, led to a wave of suicides amongst young people following its publication, so the publicity of the suicide of a high profile individual leads many people, who consider themselves 'similar' to the high-profile deceased, and who have also been suffering from melancholia, to be tipped towards suicidal activity. Given that most people in rich nations have access to a device that could easily and relatively inconspicuously be made lethal- i.e. an automobile - and considering death from an automobile accident is less 'shameful' than death from something more obviously self-inflicted, Phillips suggested that, through a modern day 'Werther Effect', epidemics of automobile-based concealed suicides tend to follow high publicity suicides.

This is in addition to unconcealed suicides, which also rise sharply. According to Phillips (as summarised by Cialdini), "within two months after every front-page suicide story, an average of fifty-eight more people than usual killed themselves. In a sense, each suicide story killed fifty-eight people who otherwise would have gone on living." [p. 146, my emphasis]


Back to the particular: I remember reading this article, in copy of the Independent which I picked up in a train I was travelling on a few weeks back. Should the film carry a health warning?, the article asks. The scientific consensus, to this question and others like it, seems to be 'Yes.'