#malcolm gladwell

When I was 22, I achieved my dream academic internship. It’s been an interesting road since that time. I’ve developed tenacity in my chosen fields and have accomplished work of which I am truly proud. I also find gratitude a naturally occurring and sobering part of my days. I’m truly thankful for everyone in my life both past and present. It’s through passion and perseverance and love and grief from which I’ve grown. And I thank God every day for my family, friends, and teachers from whom I’ve been spiritually and intellectually nurtured.

I recently listened to episode six, “My Little Hundred Million,” of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast series. Every Rowan alum should listen to it in entirety; Gladwell and the late Henry M. Rowan translate incredibly important and timely moral compass components.

Never forget where you came from. #RowanPROUD

How School Shootings Spread

“School shootings are a modern phenomenon. There were scattered instances of gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before Barry Loukaitis, but they were lower profile. School shootings mostly involve young white men. And, not surprisingly, given the ready availability of firearms in the United States, the phenomenon is overwhelmingly American. But, beyond those facts, the great puzzle is how little school shooters fit any kind of pattern.

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In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants. Then the argument shifted to the idea that rioters might be rational actors: maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs. They saw what was at stake and recalculated their estimations of the costs and benefits of taking part.

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Granovetter was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. “Most did not think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,” he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. “But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.

His argument has a second implication. We misleadingly use the word “copycat” to describe contagious behavior—implying that new participants in an epidemic act in a manner identical to the source of their infection. But rioters are not homogeneous. If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.

Finally, Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party. He was writing in 1978, long before teen-age boys made a habit of wandering through their high schools with assault rifles. But what if the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the Granovetterian model—to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before?”

Mass Shootings in America Are Spreading Like a Disease

“Several years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in The New Yorker positing that national school shootings might spread like a disease. He cited the models of Mark Granovetter, a Stanford University sociologist whose theory of social-influence “thresholds” explained the gathering force of a riot. Imagine an avalanche, where the first tranche of snowpack to move might be quite unsteady, but as the wave of snow gathers force, it becomes powerful enough to dislocate even the most stable trees and houses. Similarly, a riot might begin with one wild rebel throwing a rock through a window just to get a rush. It becomes a public movement when the momentum is powerful enough to move even the relatively stable people nearby to join in the rock hurling.

In this way, a spate of mass shootings might behave like “a slow-motion … riot,” such that each murderous event normalizes, or encourages, new participants to join the movement.

At the time, Gladwell’s conjecture was mocked for its suggestiveness. After all, there wasn’t much evidence to support the claim that Granovetter’s threshold theories applied to mass shootings that were separated by many months and committed by strangers who had had no chance of meeting.

But according to a 2015 paper out of Arizona State University, “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings,” there are some data that mass shootings often occur in bunches, which indicates that they “infect” new potential murderers, not unlike a disease. “We find significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past,” the authors wrote. Suicide and terrorism, too, have been found to be likewise contagious. (Interestingly, the authors found “no significant association” between the rate of school and mass shootings and the state’s prevalence of mental illness.)

Diseases spread among individuals, but the contagion of mass shootings seems to spread through broadcast media. In an interview with The Atlantic in 2015, Sherry Towers, the ASU paper’s lead author, hypothesized that television, radio, and other media exposure might be the vectors through which one mass shooting infects the next perpetrator. Like a commercial, each event’s extraordinary coverage offers accidental advertising for depravity. One reason why mass-media coverage of shootings might inspire more shootings is that public glorification inspires some mass murderers. Eric Harris, the central planner of the Columbine murders, wrote Ich bin Gott—German for “I am God”—in his school planner.

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That might explain why there aren’t standard methodologies, definitions, or even conclusions about their frequency or causes. For example, an analysis by Mother Jones starting in 2012 found that mass shootings killing four or more people have become more frequent in the past few decades. But a separate analysis by Grant Duwe, the research director at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, found that while the mass-shooting rate has not increased since the 1970s, the number of victims has grown steadily since the early 2000s. Duwe supposes that the rising deadliness of mass shootings might be most responsible for the growing perception that these events are becoming more common, since the number of casualties is the strongest predictor of media coverage. It’s a scary story, no matter which side is correct. Given the contagion research, one can imagine a sinister feedback loop that might explain the recent spate of murderous sprees. If more victims mean more media coverage, and more coverage means more inspiration, it implies that historically violent mass shootings might be the most contagious.

Mass shootings are often committed by lonely and unrooted men, suffering from both grandiose aspirations and petty grievances. The postmortem descriptors are practically rote: He was cold, weird, withdrawn, a loner (and, one must note, always “he”). It’s astonishingly rare to read the antonyms: He is almost never warm, welcoming, the most popular kid in school. Even when mass shootings are not, strictly speaking, terrorism, they still seem to adhere to a sort of dark and nearly invisible ideology of oppressive self-aggrandizement, a bid for greatness that requires the destruction of others. Just because there is no formal institution like isis to symbolize this strain of white rage doesn’t mean that the rage isn’t ideological. It’s possible that many instances of white-male mass-shooting violence are, in fact, driven by a media-inspired religion of grievance and greatness—a mass-distributed sickness for which male outcasts are most vulnerable to infection.

“This isn’t a guns situation,” President Donald Trump claimed on Sunday in a brief address from Tokyo. But the statistics offer no doubt. There are more gun deaths in America because, simply, there are more guns. The American rates of firearm homicide, child-firearm mortality, and gun-related suicide are far higher than in any other industrialized country. The United States, home to 5 percent of the industrialized world’s population under 15 years old, accounts for 87 percent of its unintentional firearm fatalities involving that age group, according to a 2003 paper. Mass killings are an epidemic that so many leaders refuse to name, or even to see. If America cannot amend the laws that facilitate such violence, it should at least commit more resources to studying why this seems to be a paradoxical age of historically low crime, yet contagious mass murder.”