0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

Pascual Romero: And welcome back to Scoring the Strange. This is episode 24. This is the closest to air date we’ve recorded now that we have an actual editor editing the show. So, I’m kind of excited about that. I feel like we can be a little more timely with some of this stuff. BR: Maybe we can actually have things happen before they occur.

0:00:57
PR: Yeah, exactly.

BR: We’ll be commenting on next week’s headlines.

PR: Yes, we’re going to probably call John Edward next week and see if he can help us out. But anyway, let’s get right into it, Ben. So what are you skeptical of?

BR: Well this week I’m skeptical of the History Channel.

PR: And not hard to be skeptical.

BR: Not hard at all. Primarily because, as diligent listeners may recall, they had a fiasco over two months ago, about two and a half months ago in fact, in which the Amelia Earhart, the lost evidence special, the pseudo special, pseudo science special, that we talked about here on the show and that was widely debunked and discredited within hours, actually.

0:01:45
And you know, everybody makes mistakes. I make mistakes on occasion, we all do it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But if you’re a television network that has a much hyped pseudo documentary show, then you owe it to your viewers to correct the mistakes. In fact, the History Channel, soon after the whole show exploded in their face, they didn’t apologize but they did acknowledge the controversy because they couldn’t ignore it. Because we and many other people went out of our way to remind everyone of just what a POS that piece was.

0:02:29
And they did, again, they couldn’t ignore the controversy. And so they said that they would re-examine the evidence and they said they would do so transparently. And they issued a bland sort of three-sentence statement talking about they reaffirmed their commitment to the truth which is rich. Anyway, so my skepticism stems from the fact that it’s now been over two months and we’re still waiting. I’ve been keeping track of the photograph that was central to their piece.

0:03:19
And I think it’s important. And previously on the show, we’ve talked about the importance of follow-up. And it’s far too often that somebody makes a wild statement, and then it just gets lost in the ether. And I think skeptics and critical thinkers really need to not let that go and go back and say, no, hold on. This is what you said before.

0:03:44
Is this right? Is this wrong? If it’s right, then that’s great. If it’s wrong, why was it wrong? And hold people accountable. And so I would encourage listeners to contact the History Channel through social media. Just very politely and say, it’s now been over two months now. It took a Japanese researcher about half an hour to debunk your photo. Surely all the resources of the History Channel can be brought to bear on this. Surely you guys have figured out whether there’s any validity to this by now. We’re still waiting. Tap, tap, crickets.

PR: It seems like they’re pulling the buddy lent 50 bucks to move where you just, you know, oh yeah, I’ll get back to you next week and then nothing. And, you know, it’s kind of funny that they’re kind of almost framing their position in a way that you see with those kind of teach the controversy people, you know, they’re like, we’re not saying you’re wrong, we’re just saying that people should really look into it more. But it’s like, well, people did, and they brought it out, and instead of answering to that directly, you kind of moved the pieces a little bit and tried to avoid answering. And I think, you know, I mean, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks maybe they’re just milking as much of the wave of popularity for that topic, you know, as long as they can before it becomes a non-thing, which it basically has at this point.

0:05:16
But I don’t know, that’s pretty funny that they would even bother going through so much trouble to avoid responding so directly to something that was pretty obvious.

BR: Well, I mean, they’re going to have to say something at some point. I’m not going to let it go. So if I have to contact the History Channel every six months for the next 20 years asking for a response, I’ll do it. At some point I’ll write an article and I’ll document all the times I’ve asked them and then I’ll just embarrass them further. So, you know, whatever, I can do that.

PR: Why not?

0:05:48
I think anyone who bears the name history, there’s a certain almost ethical standard that they need to be held to. Even, you know, granted they don’t owe the public anything outside of what their corporation gives us, but the fact that they call themselves history and they’re framed as a channel that provides historical facts, you know, we as the public should definitely be holding them to some standard of truth.

BR: Yeah, the only other thing I would add is that in all these, as you well know, having done a lot in TV, you know, these conglomerations have different arms. So for example, for many years I wrote for Discovery News, which is a wholly separate arm than the Discovery Channel.

0:06:35
Discovery has actually since been rebranded Seeker, but it’s all one corporation. But just because I wrote for Discovery News, I’ve been on the Discovery Channel, but they’re entirely separate branches in the same way. For example, a week or two back, I was interviewed by somebody from History about evil clowns and bad clowns. And the journalism was perfectly good. I mean, it was so, you know, it’s important not to tar anything labeled History as pseudoscience just because of, you know, some of the failures of the TV network.

PR: Definitely, definitely.

PR: Hey strangers, we love sharing our podcast with you but it takes substantial time and money to produce and release each episode. If you think our podcast is worth a buck or two, please head over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange and consider becoming a patron.

0:07:29
Not only will you be helping us but you’ll also receive some cool perks. Again, that’s patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Enjoy the show.

PR: So this week we’re talking about the copycat effect and how mimicry comes into play with a lot of things in the world, whether it be media or crimes or any number of other phenomena out there. So Ben, let’s start with what is the copycat effect.

BR: Yeah, I’ve always been fascinated by by copycat crimes and behavioral modeling. As you know, I have a degree in psychology and when I was going to UNM in psychology classes I would see different theories being taught about why people do what they do. That’s one of the basic questions of humanity and psychology and skepticism as well.

