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what's odd here isn't that 3 people committed suicide at CalTech, it's that they did it so closely together. Actually, it's not odd at all. Robert Cialdini men
by prakash 17y ago
what's odd here isn't that 3 people committed suicide at CalTech, it's that they did it so closely together.
Actually, it's not odd at all. Robert Cialdini mentions this as "Social Proof".
From Page 146 of Influence: "Phillips also found that this tendency for suicides to beget suicides occurred principally in those parts of the country where the first suicide was highly publicized and that the wider the publicity given the first suicide, the greater the number of later suicides."
On Page 148, there is a chart that shows "Fluctuation in number of suicides before, during and after month of suicide story".
So, apparently, the right thing to do is NOT TO publicize the first suicide!
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion on Amazon: http://bit.ly/yXKwu http://bit.ly/yXKwu
- mechanical_fish 17y agoYes, it's true -- people who are thinking of committing suicide are more likely to do so after hearing about someone else who commits suicide. (This is also true for other acts, like murder-suicides.) There's a lot of research on this. But it doesn't necessarily follow that the right response is to try to cover up suicides. For one thing, people who are at Caltech are bound to hear of anyone who commits suicide at Caltech. For another, it's hard to cover up anything that happens to someone, particularly a young person, in the era of Facebook and Twitter. Third, counseling can actually work for those who get the counseling. Most suicidal people can be helped by one strategy or another: cognitive-behavioral therapy, antidepressant drugs... even just frank discussion can help. Remember, a large number of suicide attempts (in the USA, at any rate, and especially among women) aren't actually meant to succeed. Just because the phrase "a cry for help" is a hopeless cliche doesn't mean that most suicides are not, in fact, cries for help. And, of course, even if some genius psychometrician crunched numbers on all the above scenarios and concluded that the best response to a suicide would be a coverup and the silent treatment... nobody would believe it, and the school would get hammered, in public and in court, for trying such a policy. After all, the same aspects of culture that recognize many suicide attempts as desperate last-ditch cries for help also recognize that the appropriate response of your friends and family is to... offer help.
- prakash 17y agoI am not saying you should cover it up; just don't publicize it. I agree with you on the counseling bit -- take action, but again, be discreet about it. Regd, students hearing about it, I am not so sure. One was in CS, the other in Chem, not sure about the 3rd. Precisely because we are in the era of FB & T, many might not have heard about it when compared to a university wide email.
- calambrac 17y agoThe study you mentioned describes a different situation, suicides within a media coverage area when the media hypes an initial suicide. That's hardly a similar situation to a college campus, where the administration can respond by making counseling resources available. There are also studies that show that an initial suicide may actually have a preventative effect for further suicides within a closely-related population. (http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/154/2/120 http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/154/2/120, for instance, though that was just a quick google, and I'm not vouching for how good it is).
- pj 17y agoPlease don't use bit.ly links.
- brandnewlow 17y agoOdd from the school's perspective, where as far as I know, these approaches tend to be successful deterrents to "breaking up" any possible copycats. I was just working in admissions, but everyone pushing papers at a university gets the same e-mails from the higher ups about what's being done for the students in situations like this.