Children Die in Copycat Hangings · 364 words posted 08/25/2004 11:25 AM

This odd, sad article on the BBC caught my eye:

At least three children have died while acting out the recent hanging of an Indian convict, reports say. Other children are reported to have hurt themselves in similar incidents.

Chatterjee, a security guard, was convicted for the 1990 rape and murder of a school girl who lived in the building where he worked. The execution of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in the eastern city of Calcutta whipped up a media frenzy with news outlets covering it in great detail.

Tipping Point Book Cover I’ve recently been reading Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, in which he applies the principles of epidemiology to social interaction. Incredibly, the wave of suicides in India is nothing new; according to Gladwell, Micronesia recently experienced a suicide epidemic among teenage males in which the suicide rate peaked at 160 per 100,000 (the comparable rate in the United States is 22 per 100,000). According to Gladwell, suicide rates temporarily rise when a suicide is reported by the media, and the type of mimicked suicide corresponds to the type of reported suicide; for instance, a famous suicide by car accident would cause a rash of other suicides by car accidents, but not a rise in suicide by gun or pills. Gladwell writes:

Here we have a contagious epidemic of self-destruction, engaged in by youth in the spirit of experimentation, imitation, and rebellion. Here we have a mindless action that somehow, among teenagers, has become an important form of self-expression. In a strange way, the Micronesian suicide epidemic sounds an awful lot like the epidemic of teenage smoking in the West.

My point here is not to dwell morbidly on suicide, but to note that Gladwell’s focus on describing social behavior via the language of epidemiology explains a lot: positive, like the midnight ride of Paul Revere; negative, like teenage suicide; and neutral, like the instant transmission of ideas via MetaFilter, BoingBoing, et al.

The Tipping Point made the hipster rounds a couple years ago, but if you initally dismissed it—as I did—as unserious, it’s worth a second look. Highly recommended.

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