0:08:29
And I’ve come across modeling copycats in various aspects. The other avenue, and I’ll just talk briefly about the other avenue, where I’ve done research in it is, and we haven’t really talked about in the show, but as you know, and probably many listeners do too, I’ve researched the media effects of, for example, fashion models and things like that on, for example, anorexia rates. And I did my master’s thesis on that. And there’s lots of interesting nuances in that program, and we should do a show on that at some point.

0:09:10
But a lot of the ideas about how people model behavior come from a psychologist named Albert Bandura. Some of his research was on finding out if aggression was learned behavior or not, right? Is it when people act aggressively, is that something that you see other people doing and you do it yourself, or is it just innate, people just inherently angry, or some combination of the two? And he learned, what he discovered in his research, was that children can, in fact, learn aggression.

0:09:47
There’s inherent aggression. There’s kids that are just inherently aggressive. But there’s also a pronounced tendency to be more aggressive when you see that being done. It seems pretty intuitive, certainly in 2017. It wasn’t as intuitive in the 50s and 60s, but certainly these days that’s sort of taken as self-evident. I would actually argue that that has been taken as too self-evident. And that the behavioral modeling that Bandura and others talk about is actually far more complex than that. And so this is why, for example, I argue, and again, based on other research I’ve done, is when I always sort of roll my eyes when I see people suggesting that, for example, thin fashion models in magazines and on TV lead to anorexia, because there’s just not good evidence that they do.

0:10:48
I mean, research anorexia and the link is not there. It seems very intuitive like, oh yeah, there’s a Kate Moss in a magazine. Well, hell, I want to be like Kate Moss and suddenly you have anorexia. That’s not how that works. There’s lots of components of anorexia. It’s largely genetic. It’s a relatively rare disease. The incidence is around 1% or less. There’s lots and lots of different aspects to it, but where the modeling comes in and the copycat comes in is that, and this is actually why during the 1980s there was concerns about after-school specials that were feared to encourage unhealthy eating, basically.

0:11:30
PR: I remember you mentioning that at some point, yeah.

BR: Yeah, there were lots of concerns particularly in the 1980s that were intended to discourage girls from becoming anorexic.

PR: Yeah, I do remember those.

BR: Yeah, and the concern was that in some cases, and there’s some research, that it can actually make the problem worse. But why is interesting? And here’s the key. Here’s what often gets missed. It’s a behavior. You model behaviors.

0:12:00
You don’t model an idea. So for example, if a person sees a thin actress or a thin fashion model, just seeing someone thin isn’t a behavior. It’s a thin person. There’s a fat person. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. There’s lots more people who are overweight than underweight. And so the key here is that simply seeing or being exposed to an idea isn’t enough. And so the concern, actually what they found when they were talking about these after school specials was that if you depict in film or visually someone actually doing something, that is vomiting, that, you can see that and you can model that behavior.

0:12:54
If you just see somebody saying, boy, I didn’t eat anything all day, you know, except for some carrots, that’s not a behavior that can be modeled, that speech. And I’ll be coming back to this when I talk about suicide clusters, for example, with the recent, the show 13 Reasons Why. There’s a whole generation of kids, myself included, that grew up watching these what in retrospect are really nasty, vicious, murderous films. And in theory we could have modeled these, right? We see Friday the 13th, Part 6, we could be modeling somebody putting a drill in someone’s head. But in fact, you see the opposite. The crime rate has actually gone down.

0:13:39
The homicide rate is decreased. So the idea that just seeing something triggers a copycat and makes people want to do that, it’s not that simple. So anyway, so that’s sort of the overall topic. So we’re talking about the tendency to, in the case of the copycat effect, it’s for the often sensationalized publicity about violent murders or suicides result in more of the same through imitation. And again, the whole topic is somewhat fraught by ambiguity, right? So if you, if there’s, like for example, Kurt Cobain, there were many suicides in the wake of Kurt Cobain.

0:14:25
In fact, in Loren Coleman’s book, The Copycat Effect, he has a chapter on that. There are some suicides that are pretty clearly connected to it because it was shortly after his death was announced and he leaves a note pinned to his chest saying, I’m with you, Kurt, or something like that. So there are some that are much more clearly connected. There are others that are much more tenuous, right? So where there were suicides in the weeks and months later on, where it was sort of retroactively attributed to Kurt Cobain’s death.

0:15:00
Because well, you know, the kid loved Cobain and Nirvana. Yeah, so did a lot of people. So did 95% of that demographic, right? So just be, and you know, we, and this actually ties into what we were talking about a couple weeks ago about the Blue Whale Game. There’s an ambiguity in there. Like, you know, unless someone explicitly tells you, this is why I did this, this is why I committed this crime, this is why I killed myself, you have to use your best guess and, you know, the evidence leading up to it.

0:15:34
So, you know, let me sort of broaden it for a second to copycats. Actually the main copycats that I come across in, for example, the sort of Paranormal Mysteries are crop circles. I mean the copycat effect is the main explanation for crop circles. And it’s, you know, you could argue the same thing with some of the Bigfoot videos, but it’s especially true with crop circles. You have the original crop circles, which sort of emerged in the, well, the two men confessed in 1991 that they had made some crop circles.

0:16:22
And what happened was there was a sort of increasing copycat. So people would see these crop circles on TV and in magazines and say, hey, I can do that. And then say, these ideas and in fact how to do them are spread online and through social media. And it’s interesting, every now and then I’ll have someone who will challenge me, hey, Mr. Skeptic, how can you possibly explain the fact that there’s all these different circles? They must be really busy, as if there’s one or two guys to do this.

