I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s newest New Yorker article, Thresholds of Violence: How school shootings catch on.
Gladwell references a theory first published nearly 40 years ago by sociologist Mark Granovetter.
“Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.”
Gladwell applies this theory to school shootings and says that a lot of kids and young adults who are currently planning and executing mass shootings may actually have pretty high thresholds of violence; that is, they really don’t have an inherent, evil desire to do harm or any real emotional reason to do so. He also gives evidence that at least one of these young people has planned or committed violent/mass shootings as a “symptom” of being on the autism spectrum (!).
The whole thing is fascinating. It makes me wonder, are you more, less, or just as worried as you’ve ever been about encountering a gunman on campus or in the grocery store?