The story of the Werther effect is both chilling and intriguing. More
than two centuries ago, the great man of German literature, Johann von
Goethe, published a novel entitled Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The
Sorrows of Young Werther). The book, in which the hero, named Werther,
commits suicide, had a remarkable impact. Not only did it provide
Goethe with immediate fame, but it also sparked a wave of emulative
suicides across Europe. So powerful was this effect that authorities in
several countries banned the novel.
Professor Phillips’s own work has traced the Werther effect to modern
times. His research has demonstrated that immediately following a
front-page suicide story the suicide rate increases dra-matically in those
geographical areas where the story has been highly publicized. It is
Phillips’s argument that certain troubled people who read of another’s
self-inflicted death kill themselves in imitation. In a morbid illustration
of the principle of social proof, these people decide how they should
act on the basis of how some other troubled person has acted.
Phillips got his evidence for the modern-day Werther effect by ex-
amining the suicide statistics in the United States between 1947 and
- He found that within two months after every front-page suicide
story, an average of fifty-eight more people than usual killed themselves.
In a sense, each suicide story killed fifty-eight people who otherwise
would have gone on living. Phillips also found that this tendency for
suicides to beget suicides occurred principally in those parts of the
country where the first suicide was highly publicized and that the wider
the publicity given the first suicide, the greater the number of later
suicides.
If the facts surrounding the Werther effect seem to you suspiciously
like those surrounding the influence of suicide stories on air and traffic
fatalities, the similarities have not been lost on Professor Phillips either.
In fact, he contends that all the excess deaths following a front-page
suicide incident can be explained as the same thing: copycat suicides.
Upon learning of another’s suicide, an uncomfortably large number of
people decide that suicide is an appropriate action for themselves as
well. Some of these individuals then proceed to commit the act in a
straightforward, no-bones-about-it fashion, causing the suicide rate to
jump.
Others, however, are less direct. For any of several reasons—to protect
their reputations, to spare their families the shame and hurt, to allow
their dependents to collect on insurance policies—they do not want to
appear to have killed themselves. They would rather seem to have died
accidentally. So, purposively but furtively, they cause the wreck of a
car or a plane they are operating or are simply riding in. This could be
accomplished in a variety of all-too-familiar-sounding ways. A commer-
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 111