0:16:59
No, no. People see these and they know how to do them because there’s videos. I’ve made them and it’s not that complicated, actually. And then they say, hey, I could do this too. And so there’s not some conspiracy of a handful of crop circle makers to do all these. It’s random people getting copycat ideas.

PR: Well, if I were inclined to do something like that, which I am the kind of person who really enjoys a good prank, a good harmless prank like a crop circle. But I would be the kind of person who’d want to just outdo other people. So it would be, you know, it’s like to me it’s like not only is it funny and exciting to think to just like, yeah let’s go in the middle of the night, just make this big giant thing, but also I would want to do something really impressive that especially would just get the more credulous people really excited, you know.

0:18:21
And of course I would absolutely have to come out and confess to it because there’s no way I’d be able to hide that. But anyway.

BR: But no, so again, if we’re discussing copycats and particularly the strange things, I mean, again, crop circles are essentially a version of sort of copycat artistry that’s been and is going to continue to go on. So that’s one type of copycats. And then I want to touch on copycats that are sort of crimes inspired by other crimes. And so the one example that I actually talk about this in my book, Media Mythmakers, was in May 1996 there was a rash of a dozen church fires reported nationwide, five of which served mostly black congregations.

0:18:50
PR: Yeah, I recall that.

BR: You remember the whole thing?

PR: Yeah, sure.

BR: And it was a big thing at the time, and people assumed that it was, you know, that the white nationalists were burning down churches. And it was interesting because it was such a national problem that President Clinton went on TV to address it. Which is in itself, you know, interesting. I mean, church fires don’t necessarily bring out the President of the United States to, now these days Trump would just tweet about it, probably favorably, but, but you know, in this case, he announced that there would be a national task force.

0:19:33
And a year later that task force found that most of the 429 fires that they examined were not, they couldn’t find any actual racist motivation, most of them were copycats. It was someone would see a church burning on TV and you know, maybe reenactment and say, hell, I could do that, right? I mean, how hard is it to, and again, we’re not talking about the modeling. We’re not talking about Ben Durer’s modeling I was talking about before. They’re not seeing a behavior. It’s a copycat in terms of, hey, you know, I want to burn something too. And so they go into the nearest place and burn it down. So there was, again, no real evidence of a racist conspiracy or even a clear pattern. And many of them were committed by individuals acting alone or were juveniles, teenagers who they probably didn’t even know whose church it was.

0:20:34
They’re just, there’s a church, there’s burning going on.

PR: That kind of reminds me of the black metal church burnings in Norway in the early 90s. It’s definitely kind of a similar situation versus people who are kind of like loosely, Obviously, not at all affiliated, but they just keep seeing this as something they can do. But then you’re looking at people who obviously were prone to doing something like this to begin with.

BR: And what was interesting was that the task force actually concluded that in many states, the arsons of white churches increased more than the black churches.

0:21:13
And perversely, and this is sort of where the media’s effect comes in, Clinton’s announcement about the church fires actually led to more, not fewer, arsons. In fact, after his speech, the number of incidents nearly quadrupled. So there’s a handful of these going on. The President of the United States goes on TV and talks about this, and suddenly four times as many people are doing it. Why? Because the President of the United States is telling people about it. And it’s just fascinating to sort of see that dynamic going on. And of course for politicians and the news media, it’s a no-win situation, right?

0:21:56
Because you want to address it, I mean particularly if you think there’s a rise in racist search fires, that’s important. I mean, that should not be ignored or something to the right. On the other hand, we know for a fact there’s evidence that in at least some cases, you’ll make the problem worse by highlighting it. And it just exacerbates it and makes more people know about it. So anyway, that was one the one thing was fascinating was again a clear-cut example of how the president’s attention to something draws attention to it and causes more people to do it whereas it may have actually been smarter to just sort of you know not make a big announcement I mean, you know not not ignore it, but just not not give it any more ink than they needed to.

PR: I think that anyone who’s a parent will probably relate to that because children have a tendency to amplify whatever behavior they are getting the reaction from. It’s almost instinctive to me that I don’t overreact to my kids doing things that are bad.

0:23:08
I just stop it and talk to them as calmly as possible because any time you flip out or even worse, if it’s something that’s funny but they shouldn’t be doing, when you laugh, they just keep doing it. Just reinforce it. I swear, it’s all part of the same little web of human nature where people just, the more you point it out, the worse it gets.

Celestia Ward: Hey, Squares and hey, strangers. Celestia here with your Skeptical Fortune Cookie. Let’s see what’s inside this week. People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.

0:23:54
This is a very down-to-earth explanation of confirmation bias, and it comes to us from a fellow who made his name expressing things in a down-to-earth way, legendary and long-lived journalist Andy Rooney. More than just an opinionated pair of eyebrows, Rooney had a long and storied career as a journalist, beginning as a writer for Stars and Stripes during World War II, and then moving into radio and television shortly afterward. In addition to plenty of essays and behind-the-scenes news writing, Rooney, which began in 1978 and continued until 2011. He died at the age of 92, mere weeks after his last appearance on the show. Rooney’s segments were part curmudgeonly grandpa, part humor, part skepticism, and at times even part controversy. He expressed his views unapologetically and poked some sacred cows squarely in the eye. He was also an avowed atheist with what he admitted himself was a liberal bias, and he received the Emperor Has No Clothes Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation back in 2001. His clear, unacademic words spell out exactly what confirmation bias is, and in a way that we can all identify with, which is really, according to him, a writer’s job. To tell the truth in a way people can recognize as something they knew all along.

