By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
Another mass shooting at a school, this time at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. Another isolated and disturbed gun collector, and another set of victims to be remembered: nine in this case. In President Obama’s remarks, we see increasing frustration as he spoke of “more American families — moms, dads, children — whose lives have been changed forever.” Shortly thereafter, GOP Presidential candidate Jeb Bush commented, also calling it a “tragedy,” but then following that with, “Stuff happens, there’s always a crisis, and the impulse is always to do something, and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.” The “stuff happens” part of those remarks isn’t resonating well right now. Fellow candidate Donald Trump quickly followed Bush’s remarks with his own take: “That’s the way the world goes.” Their word choices capture a certain reduced intensity that the President called out in his earlier remarks: “Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.”
These comments got me thinking. As a social scientist, can I say what accounts for the difference between events that are perceived as tragic, and those that are seen as just unfortunate or sad but expected? Mass shootings are starting to seem routine, but more broadly, the mass shootings that still tend to regularly galvanize our attention and restart the discussion don’t make up the bulk of gun deaths. While deaths from mass shootings are much more common in America than other countries (as President Obama noted, “We are the only advanced country on earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months”); they are still just a drop in the cartridge-bucket when we look at all gun deaths in the country. Compared to mass shooters, gun deaths by accident, suicide, domestic dispute, or drunken argument are far more common. But still, we focus on the occasional mass shooting more than we focus on the steady drumbeat of more common gun deaths. Four social science effects can help explain why some events will be viewed as major tragedies while others will end up in the “stuff happens” bin. Understanding these effects is useful to litigators who are trying to influence whether the events at the center of a trial end up in one cateogory or the other. This post takes a look at each.
The Spotlight Effect
The mass media obviously gravitates toward mass shooting events, bestowing close to wall-to-wall coverage to each tragedy, even in the early moments when details are scarce. The fact that the media gives more attention to mass shootings than they give to the more common causes of gun deaths is not necessarily sensationalizing, since a single event that affects a large number of people has more news value than the kinds of events that make up the background levels of gun violence. Even when media outlets place these stories in the context of the larger numbers of gun deaths outside of mass-shooting events, as they sometimes do, it is still the examples like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Charleston, and Newtown that come most readily to mind. We might rationally understand that they’re only a very small part of the reality, but it is hard to ignore what is in the spotlight.
The Counterfactual Effect
An important way we understand events is not just by looking at what is, but also by looking at what might have been. Counterfactual, or “if only,” thinking occurs when we mentally undo an event in order to think about how it could have been avoided. When it is easy to imagine how an adverse event could have been averted, it seems like a greater tragedy, and when it is difficult or impossible to imagine a different ending, then it is more likely to fall into the sad-but-inevitable “stuff happens” category. One example that has been used in the research looks at an airline passenger who is added to a flight at the last minute versus a passenger who is taking his normally-scheduled flight: When the plane goes down, subjects view the passenger who added the flight at the last minute as a greater tragedy. The only reason for that is the alternative of not being on that flight is easier to imagine. In the case of mass shootings, the occurrence seems so out of the blue that it is easy to imagine that the victims might have easily escaped death or injury if they weren’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mentally undoing the more common gun deaths might be more difficult, and that makes the mass shooting seem more tragic.
The Reciprocal Effect
People like to believe in a “just world,” preferring to act as though bad things don’t happen to good people for no reason. That psychological bias creates a motivation to think about what an apparent victim might have done in order to bring that misfortune upon themselves, because the world seems “just” if, in at least a small way, they had it coming. That is usually pretty difficult to do after a mass shooting. In most cases, there is absolutely no way to blame the victims since they were simply going to school, or work, or church, or a movie and did nothing to absorb any blame for themselves. Apart from the strained argument that all people should be constantly armed in all public places, blaming the victim just doesn’t work in the case of a mass shooting. Not so with many other gun deaths. In the context of domestic violence situations, criminal activity, suicides, or accidents, it is easier to think that the victims played at least some role in increasing their own risks. As callous as it might be, that makes us more comfortable thinking about it and it makes us feel personally less at risk.
The Desensitization Effect
In explaining the difference between the routine and the tragic, President Obama recognized the last of these psychological biases in his own remarks, noting that “We’ve become numb to this.” That tendency to numb is part and parcel of any strong emotional appeal. If there was a button labeled “emotion,” then the bias is that each push of the same button will result in an incrementally weaker response as we get desensitized over time. It is a sad fact of human psychology that, particularly when they regularly occur, each new mass shooting event will seem less surprising, less novel, and less upsetting. Each new tragedy becomes a little less tragic. Desensitization is an adaptive strategy toward stressors, but it also means that communicators need to be measured in their use of emotion in order to preserve the impact of that emotion.
So, with those factors and many others at work, it isn’t a simple matter. But it is no great mystery why a repeated event would come to be less shocking, or why the spotlighted event would be more of a focus than the background events, even when those background events are much more common. Of course, given the focus of this blog, the important question isn’t how this explains America’s attention to gun violence. Instead, the important question is what this example has to say to those seeking to influence the perception of “tragedy” or “stuff happens” in a trial context.
In that setting, let me suggest four questions to ask in assessing your case:
1. Is the type of harm at the center of your case something that has held the spotlight of the public’s attention?
2. How easy is it for fact finders to counterfactually imagine that the adverse event at the center of this case could have been avoided?
3. To what extent did the victim contribute, or could be imagined to have contributed, to the harm?
4. Is this kind of injury fresh and novel, or are fact finders likely to have heard a repetitive emphasis on it?
The way you answer these questions in the context of your own case can make the difference in whether your fact finders see you as talking about a tragedy or a numbed-down background occurrence.
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Other Posts on Lessons from Gun Controversy:
- Don’t Let Concern Substitute For Action
- Empower Through Choices
- Use Mental Images to Sway Moral Judgment
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Image Credit: 123rf.com, used under license