Media and Suicide by Thomas Niederkrotenthaler & Steven Stack

Author:Thomas Niederkrotenthaler & Steven Stack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Causal Hypotheses: Behind Werther Effect

An overview of our sample revealed a clear dividing line between social and psychological theories. Social accounts—also referred to as collective theories—consider WE to be a consequence of modifications in the way societies are structured and carry shared representations. On the contrary, psychological or individual theories try to understand the WE through intra-individual mechanisms, by exploring how readers/ auditors/viewers emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally react when exposed to suicide-related media items. Psychological Accounts: Social Learning. Reconsidered in the behavioral theories light, the WE could be summarized by the following question: why may someone acquire an extreme conduct such as suicide, simply by observing it? Obviously, classical or operant conditioning can’t apply to this context, since the observer doesn’t directly experiment the consequences of a nonreproducible behavior. Bandura’s social learning theory is frequently used to solve the issue (Bandura, 1977). According to the psychologist, one may learn the behavior of an observed model whenever this behavior leads to some form of reward (Tousignant et al., 2005). In the WE, this pro-social process is thought to become maladaptive (Zarghami, 2012; Suh, Chang, & Kim, 2015). Instead of being considered strongly aversive, lethal behaviors could be interpreted as a way of relieving pain or bringing notoriety, especially when the coverage style is sensationalist, trivial, or romantic (Stack, 1992). Subjectively perceived as a gain, the outcome of the depicted suicide acts as a reinforcer and increases the likelihood of imitation (Insel & Gould, 2008; Ladwig et al., 2012).

When speaking about observational learning, some moderating processes should be taken into account (Bandura, 1977; Schäfer & Quiring, 2014). First, factors related to the learner, including, for instance, vulnerability or identification, crucially influence the motivational process described above (see Differential Identification and Vulnerability sections). Attention also has an important role (Bandura, 1977; Schäfer & Quiring, 2014; Gould, Wallenstein, & Davidson, 1989): the more visible and attractive the model (for instance, due to redundancies in stories, large audiences, emphatic style, or use of pictures; Niederkrotenthaler & Sonneck, 2007; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2010; Schäfer & Quiring, 2014), the more probable the learning process. Additionally, attributes of the model are thought to have a crucial influence. For instance, social learning theory predicts that when the outcome of the behavior is uncertain, the learner may estimate its rewarding value on the base of the model social status (Till et al., 2013). Thereby, celebrities could be a priori associated with an implicit reinforcing that increases the risk of copycat behaviors (Tousignant et al., 2005). Finally, this cognitive prestige bias has a counterpart according to which individuals preferentially copy the behavior of models that are similar to them, that is, similarity bias (Mesoudi, 2009; McElreath & Henrich, 2006).

Psychological Accounts: Differential Identification. Since Tarde (Tarde, 1903) and Bandura (Bandura, 1977), identification has frequently been presented as a necessary prerequisite for social learning to ultimately lead to self-harm imitation (Ladwig et al., 2012; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2009; Tor, Ng, & Ang, 2008). Because it depends on two distinct dimensions of the model-audience dyad, identification is said to be differential (Lee et al.

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