0:25:19
People will generally accept facts as truth, only if the facts agree with what they already believe. I miss Andy and his eyebrows. Now, let’s get you back to Ben and Pascual.

BR: Yeah, and I mean, so there’s other cases too. I mean, there was, you can go back to the Virginia Tech shooting in April of 2007 in Virginia. There was a senior named Seung-Hoo Cho who shot and killed 32 people. As you recall, it was a horrific case. And what happened was that in the weeks following the Virginia Tech massacre, according to the FBI, there were 50 copycat threats across the country. And so it’s, I mean, to be clear, they weren’t people who were copycatting the crime itself, they were people who were threatening to do so. And so they would call in fake threats, you know, I’m gonna come and shoot up the campus, you know, I’m gonna do like that guy Cho did.

0:26:30
And again, you know, 50 of them, at least 50. And it’s, again, they’re directly attributable to the news media coverage of this. And as I said before, it creates this sort of toxic bind where you wanna cover it, but you need, there’s a balance there. And of course, part of the problem is the news media’s default tendency to sensationalize it. Oh yeah. It’s not just like, this happened, it’s this happened and here’s 24 hour wall-to-wall coverage.

0:27:04
And at some point you’re like, okay, I think we got it. It’s not disrespectful to the victims to not hear about this for the next three months.

PR: That is a good point. I’ve always kind of felt like there’s a lot that can be explained by how the media has shifted. You and I both, we kind of come from the same generation on each end of Generation X. the local nightly news which covered just really local stuff and then maybe a couple of national pieces and then you know there was the national news or world news you know and you had Dan Rather getting out there and and talking about you know the major events of the day and then that was it and then you know your parents read the newspaper in the morning and and it was but it was like everything was just a small little serving of information and it was not at all sensationalized.

0:28:08
I mean I guess as the, I remember in the early 80s when terrorism and hijackings were kind of becoming more common, there was a little more coverage of that. But even then, you know, granted CNN was around, I think, when did they, I think they started right around that time, didn’t they? And so, but still it was like, you know, most of us got our news in just small portions throughout, you know, at the beginning of the day with the newspaper, end of the day with the local news and then the world news.

0:28:39
And a lot of national news just didn’t make it to you. You know, it was like if something happened, if the, you know, three people got shot in Chicago, you didn’t really hear about it, you know, you just, unless you lived there. And it was like the, so the world, I think a lot of the way people look back on things as being better, a lot of it may have had to do with the fact that you didn’t hear about a lot of the things that were happening. You know, a shooting of, of, you know, 32 people or a killing of 32 people would, would obviously make the national news, but, you know, you’d hear about it and then the next morning you’d read about it, and then you’d talk about it at work, and by the third day it probably wasn’t.

0:29:19
Three days later, nowadays, you’re still just 24 hours of, well, we don’t have anything new but we have to keep talking, so we’re going to keep talking about this thing that happened three days ago.

BR: Stay tuned for more speculation. I think you make a good point about that. There was, as you point out, at one point not too long ago, there were three stations.

0:29:46
The news came in during that time, and it wasn’t this continuous wall of coverage that was desperate to be fed. They assume if the news editors think that someone will watch it, they’ll run it. It doesn’t matter how banal it is, it doesn’t matter how exploitative it is, they’ll run with it. And I think that’s one of the key parts to trying to stem copycats, and I’m certainly not the first to say this. I mean, Loren Coleman in his book talks about that, and there’s been plenty of debate about it, particularly in the Charlottesville case, where you have all this media attention being put on events that are important, but where is that attention going?

0:30:38
Is that helpful? Another example is the anthrax hoaxes. You remember?

PR: I do. Not just the band, but yeah, that was a pretty big thing, and I recall a lot of anthrax by male threats.

BR: Yeah, yeah. I mean, in fact, so it was, again, it’s another perfect example of a copycat case where you had a handful of envelopes that were addressed, I think one of those to Tom Daschle, as I recall, that were actually traced down, turned out to be anthrax. But then after that, after the minuscule legitimate threat, came hundreds and hundreds of fake threats.

0:31:24
According to a New York Times story I’m looking at from January 1998 to April 2001, 172 false anthrax threats were made in the States. In fact, the estimate is there’s probably another 100 or so that were made but weren’t made public. So we’re talking hundreds of these. And one guy did some research on it, and he found that 2 thirds of them were perpetrated by lone wolf actors with motivations all over the map. So one guy sent in anthrax hoax because he wanted to go home early. One guy did it because he wanted to get out of a court date.

0:32:02
A couple people were teenagers who did it to avoid homework. Among the adult hoaxers, some had drug or alcohol problems and others were mentally ill. Again, you see the same pattern. You have this high-profile threat that is, in some ways, greatly exaggerated, right? Is the anthrax dangerous? Yes, it is. It was sent to fewer than a dozen people. Out of all the Americans in the country, this is very narrowly targeted.

