Children
School killings - the social proof we are creating
By Reprinted with permission from author
Feb 24, 2008 - 12:35:48 PM

What is happening to our society.  My daughter is a student at NIU and lives in the residence hall right next to the location of the tragic shootings.  NIU, Virginia Tech, Columbine, on and on and on.

This time at NIU I hear people saying how unexpected it was.  How he was such a smart person.  How nobody saw it coming...even so called experts.  Even his close friends.  Or are they just denying they ever suspected something.

I am not going to judge these people, nor am I going to judge the killers.  They did a terrible thing.  This is undeniable.

Who is to blame?  Let's see.  My knee jerk response goes as follows.  The killer is to blame.  The gun delaer.  The drugs he was not taking.  His mental disease.  The amount of security in the building.  There were no metal detectors.  There was not a badge id system for every single building.  There was not a guard in every classroom at all times.  There was not an armed guard in every classroom.  The students were not armed.  And on and on.

Our response to this craziness will be the same.  Why did he kill those people?  We have to figure out the motive.  We have to increase security so we can stop these incidents from happening again.  We need to prevent people with guns from getting into the buildings.  We need to train our people to better pick up on people who are planning to travel 80 miles to kill people in classrooms they taught in.

How come no one is asking deeper questions like why do people resort to such heinous violence?  Where do they get these ideas?  What has made people believe that if I have problems it is socially acceptable to kill people?

Where?  I wonder.  There are many researchers who have studied this.   Albert Bandura and Robert Cialdini have both done research on Social Proof.  Social Proof is an influence factor.  We look to others for what is right and wrong.  Dr.  Bandura did research in which he showed children how to act in certain situations by showing them films of children or adults acting things out or behaving in certain ways.  The children often enacted both positive and negative behaviors often from just one viewing.

So now where do you think people are getting the social proof in how to act.  What is socially acceptable to do.

Let me name a few.  The movies, the news and video games.  I am not an expert but I would say video games are very powerful influencers.  Why??

Video games put the player in the first person.  They control the acts of the game including mass killing with no repercussions except having to hit play again.  Ever wonder why a good story can teach lessons far better that cold hard facts.  Good stories reach us from our deeper selves...some people call it our source.  Stories help us relate and empathize with facts.

Our minds can often not separate an actual experience from imagining an experience.

We let our kids play these games thinking they can separate reality from fun...and they are also not bugging us, they are safe at home and all the other kids are playing these games so they must be okay.

The movies and news are not without blame as well.  The news seems to love these stories.  What do you think advertising these killings does?  Look at all the attention I will get if I do a heinous crime.  This is what some people who are socially troubled want.

Look at the recent killings at Virginia Tech and NIU.  What is in common?  Video games.  He never bothered anyone except he played his video games really loudly...and what kind of video games do you think they were?  Donkey Kong? Asteroids?  Maybe not.

Let's get real here.  There needs to be a serious intervention about these games we are letting educate our society.  The tobacco companies are sued for their role in causing addiction to smoking and also with lung disease.  Is this any different to the addiction to video games and the damage caused to individuals sense of responsibility and to society when people die?  I don't think there is much of a difference at all.

But people have choices not to play these games.  Sorry this excuse does not work.  People had choices not to smoke, too.

Just like there has been a drastic change in smoking social proof as well as the structures in our society to prevent its allowance, we need this same shift in what we are allowing our children and even adults to feed their minds with.  I am not against freedom of speech etc, but I am against the denial we have of who is responsible.  As Einstein said the problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

Solving a problem by piling on solutions is not the best long term answer.  There are school killings.  Let's put more security at the schools, malls, stores etc.  This is not necessarily a bad thing to do but it is not sufficient.  It does not address the underlying issue that will manifest itself in other areas...ever squeeze a ballon and it bulges in one area.  When you push in that bulge it bulges somewhere else.  This is what is like to address real issues with superficial solutions.

Stop this madness with systemic solutions not with a knee jerk response.  This is everyone's responsibility, not just law enforcement's, the school's, the mentally distraught, the prison system, the injured and the killed.