Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

to attempt even a stroke outside of his plastic ring.

Around this time, Chris was attending a day camp that provided a number of activities to its members, including use of a large pool, which he scrupulously avoided. One day, shortly after the graduate student fiasco, I went to get Chris from camp a bit early and, with mouth agape, watched him run down the diving board and jump into the middle of the deepest part of the pool. Panicking, I began pulling off my shoes to jump in to his rescue when I saw him bob to the surface and paddle safely to the side of the pool—where I dashed, shoes in hand, to meet him.

'Chris, you can swim,' I said excitedly. 'You can swim!'

'Yes,' he responded casually, 'I learned how today.'

'This is terrific! This is just terrific,' I burbled, gesturing expansively to convey my enthusiasm. 'But how come you didn't need your plastic ring today?'

Looking somewhat embarrassed because his father seemed to be raving while inexplicably soaking his socks in a small puddle and waving his shoes around, Chris explained: 'Well, I'm three years old, and Tommy is three years old. And Tommy can swim without a ring, so that means I can too.'

I could have kicked myself. Of course, it would be to little Tommy, not to a six- foot-two-inch graduate student, that Chris would look for the most relevant information about what he could or should do. Had I been more thoughtful about solving Chris's swimming problem, I could have employed Tommy's good example earlier and, perhaps, have saved myself a couple of frustrating months. I could have simply noted at the day camp that Tommy was a swimmer and then arranged with his parents for the boys to spend a weekend afternoon swimming in our pool. My guess is that Chris's plastic ring would have been abandoned by the end of the day.

Any factor that can spur 70 percent of New Yorkers to return a wallet (or can reduce the likelihood that kids will take up smoking or will fear a dentist visit) must be considered impressive. Yet research findings of this sort offer just a hint of the immense impact that the conduct of similar others has on human behavior. Other, more powerful examples exist. To my mind, the most telling illustration of this impact starts with a seemingly nonsensical statistic: After a suicide has made front-page news, airplanes—private planes, corporate jets, airliners—begin falling out of the sky at an alarming rate.

For example, it has been shown that immediately following certain kinds of highly publicized suicide stories, the number of people who die in commercial-airline crashes increases by 1,000 percent! Even more alarming: The increase is not limited to airplane deaths. The number of automobile fatalities shoots up as well. What could possibly be responsible?

One explanation suggests itself immediately: The same social conditions that cause some people to commit suicide cause others to die accidentally. For instance, certain individuals, the suicide-prone, may react to stressful societal events (economic downturns, rising crime rates, international tensions) by ending it all. But others will react differently to these same events; they might become angry or impatient or nervous or distracted. To the degree that such people operate (or service) the cars and planes of our society, the vehicles will be less safe, and, consequently, we will see a sharp increase in the number of automobile and air fatalities.

According to this 'social conditions' interpretation, then, some of the same societal factors that cause intentional deaths also cause accidental ones, and that is why we find so strong a connection between suicide stories and fatal crashes. But another fascinating statistic indicates that this is not the correct explanation: Fatal crashes increase dramatically only in those regions where the suicide has been highly publicized. Other places, existing under similar social conditions, whose newspapers have not publicized the story, have shown no comparable jump in such fatalities. Furthermore, within those areas where newspaper space has been allotted, the wider the publicity given the suicide, the greater has been the rise in subsequent crashes. Thus it is not some set of common societal events that stimulates suicides on the one hand, and fatal accidents on the other. Instead it is the publicized suicide story itself that produces the car and plane wrecks.

To explain the strong association between suicide-story publicity and subsequent crashes, a 'bereavement' account has been suggested. Because, it has been argued, front-page suicides often in-volve well-known and respected public figures, perhaps their highly publicized deaths throw many people into states of shocked sadness. Stunned and preoccupied, these individuals become careless around cars and planes. The consequence is the sharp increase in deadly accidents involving such vehicles that we see after front-page suicide stories. Although the bereavement theory can account for the connection between the degree of publicity given a story and subsequent crash fatalities—the more people who learn of the suicide, the larger number of bereaved and careless individuals there will be—it cannot explain yet another startling fact: Newspaper stories reporting on suicide victims who died alone produce an increase in the frequency of single-fatality wrecks only, whereas stories reporting on suicide- plus-murder incidents produce an increase in multiple-fatality wrecks only. Simple bereavement could not cause such a pattern.

The influence of suicide stories on car and plane crashes, then, is fantastically specific. Stories of pure suicides, in which only one person dies, generate wrecks in which only one person dies; stories of suicide-murder combinations, in which there are multiple deaths, generate wrecks in which there are multiple deaths. If neither 'social conditions' nor 'bereavement' account for this bewildering array of facts, what can? There is a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego who thinks he has found the answer. His name is David Phillips, and he points a convincing finger at something called the 'Werther effect.'

The story of the Werther effect is both chilling and intriguing. More than two centuries ago, the great man of German literature, Johann von Goethe, published a novel entitled Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). The book, in which the hero, named Werther, commits suicide, had a remarkable impact. Not only did it provide Goethe with immediate fame, but it also sparked a wave of emulative suicides across Europe. So powerful was this effect that authorities in several countries banned the novel.

Professor Phillips's own work has traced the Werther effect to modern times. His research has demonstrated that immediately following a front-page suicide story the suicide rate increases dra-matically in those geographical areas where the story has been highly publicized. It is Phillips's argument that certain troubled people who read of another's self-inflicted death kill themselves in imitation. In a morbid illustration of the principle of social proof, these people decide how they should act on the basis of how some other troubled person has acted.

Phillips got his evidence for the modern-day Werther effect by examining the suicide statistics in the United States between 1947 and 1968. He found that 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. 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.

If the facts surrounding the Werther effect seem to you suspiciously like those surrounding the influence of suicide stories on air and traffic fatalities, the similarities have not been lost on Professor Phillips either. In fact, he contends that all the excess deaths following a front-page suicide incident can be explained as the same thing: copycat suicides. Upon learning of another's suicide, an uncomfortably large number of people decide that suicide is an appropriate action for themselves as well. Some of these individuals then proceed to commit the act in a straightforward, no-bones-about-it fashion, causing the suicide rate to jump.

Others, however, are less direct. For any of several reasons—to protect their reputations, to spare their families the shame and hurt, to allow their dependents to collect on insurance policies—they do not want to appear to have killed themselves. They would rather seem to have died accidentally. So, purposively but furtively, they cause the wreck of a car or a plane they are operating or are simply riding in. This could be accomplished in a variety of all-too-familiar-sounding ways. A commercial-airline pilot could dip the nose of the aircraft at a crucial point of takeoff or could inexplicably land on an already occupied runway against instructions from the control tower; the driver of a car could suddenly swerve into a tree or into oncoming traffic; a passenger in an automobile or corporate jet could incapacitate the operator, causing a deadly crash; the pilot of a private plane could, despite all radio warnings, plow into another aircraft. Thus the alarming climb in crash fatalities we find following front-page suicides is, according to Dr. Phillips, most likely due to the Werther effect secretly applied.

I consider this insight brilliant. First, it explains all of the data beautifully. If these wrecks really are hidden instances of imitative suicide, it makes sense that we should see an increase in the wrecks after suicide stories appear. And it makes sense that the greatest rise in wrecks should occur after the suicide stories that have been most widely publicized and have, consequently, reached the most people. And it makes sense that the number of