0:32:39
No offense to the people that were targeted, it’s a horrible thing, but in terms of the actual overall threat, incredibly minuscule. Far more likely to die crossing a street or die of a heart attack or get hit by a comet than die of anthrax. And so you, but you have the news media that is just incessantly hyping this, talk about how dangerous it is, and you know, all these different things. So then you have people, and especially too with anthrax, where it’s so easy to fake. Talcum powder. Flour. Envelope. And, and incredibly expensive. Keep in mind that if you as with as with all the security measures you have to assume the worst right right you have to see if you put a suspicious package on a plane, they they they literally have to assume it’s a bomb. But what that does it creates this exaggerated overreaction to the actual threat.

0:33:37
And so anytime that some idiot puts a handful of talcum powder in an envelope and sends it off, you’re costing the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars to bring in hazmat and the whole thing, all because you thought it would be cute to make the news or to get out of work early. So anyway, there’s those. Let me touch briefly on another recent copycat panic that I wrote about, which is of course the scary clowns. Yeah, this time last year, as you may recall, in fact it was exactly this time last year, shortly before Halloween, there were clown panics across the United States and in fact around the world.

0:34:21
I think we’re planning on doing a show on that at some point.

PR: Yes, we are. We are.

BR: And I don’t want to give too much away for that show, but basically what happened was that there was a handful of people that were going into parks and scaring people dressed as clowns and a huge number of copycats. And what’s interesting about that case was that there were few, if any, well first of all, there were exactly zero actual clowns with machetes trying to kill anybody or abduct anybody. That number was zero. There was a small number, about a dozen, probably fewer, of people that dressed as clowns and pretended or threatened to scare kids or chase them with a machete or something stupid like that.

0:35:16
And who made threats about it. And like, you know, there was actually a school lock down There were schools that were locked down because of clown threats. And so, again, I don’t want to give too much away because we’ll be talking about it another time. But that was – it’s another recent case of clear copycat behavior where, you know, there were teenagers and other people who frankly have too much time on their hands. They see these videos online, social media, of a scary clown, and either they themselves go to the local, go to Walgreens, put on a clown mask, and you can make the national news.

0:35:54
And in some cases they did. And then there were actually, so then there were sort of hoaxes of hoaxes. There was one case I remember where a woman claimed that she had been attacked by a clown on her way to work. She said that she was getting in her car, going to work, and a clown jumped out and like scared her or something. Anyway, long story short, she faked it. Surprise, surprise. And she worked at McDonald’s.

0:36:17
So that was her. The reason she says she was attacked by a scary clown was she was late for work at McDonald’s and didn’t want to admit it.

PR: Which is pretty, I mean, I guess points for creativity, but there are much easier ways to come up with excuses, but I suppose the outlandish ones are a little, you question them less.

BR: So let’s turn from those to suicides. Copycat suicides because that’s the other sort of major category, right? That people talk about. And you know I mentioned before about some of the suicides in the wake of Kurt Cobain.

0:36:59
And you know and you and this is actually fairly common particularly in Japan. There’s when a high-profile pop figure dies, particularly in suicide, there’s also sorts of triggers there. It’s really kind of interesting. There’s lots of sociocultural reasons for that. But one case that I wrote about was a particularly gruesome type of suicide, which is self-immolation.

PR: That is really gruesome.

BR: That is no fun. And it was really interesting. I wrote about this in 2010, 2011. There was actually a cluster of these and these do tend to occur in clusters where there’s a spade of them and one sort of triggers others and then it sort of fades away.

0:37:54
In some ways, it’s sort of similar to mass hysteria where it becomes self-limiting in Is it because the idea is fueled by other people talking about it? Right. If no one’s talking about it, people don’t get the idea. It’s only when you’re talking about it, especially over and over and over again, that people say, hey, maybe I should do some of that. But in that case, in 2010, there was a guy in Tunisia that burned himself in a government protest. He set himself on fire on December 17, 2010 and his death made a martyr to Tunisians who were, this was during the time of the revolution, the green screens and that sort of thing, green screens for Iran type thing. And since that time there were a handful of other copycat suicides. A guy set himself on fire in Cairo, in Algeria, in Mauritania, and elsewhere.

0:38:55
And again, so even something as horrific as setting yourself on fire for some small percent of the population, that can be very compelling, particularly when you combine it with maybe religious fervor and political fervor. Keep in mind that the first person that set himself afire, Mohamed Bouzizi in Algeria in 2010, he was a martyr. He was a hero. People were, oh, this powerful man, he couldn’t take it anymore, he burned himself alive. Be like him. And so there was also this martyr victim aspect to it and people are like hell You know, I I want to give my life with revolution and this is this is sort of what happens So there was that and then of course we can move on to 13 Reasons Why.

PR: Yeah, we brought that up on an episode a while back, so there was a little bit of Hysteria around well, there’s a lot of fear around copycat suicide before even the show had come out.

0:40:03
And then I recall once it was out, there was a lot of people talking about that.

BR: Yeah, yeah. For those who don’t recall, and I didn’t see the series, I’ll be totally honest. I saw a little bit of one of them on YouTube. I didn’t see the series. I know about it. Did you happen to see it?

PR: No. My wife did, so I kind of caught a lot of it over her shoulder. And it’s not really my kind of show.

0:40:27
But yeah, she actually spoke about it pretty favorably, but never had any indication that she thought that it would inspire people. But yeah, that was definitely part of the discussion.

