The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,82

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2.

The central observation of those who study suicide is that, in some places and under some circumstances, the act of one person taking his or her own life can be contagious. Suicides lead to suicides. The pioneer in this field is David Phillips, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego, who has conducted a number of studies on suicide, each more fascinating and seemingly improbable than the last. He began by making a list of all the stories about suicide that ran on the front page of the country’s most prominent newspapers in the twenty year stretch between the end of the 1940s and the end of the 1960s. Then he matched them up with suicide statistics from the same period. He wanted to know whether there was any relationship between the two. Sure enough, there was. Immediately after stories about suicides appeared, suicides in the area served by the newspaper jumped. In the case of national stories, the rate jumped nationally. (Marilyn Monroe’s death was followed by a temporary 12 percent increase in the national suicide rate.) Then Phillips repeated his experiment with traffic accidents. He took front page suicide stories from the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and matched them up with traffic fatalities from the state of California. He found the same pattern. On the day after a highly publicized suicide, the number of fatalities from traffic accidents was, on average, 5.9 percent higher than expected. Two days after a suicide story, traffic deaths rose 4.1 percent. Three days after, they rose 3.1 percent, and four days after, they rose 8.1 percent. (After ten days, the traffic fatality rate was back to normal.) Phillips concluded that one of the ways in which people commit suicide is by deliberately crashing their cars, and that these people were just as susceptible to the contagious effects of a highly publicized suicide as were people killing themselves by more conventional means.

The kind of contagion Phillips is talking about isn’t something rational or even necessarily conscious. It’s not like a persuasive argument. It’s something much more subtle than that. “When I’m waiting at a traffic light and the light is red, sometimes I wonder whether I should cross and jaywalk,” he says. “Then somebody else does it and so I do too. It’s a kind of imitation. I’m getting permission to act from someone else who is engaging in a deviant act. Is that a conscious decision? I can’t tell. Maybe afterwards I could brood on the difference. But at the time I don’t know whether any of us knows how much of our decision is conscious and how much is unconscious. Human decisions are subtle and complicated and not very well understood.” In the case of suicide, Phillips argues, the decision by someone famous to take his or her own life has the same effect: it gives other people, particularly those vulnerable to suggestion because of immaturity or mental illness, permission to engage in a deviant act as well. “Suicide stories are a kind of natural advertisement for a particular response to your problems,” Phillips continues. “You’ve got all these people who are unhappy and have difficulty making up their minds because they are depressed. They are living with this pain. There are lots of stories advertising different kinds of responses to that. It could be that Billy Graham has a crusade going on that weekend—that’s a religious response. Or it could be that somebody is advertising an escapist movie—that’s another response. Suicide stories offer another kind of alternative.” Phillips’s permission givers are the functional equivalent of the Salesmen I talked about in chapter 2. Just as Tom Gau could, through the persuasive force of his personality, serve as a Tipping Point in a word of mouth epidemic, the people who die in highly publicized suicides—whose deaths give others “permission” to die—serve as the Tipping Points in suicide epidemics.

The fascinating thing about this permission giving, though, is how extraordinarily specific it is. In his study of motor fatalities, Phillips found a clear pattern. Stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide murders resulted in an increase in multiple car crashes in which the victims included both drivers and passengers. Stories about young people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving young people. Stories about older people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving older people. These patterns have been demonstrated on