cars and planes of our society, the vehicles will be less safe, and, con-
sequently, we will see a sharp increase in the number of automobile
and air fatalities.
According to this “social conditions” interpretation, then, some of
the same societal factors that cause intentional deaths also cause acci-
dental ones, and that is why we find so strong a connection between
suicide stories and fatal crashes. But another fascinating statistic indic-
ates that this is not the correct explanation: Fatal crashes increase dra-
matically only in those regions where the suicide has been highly pub-
licized. Other places, existing under similar social conditions, whose
newspapers have not publicized the story, have shown no comparable
jump in such fatalities. Furthermore, within those areas where newspa-
per space has been allotted, the wider the publicity given the suicide,
the greater has been the rise in subsequent crashes. Thus it is not some
set of common societal events that stimulates suicides on the one hand,
and fatal accidents on the other. Instead it is the publicized suicide story
itself that produces the car and plane wrecks.
To explain the strong association between suicide-story publicity and
subsequent crashes, a “bereavement” account has been suggested. Be-
cause, it has been argued, front-page suicides often in-volve well-known
and respected public figures, perhaps their highly publicized deaths
throw many people into states of shocked sadness. Stunned and preoc-
cupied, these individuals become careless around cars and planes. The
consequence is the sharp increase in deadly accidents involving such
vehicles that we see after front-page suicide stories. Although the be-
reavement theory can account for the connection between the degree
of publicity given a story and subsequent crash fatalities—the more
people who learn of the suicide, the larger number of bereaved and
careless individuals there will be—it cannot explain yet another startling
fact: Newspaper stories reporting on suicide victims who died alone
produce an increase in the frequency of single-fatality wrecks only,
whereas stories reporting on suicide-plus-murder incidents produce
an increase in multiple-fatality wrecks only. Simple bereavement could
not cause such a pattern.
The influence of suicide stories on car and plane crashes, then, is
fantastically specific. Stories of pure suicides, in which only one person
dies, generate wrecks in which only one person dies; stories of suicide-
murder combinations, in which there are multiple deaths, generate
wrecks in which there are multiple deaths. If neither “social conditions”
nor “bereavement” account for this bewildering array of facts, what
can? There is a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego
who thinks he has found the answer. His name is David Phillips, and
he points a convincing finger at something called the “Werther effect.”
110 / Influence