BR: Yeah, and I remember that very clearly. It was interesting to me because, as I mentioned before, again, I haven’t seen the series and so I don’t know whether, as I mentioned earlier, part of the concern with, for example, the after school specials was whether they actually depicted the act of suicide. Again, you can’t, in psychological terms, you can’t model the idea of suicide. You can model a way of suicide. You can model putting your head in a plastic bag.

0:41:17
If there’s some specific visual thing that you can, hey, I could do that, I can enact that, that’s one thing. But again, the general idea of ending your life is so ambiguous and amorphous and common that it’s not something that a person can latch onto specifically and act. And, you know, part of the reason they were concerned, I mean, there’s evidence, there was a study I was reading that talked about how being exposed to a classmate’s suicide was associated with being five times more likely to have suicidal thoughts. Now, it’s important to say that, you know, being five times more likely to have suicidal thoughts is not the same as being five times more likely to kill yourself.

0:42:00
Yeah, they’re not the same very important line right important distinction, but nonetheless I mean any increase in suicidal thoughts particularly in teenagers is Caused for concern sure, but lots of psychologists said that it’s unlikely that the show by itself would good would you know would would commit? We would cost someone to commit suicide pretty if they weren’t predisposed to it, right and again you see this over and over again, where among certain vulnerable populations, people who already are depressed, people who already have other symptoms associated with that, that may in fact be a trigger, the same way if a person is predisposed to anorexia. If everything else is lining up, then yes, if you’re right on the balance, maybe seeing a thin fashion model might tip you to the 51% that would do it.

0:42:53
But in most normal healthy people who aren’t predisposed to it psychologically or genetically, it’s probably not gonna have much of an effect. But what was interesting was the follow-up to the 13 Reasons Why. And from my research, I found at least five suicides or attempted suicides that were linked to 13 Reasons Why. Again, this is going back to the concerns about anorexia and people imitating what they see.

0:43:26
There were two girls in Austria that were 13 years old that apparently killed themselves after seeing the series and being influenced. There were two California teens that killed themselves in April just a couple days after seeing the show and they said that it acted as a trigger for them. There was also a man in Peru, a 23 year old that died in the hospital after being found by emergency services who had recently seen the series. Now again, I want to be very clear that the connections are indirect. I mean again, there there people kill themselves all the time without having seen the series and people see the series don’t kill themselves. So there’s the the overlap is not is not perfect. Nonetheless, it’s interesting because I was reading a statement from the National Association of School Psychologists and and they issued a statement saying “we do not recommend that vulnerable youth, especially those who have any degree of suicidal ideation watch the series.

0:44:29
Unfortunately, adult characters in the show, including the second school counselor who inadequately addresses Hannah’s pleas for help”, Hannah being the main character, “do not inspire a sense of trust or ability to help.” And then it goes on to just talk about how solution is not a suicide to problems, and the series does not emphasize the common among most suicide deaths is the presence of treatable mental illnesses. The people that kill themselves typically there’s a cluster of things, it’s not just one thing. So an otherwise well-adjusted normal healthy person who sees a show is not going to make them go over. It’s difficult to ascertain with 100% certainty that there was a direct link to this. But in at least these cases that I saw, there does seem a plausible link. And as with President Clinton highlighting church fires, it’s possible, and I don’t want to throw any shade here, but it’s possible that the producers of 13 Reasons Why led to people’s deaths. And again, I’m not saying they held a moral responsibility, but that is the risk, that is the danger, is that when you have a TV show like that, particularly one that is emotionally evocative and compelling, in certain circumstances, it can lead people to do this.

0:45:55
Again, I’m not blaming this show’s producers, I’m sure they have the best of intentions, but let’s not gloss over the fact that this can happen.

PR: Yeah, absolutely. I think that that’s, you know, and it’s, you can kind of cast it in maybe a more or more simple sort of example by talking about how like, you know, if you’re on the fence about something or you’re thinking about something and then, and then, you know, you see a commercial for it or you see a TV show that has that, like, you know, I don’t know, maybe you’ve been thinking about getting a motorcycle and then you get really into Sons of Anarchy and then you just decide to do it.

0:46:29
I think that there is something to be said about when an idea is already there, when the seed of an idea is already there, when you see it kind of played out in front of you even in a fictional sense, it can definitely inspire you to follow through or at least make you feel more comfortable with following through. I think that that’s something that advertising takes advantage of all the time. And so I think that that is very much in kind of human nature that someone would not necessarily be driven by the content, but inspired by the content in terms of having it presented to them because it creates a situation where now it’s visualized and now they see it happening and they can wrap their head around it a little bit. And unfortunately, in the case of suicide, I can imagine that it’s possible that depicting it and in certain ways that especially if they evoke just the right emotions in a person who’s already on that road, you know, could help them into that situation where they, you know, end up taking their own life.

0:47:36
BR: Sure, and even, I mean not to derail it, but even, you know, the larger ideas, for example, you take Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. It’s well established that several people who killed people, including Mark David Chapman, the killer of…

PR: John Lennon…

BR: John Lennon. He was absolutely inspired by Catcher in the Rye. He said, I mean repeatedly, there’s no question. And I think there’s at least three or four others that explicitly said, you know, I was driven to it. I was inspired by Catcher in the Rye. And so again, I’m not suggesting that Salinger holds any moral culpability here, but in any population, there’s gonna be a few people that are unbalanced and they’re going to get inspiration for that.

