Our minds recoil in horror. We try to imagine what it must have been like to be one of those victims...and what it is like to be a survivor or someone who loved one of the victims. It's terrifying, and more terrifying the more we think about it. We wonder what the reasons might be. And we see this latest mass murder as part of a pattern of increasing incidence, increasing danger.
On that last point: we're mostly wrong about the pattern of increasing incidence (though there's one small way in which we're right). There are four main things that contribute to our mistaken pattern detection:
- We're hard-wired to detect patterns. Our brains can largely be thought of as pattern-detection machines, highly evolved to see patterns like threats and sources of food. This pattern detection is completely subconscious; we can neither control or perceive it. It's a nearly universal part of our daily experience: it lets us recognize faces, detect odors of rotten foods, see birds in the forest, hear one voice in a noisy room, and so on. It's also a famously error-prone ability: we constantly perceive patterns where there are none at all. One very clear and famous example has almost been rendered obsolete by technology - remember the “static” you'd see on the screen of an old-fashioned TV set? Anyone who sits and stares at such a screen for a few minutes will think they see movement on the screen – a pattern in the noise. In fact, careful measurement by scientists shows that there is no such movement. It's our over-active pattern detector at work again, trying hard to find patterns amongst the noise. In the case of mass murders, our pattern detector is also putting together recent memorable events (more on that below) to make a pattern – but examined objectively, that pattern is just barely there (see the last point in this post).
- Proximity bias. This is a very well-known perception bias: we remember the things most proximate to us (in either space or time) much better than the things far away. Both space and time apply to our perception of mass murders. How many Americans are aware of the mass murders that occurred in, say, India (and there were many)? We might even have heard about some of them on the news, but they're far away so we don't remember then nearly as well as those that occur close to home. More relevant here, though, is that we don't remember mass murders that happened in the past as well as the ones that happened more recently – even those that occurred in our own lifetime. People of my age (60) will immediately remember Sandy Hook, Columbine, Gabby Giffords, etc. – but do you remember the Texas Clock Tower shootings, and the Chicago Student Nurse House murders? Or how about a little further back in time, to 1927 and the Bath School Disaster in which a bomber killed 38 school children and 7 adults (the worst mass murder of children in U.S. history)? These older mass murders don't hold the prominence in our minds that the more recent ones do, and they aren't being considered by our subconscious pattern detection.
- Absolute vs relative numbers. This is another perceptual bias, and one that is particularly difficult for many people to wrestle with. In the year 2000 there were about 4 times as many mass murders in the world as there were in the year 1900 – the absolute number of mass murders went up by 400%. Many people would look at that fact and say to themselves “See, there are more mass murders today!” But combine this with the fact that the world's population increased by the same amount (from 1.6 billion to 6.4 billion, or 400%) and you get a different picture. The rate of mass murders per capita (the relative number of mass murders) didn't increase at all.
- Instantaneous worldwide reporting. This is an artifact of the electronic age we live in. In the U.S., we heard about the murders committed by Anders Breivik at the same time the Norweigans did, thanks to the pervasive nature of TV and the Internet. We all saw the same photos and videos, and at nearly the same time. Not so many years ago, it would be days before we heard about the incident, if we heard about it at all. It certainly would not have been top of the news cycle for days on end. This phenomenon of “connectedness” that is now nearly worldwide means that we're much more likely to be aware of contemporary mass murders than we would of those that occurred earlier within our own lifetime.
There is one actual increase in mass murders that I'm aware of, albeit one that's nearly impossible to measure (though its effect can't be very large, as the overall statistics show little increase in the mass murder rate over the past 200 years). In the 1950s there was a broad push in many countries to stop the practice of committing and institutionalizing the mentally ill. In the U.S., this culminated with the Community Mental Health Centers Act in 1963, which banned the practice of institutionalization except for very specific cases where the mentally ill person was a clear and present danger to themselves or others. Before this act went into effect, it was relatively easy for a family (generally with the cooperation of their family doctor) to commit a mentally ill person to an institution for life. After the act went into effect, commitments to a mental institution were difficult and revocable (in fact, regularly reviewed). As a very direct result of this act, tens of thousands of mentally ill people who would have been institutionalized under the old system are now as free as everyone else. Some of these people, one must presume, are amongst the perpetrators of mass murders since 1963.
However, we must be very careful contemplating this – and I want to be perfectly clear that I am not advocating a return to easy commitment. First of all, the previous system was demonstrably rife with gross miscarriages of justice – people who were merely inconvenient to their families, and not mentally ill at all, were committed to a life sentence in those institutions. Such abuse proved impossible to stop; it was just too tempting for the unscrupulous and evil. Secondly, it's demonstrable that many of our modern mass murders would never have been committed, even under the previous system. We often hear, with famous hindsight, that the perpetrators were “odd” – but that's very different than saying that they were sufficiently odd or disturbed that they would have been committed. The vast majority of the time these perpetrators surprise those who knew them best.
It's no comfort to know that the rate of mass murders isn't actually dramatically increasing. But maybe it will help us organize our fears a little better. You (and your children) are vastly more likely to die of a car “accident”, lightning strike, bee sting, or cancer than as the victim of a mass murderer...
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