By Doug Wallace
Do you remember when you were a little kid and someone would imitate you? Fist clinched, you’d turn and yell, “Stop copying me, copycat!”
“Stop copying me, copycat!” you’re imitator would mock back.
It’s been said that, “Imitation is the highest form of flattery,” but in today’s 24/7 news crazed world, copycatting is no longer child’s play. Many people are being influenced by the crimes they see and hear through the media. Some of these people then go on to imitate these crimes. This phenomenon is called The Copycat Effect.
There’s an old news adage that says, “If it bleeds, it leads.” This means that if the story involves guts and gore, it’s going to be the first story that goes on the news that night.
Do you remember how shocked you were the first time the Columbine shooting appeared on the news? It’s hard to forget because they kept playing the footage over and over. Do you remember the rash of school shootings that followed Columbine? A pattern appeared. The same pattern has been true anytime you’ve heard of snipers shooting up a courtyard, workplace killings, suicides, planes flying into buildings or postal workers, “going postal.” This pattern is attributed to the copycat effect.
Loren Coleman, author of The Copycat Effect and many other sociologists claim that the copycat effect is a byproduct of the media. With millions of people watching television or movies in the United States today, there is a good chance that a small group of people are going to see a story that resonates with them and then copy those actions.
Let’s just say 10,000,000 people watch a movie about a serial killer; .001% of that audience is 10 people. This statistic almost looks non-existent, .001%. But if those 10 people decide that they to want to go on a killing spree, then those 10 people turn into a big number. Even if half of the sample, .0005% of 10,000,000 are influenced by the serial killer movie, that means there will be five people running around copying what they saw. (For the record I should say that these are not the actual statistics of the copycat effect. It is almost impossible to say how many actual individuals are influenced by one movie until after the violence has occurred.)
“A meme (pronounced meem) is a contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passing from mind to mind,” Coleman says. Memetics is the filed of study that uses a meme as the basic unit of cultural evolution. These memes include song lyrics, phrases and icons, including serial killers. Successful memes go on to live in the cultural mind. Unsuccessful memes die.
There has been some infighting between psychologists and sociologists as to the precise definition and validity of memes. But if you buy into the theory, you realize that everything we know, from fads to philosophy, are successful memes. It doesn’t matter what the phrase or idea is, memes get implanted into the psyche and stay there for a long time. Memes can also be ideas that are implanted subconsciously: yawning, fear, sadness, suicidal thoughts, fads, crowd aggression and even, “going postal.” Once an idea grabs hold, it can have a major rippling effect. Memes and the copycat effect go hand in hand.
Originally the copycat effect was called the Werther effect; sociologist David P. Phillips coined the phrase. Phillips got the name from the 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Coleman explains,
“In the story the Werther falls for a lady who’s promised to another. He secedes that his life cannot go on and that his love is lost. He then dresses in boots, a blue coat and a yellow vest, sits at his desk with an open book, and literally at the eleventh hour, shoots himself.”
The book was eventually banned in Italy, Germany and Denmark because so many young men copied the suicide in The Sorrows of Young Werther while at their desk with an open copy of the book in front of them.
The Sorrows of Young Werther is the first example of the copycat effect taken place in a popular book. By 1888, newspapers were widely read and were the main way people received the news. This was the same time that five prostitutes were murdered. The newspapers gave the murder the name Jack the Ripper.
The telegraph helped the Jack the Ripper story spread all over Europe and the United States in gory detail. The meme was implanted and lead to other people copying Jack the Ripper’s crimes. The most notable was Peter Sutcliffe who became know as the Yorkshire Ripper who stabbed and mutilated twenty women, with thirteen fatalities. According to Coleman, there have been at least thirty-eight Jack the Ripper movies and television episodes form 1917 to 2001. I would imagine that there have been much more to add to that list from 2001 to today.
In modern day, many movies have had a copycat effect. A Clockwork Orange, American History X, Basketball Dairies, Natural Born Killers, The Deer Hunter, The Fisher King and The Matrix, all have produced a copycat effect.
Is there a solution to the copycat effect? Many sociologists suggest that responsible news reporting would be one way to curtail the copycat effect. Most news outlets refuse to acknowledge that they are even part of the problem. With the, “If it bleeds, it leads,” news motto, and today’s 24 hour news-cycle, it is farfetched to believe that the media will police themselves on how they cover violent news stories. So the copycat effect wheel will keep on turning and probably will roll on forever.
Douglas Thomas Wallace has had a lifelong fascination with criminology. He has a B.S. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Univ. MO-St. Louis and a M.A. in Communications from Lindenwood University. You can read more of his work at www.douglasthomaswallace.com.
Editor's note: this essay ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. It is an argument about media effects rather than a case report, and it says so; the percentages the author works through are explicitly labelled in the text as illustrative and not real figures. Two factual points against this archive's record. Peter Sutcliffe is carried here at thirteen, which is the number he was convicted of, and the article's twenty stabbed with thirteen fatalities counts the seven women who survived his attacks alongside them; that is a defensible way to write it but the thirteen is the conviction. Jack the Ripper is filed here as unsolved with five canonical victims. The Werther effect and the memetics framing are Loren Coleman's and David P. Phillips's, attributed in the text, and the claim that particular films produced copycat killings is contested in the academic literature and is the author's position rather than a settled finding.