0:48:27
So let’s wrap it up with copycats that were claimed to have been inspired by the media. There are a couple I talk about in my Myth Makers book. In 1993, there were a couple, you may not recall this, but there were a couple high school football players that were injured reenacting a scene from The Program.

PR: Oh yeah, sure. I remember that, laying in the middle of the road.

BR: Laying in the middle of the road, right. I always call that. Right, and in the program, like, yeah, there’s a bravery thing, like, I’m gonna lay in the middle of the road as cars zoom by me.

0:48:58
Yeah. Like, okay.

PR: Yeah, that works on a movie set, but.

BR: That’s why they have Stuntman. That’s Stuntman and special effects tricks. But sure enough, and so again, you know, these, they were clearly inspired by the film. And there’s no, again, it’s not that someone else couldn’t have done that, it’s just that it was clearly connected temporarily and ideologically to the movie. There was also another case and I wrote a little bit of this, there was a case, there was an action film called Money Train, and there was a scene in there and I remember I saw it a long long time ago where there was a person that squirted lighter fluid into a Brooklyn subway token booth and sets it afire.

0:49:41
And somebody did that. There was actually, yeah, I don’t know if someone was killed or not, but someone was injured and I think it may have happened twice. And again, not that combining lighter fluid with that particular attack was known in the world thought about, obviously a screenwriter did, but seeing that said, hey, that could be funny or sick or whatever else they thought. There are cases like that where there’s clearly some copycat connection between a film and what people later on do. There was actually another case I want to talk about. There was a woman who claimed in 2013 that she’d been abducted in the trunk of her car and she called a dispatcher from the trunk of her car saying that she’d been abducted by gunpoint in Austin, Texas and she lost consciousness and she was being driven around in her trunk of her car.

0:50:38
And the next day she was forced to the trunk of her car doused with bleach and driven around until her kidnapper left the scene and the police of course, you know, were trying to find this woman. They later found surveillance camera footage of her at McDonald’s when she said that she was, this had actually happened. So the story fell apart. So she, they said, look, you know, you, you weren’t kidnapped. You’re right here. There’s no, and she, she admitted, okay, I made the whole thing up. But the weird copycat aspect, it was that, that since her arrest, several of her friends and co-workers said that she told police that she was inspired by a movie called The Call, which I think had Halle Berry as the 9-1-1 dispatcher.

0:51:24
PR: Oh, yeah, I do remember that.

BR: And it’s about this woman calling 9-1-1 from the trunk of her car, and so she’s like, hey, that could actually happen. And what’s weird about the case besides that is that there are actually several cases. I found two other cases in addition to that one where there are women who have called the police pretending they were abducted in the trunk of a car. Like yeah, like why would, of all the things like you know, that you’re just like hey why not, right? And of course these days they actually have latches, glow-in-the-dark latches, that are built in exactly so that can’t happen. Now if it’s an overmodeled car or whatever else, but I think that it’s… And to be fair, I mean there are actual cases where that happens, but in at least three cases, these people are like, they clearly copycatted this movie, The Call, and they want to do that.

0:52:22
And then I just want to touch on one other case, which is a non-copycat crime. And this is a case that is widely believed to be a copycat crime, but is not. And I talk about this in my book, Bad Clowns, and that is the case of James Holmes in the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooter that shot up the Batman film, Dark Knight Rises. rises. He showed up at this midnight screening and he had a bulletproof vest and riot helmet along with a gas mask. The immediate assumption was that he was emulating a character in the film, Bane. The Batman villain Bane, he also wears bulletproof armor, and he breathes through the mask, although it’s not a gas mask, it’s a regular mask.

0:53:18
For those who’ve seen it, I’ve seen it, I’m sure you’ve seen it. So again, it was interesting because the assumption was, well, here he is, he’s shooting people, he’s being violent at this movie, in this screening, this Batman, he must be acting like the villain. Well, the problem was that he couldn’t have been inspired by it because he hadn’t seen it yet. That was the very first screening. So it’s not like he’s seen this several times and he’s enacting it. He’d never been there before. He couldn’t have been inspired. He could maybe have been inspired by a publicity steal or something. But the fact is that he was basically dressing appropriately for his plan of attack.

0:54:01
If you’re going to be in a shootout and you’re going to use a gas mask or a grenade, which he was planning to do, that’s what you would wear, a bulletproof vest and a gas mask. So then people, so then at that point their narrative fell apart. Like, okay, I guess he couldn’t really be inspired by Bane because, oh, the Joker. It’s like, well he’s clearly inspired by the Joker, because he had his hair dyed red and all these other things. So it was fascinating watching this in real time, because they blame it on the DC Comics villain, Bane.

0:54:37
And then they’re like, oh, no, I guess that doesn’t work. Oh, hold on, he’s acting like the Joker. Of course, the Joker doesn’t wear a gas mask or bulletproof armor, whatever. So then the narrative shifted and latched on to this day that James Holm was inspired by the Joker. And I won’t go into the whole thing, you can read about it in the chapter in my book, but basically the whole thing fell apart. There were like two or three reasons why people thought he was inspired by the Joker. The first one was his hair, which was dyed red. Except the Joker doesn’t have red hair.

0:55:13
Joker has green hair. Very, very long history of green hair.

PR: Very long. It’s always been green.

