Imitation Is the Key to a Lethal Death

The principle of social proof states that we use information about how others have behaved to help us determine proper conduct for ourselves. If the increase in wrecks following suicide stories truly represents a set of copy cat deaths, then the imitators should be most likely to copy the suicides of people who are similar to them. The average number of people killed in a fatal crash of a commercial air liner is more than three times greater if the crash happened one week after a front page suicide story. A similar phenomenon can be found in traffic statistics where there is evidence for the deadly efficiency of post suicide story auto crashes.