What is the Werther effect and what is the cause of herding?
In 1774, Goethe published his first novel, The Suffering of Young Werther. The book brought the writer instant fame and gained such popularity among the public that impressionable young people of Europe, following the example of the protagonist, armed themselves with two pistols and dressed in blue tailcoats and yellow pantaloons. This, however, did not end the matter. At the end of the novel, Werther, tormented by unhappy love and rejected by his beloved, commits suicide. As it turned out, the fashion spread to this too - soon after the publication, a wave of fake suicides swept across Europe, often with the fatal volume lying in place of this act. This led to the banning of the distribution of the novel and of Werther's style of clothing in Leipzig, the book was also banned in Copenhagen and throughout Italy.
The described case is not at all a historical curiosity, something unique and out of the ordinary. After Nikolai Karamzin published the story Poor Liza in 1792, in which a girl drowns in a pond for the same reasons as Werther, a series of imitations was observed in the Russian Empire. Not only works of art in which people take their own lives had similar consequences, but also hundreds of resonant suicides of real people. The most famous among them are the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in 2010, which at the same time gave rise to the Tunisian revolution.
The term "Werther effect" was introduced by the American sociologist David Phillips in 1974 to conceptualize the described phenomenon. The researcher and his colleagues noticed a striking correlation. After examining the statistics of suicide in the United States over several decades, they found that within two months of massive media coverage of suicide, the number of people choosing to commit suicide increases significantly. But what is really puzzling is the fact that immediately after a major suicide story, the likelihood of a commercial aircraft crash increases by 1000%. The number and fatalities of fatal car accidents are also skyrocketing. Moreover, the main authors of suicides and similar "accidents" are people belonging to the same social and age group and region,as the culprit of the initial suicide.
This gives us additional evidence of the power that man's natural propensity to imitate has. When we choose how to behave, the main source of our decisions is the behavior of other people, both those who lived before us and those around us now. This mechanism is justified from the point of view of evolution and is very useful, as it allows you to learn from important social experiences. It allows you to bypass the wolf pits invisible to us and not waste time solving problems that others have already found an approach to. Imitation and submission to authority are such powerful instincts also because without them the development and safety of offspring is impossible. If a child, who still does not know anything about the world, does not reproduce the forms of behavior of those around him, his life turns out to be very short. He must take on faiththat you can't eat those delicious-looking berries, approach the edge of a cliff, or tease poisonous snakes. He must take an example from the actions of adults, otherwise he will not be able to learn anything.
Like everything useful, however, instinctive imitation can fail. Regressive behaviors, useless or downright destructive habits and life choices are often subjected to blind copying. Such, for example, are superstitions that have stretched to our time from the deep depths of centuries. The degree of maturation and the stage of individual development are determined precisely by the degree to which the decisions we make are really ours. Whether the perceived ideas and behaviors have passed the honest test of our own judgment, the crucible of independent intellectual analysis and synthesis.
It is, of course, impossible to completely get rid of imitation, and there is a situation in which the tendency to resort to it is especially all-encompassing and its destructive potential is therefore maximum. This is the state of uncertainty. Not knowing what to do, not wanting to take responsibility and painfully strain our mental strength, we readily respond to any external influences. Hesitation, uncertainty, ambiguity are some of the most unpleasant psychological experiences in our life. It is not surprising because a person persistently strives to get rid of them and is so relieved when he makes a decision, even if it is wrong. People who have fallen victim to the Werther effect are those who are on the verge of the most important decision - the choice between life and death. They are not capable of their action even in this matter. Any breeze, spoken word, newspaper article or reportage can push them to the left or to the right, to life or death, marriage or separation, heroism or meanness. One need not think, however, that such spinelessness is something rare - on the contrary, this is the usual position of the individual, although this is not always so clearly striking.
In science there is such a concept as a bifurcation point - the state of the system before a sharp qualitative leap, before the transition to a new state. The simplest physical example of bifurcation is the freezing or boiling of water, when a slow accumulation of quantitative transformations (a gradual change in temperature) at one moment leads to a rapid change in the quality of the entire system. In philosophy, psychology, and catastrophe theory, a bifurcation point often represents a state of the system before a qualitative leap, when it is impossible to predict exactly where this leap will occur - towards "freezing", "boiling" or some other. The system is seething chaotically, it is ready to step in any direction and itself "does not know" what will happen to it. Any external influence is capable of launching an unstoppable movement along one of the many opening trajectories.
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A person at the point of bifurcation can be provoked by anything, not least by an example of someone else's behavior. Then, inspired and gaining strength, he swallows a handful of sleeping pills or puts a bullet in his temple. Then he directs his car into a head-on collision and takes a few more random oncoming people with him into oblivion. Then he, consciously or semi-consciously, makes a mistake while piloting an airplane and provides a "qualitative leap" for tens or hundreds of passengers. Then he goes up to the roof of the building, shoots the crowd with a machine gun and commits suicide, as happened in Las Vegas in 2017.
Man is usually too weak to make his own decisions, too tormented by the anxiety of uncertainty. He is happy to delegate them to the occasion, or willingly hand over his will to totalitarian systems - a political leader or a religious authority, who will do it for him, giving his soul the longed-for peace. He flees from freedom, burdens with it, because freedom means responsibility. Freedom requires the exertion of mental and spiritual forces, it implies the need to choose, plan, take risks, fight, overcome oneself, and create. Rejection of it, no matter how clear its reasons may be, is always fraught, for it is a betrayal of the best part of our personality, its constructive and progressive instincts.
The Werther effect is an extreme embodiment of human spinelessness, a phenomenon in which the latter reaches grotesque exaggeration. He demonstrates that even in matters of life or death, let alone problems of a lesser caliber, a person cannot make his decision. Unconsciously admitting his own intellectual bankruptcy, he leaves the decision at the mercy of chance, or, which is hardly better, entrusts himself into the greedy hands of a leader, leader, ideology.
This spinelessness - just like herding and dependence - is a consequence of the deep laziness of man. It allows you to enjoy the comfort of unambiguity that has not been worked out, has not been earned by your own inner effort to extract it. Delegating the main choices in life to external forces, we relieve ourselves of the heavy burden of freedom and in return receive the “gift” of limitation. If addiction, moreover, with skillful deceit disguises itself, becomes user-friendly, as it happens in the modern world, the person is completely crushed by it. The most complete slavery reigns where it is not realized, for in this case there are no conditions for rebellion. But how not to become a weather vane, mindlessly swaying in the wind? How not to run to the store at the click of an advertising whip, not to grab a gun after reading a book,not to march on the orders of the leader? How not to turn into a hologram and a projection of external forces? For this, a person must dare to do something rare, difficult, but salutary. To dare to make your decisions, which in turn requires a constant willingness to pay the required price for it - to endure the discomfort of self-creation and persistent use of one's own judgment.