BR: So the fact that his hair was red is only significant if the Joker had red hair, which he doesn’t. Holmes also didn’t. He made no attempt at all to dress like the Joker.

0:55:31
They didn’t wear makeup. And there’s literally nothing in what James Holmes did that had any connection to Batman or the Joker. He just happened to show up and attack. But in the public’s mind, the connection was obvious. Well, why else would he shoot up a Batman screening? Well, because crazy people do these things. Anyway, so there again, I won’t go into the, you can read more about it in the Clowns book, but it was just fascinating how, again, to this day, I have arguments with people who just, oh, James Holmes was inspired by this joke.

0:56:05
No. I researched that. No, you’re wrong.

PR: Yeah, the only popular clown I can think of with red hair is Ronald McDonald, so if you want to start arguing that, maybe we can have a discussion. Right, knock yourself out.

BR: So I guess in the end, all I would just say is that blaming the media for social problems is nothing new. It’s always been the go-to. You know this better than most people. There’s some social problem, homelessness, poverty, race, take your pick, blame the media, blame Dungeons and Dragons, blame Death Metal, blame the Saw series, take your pick.

0:56:48
PR: Sure, sure. Yeah, it’s definitely something that I’ve, you know, been party to quite often in my life and and, you know, and found myself on the defensive end of it quite frequently in the music world. And, you know, I hate to you know, I don’t like to argue with people who are hurting over something bad that happened, which I really generally just avoid if I can, because, you know, it’s, number one I don’t speak for the people that do these things and so right whether or not it had to do with the world I exist In you know I can’t speak to the person’s actions right and you know and really just I think a lot of people are you know they look for answers

0:57:28
in situations that just don’t have clear answers and they’re in and I Understand the instinct to just go for whatever you can find and the problem is you start going down some very confusing, very dark avenues when you start reaching for these very tenuous things. So I think it’s important to try to keep your perspective a little broad on those situations.

BR: And so that’s just what I would say is that the copycat phenomenon, it’s fascinating psychologically, socially, culturally, and otherwise. Everything again from, you know, from violent video games to Beavis and Butthead being blamed for burning down a house. I mean, there’s just such a long history of this.

0:58:17
And so, you know, I think that the takeaway is that, you know, yes, this is a real thing and it’s a complex issue. It’s not black and white, it’s not simple, and oftentimes the tendency to sort of knee-jerk, blame entertainment media is misplaced. I would say that, if anything, the news media should do a better job. I’m frankly less worried about violent video games and Game of Thrones and violence there but I am about the CNN and their excessive coverage of every shooting and milking it for every sensationalist drop.

PR: Definitely I agree with you on that and I think that you know covering real life to that extent is not a healthy thing to do and it doesn’t really help us as a society, you know, because being informed generally, you know, at least in my opinion, has more to do with just knowing facts and not forming, you know, assumptions out of those, you know.

0:59:28
So, and I think that the, you know, as you see, and when anything bad happens, the first thing the news media does is just start speculating. And it’s, you know, it’s not good. I mean, we don’t need 24-7 coverage of things that happen every time they happen unless they are ongoing things that affect everyone’s lives.

BR: Exactly.

PR: We would like to thank our sponsor-level patrons, Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’d like to find out what that is and how to become one, head over to patreon.com forward slash squaringthestrange.

1:00:12
Patronage starts at just a buck, and there are a lot of perks and bonus content just for our patrons.

BR: If you’d like to lend your moral support, you can head over to iTunes and give us a review. Every five-star review gets us a little more visibility on the iTunes podcast charts and brings a smile to Pascual’s face.

PR: So that about does it for us this week. We are going to be live at the New Mexico Podscape Fest this weekend.

BR: Podscape sounds like something, invasion of body snatchers.

PR: Yeah, I don’t know. Are they going to put us in a pod? I don’t know.

1:00:56
BR: I don’t know.

PR: We’ll find out. Yeah, I guess we’ll find out. That’s this Saturday. We go on at noon, right?

BR: Yes, I believe we go on at noon, and as it happens, that date, September 23rd, is apparently the latest in a long series of doomsday apocalypse predicted dates. So in honor of that we’ll be discussing doomsdays and apocaly… apocaly… apocaly… apocali? yeah that’s a that’s a weird word. Apocalypsies?

PR: So yeah we and that’s gonna be over at the Albuquerque Press Club. So for those of you who live in town come on down check it out it’s gonna be going on all day and we will be recording it and we will be releasing it probably as bonus content first, but then we’ll probably cut it into an episode later.

1:01:46
But yeah, definitely come check that out. But also next week we have a new episode coming out and that is going to be on the history of conspiracy theories, which I love. I’m a huge fan of conspiracy theories and not a huge fan of the people that promote them, but a huge fan of the crazy and wacky stuff people come up with. It’s it’s just a wild world and I I get my heart rate up over some of these arguments once in a while. But I’m excited to talk about that. So

BR: Fun fun interesting bizarre stuff as long as you don’t go too far down that rabbit hole.

PR: Which is why we’re covering the history of it, right because we really don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. But it’s going to be really interesting. We’ll get a little more perspective on it than your average skeptic podcast would. So until next week, we’ll see you then. Bye.

1:02:39
by memory, guitar and feather and Pascual Romero. Content producer, Celeste Jawori. Audio engineering, producing and editing provided by Pascual Romero at Acronis Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero and of course, our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of squaring strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Acronis Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers or any affiliated organizations and employers.