When someone mentions school shootings, we generally think of it as a typically ‘American’ phenomenon.  Indeed, if you look at histories or timelines of school shootings, the US seems to dominate the records.  Michael Moore’s famous documentary reveals how violent American culture is and seems to point the finger in that direction.  But in light of last week’s school shooting in Athens, “Greece’s first school shooting,” the practices seems to be spreading outside US borders.

Similar to disordered behaviors like bulimia, school shootings seem to be a mostly Western phenomenon, and specifically an American one.  Yet, these behaviors are slowly spreading over the globe.  There are numerous explanations for behavioral influences (check out Loren Coleman’s interesting book about social contagion, The Copycat Effect).  However, the issue of information cascades and clustering gives us a new angle.

Disordered behaviors often occur in clusters.   Coleman’s book discusses suicide clusters as does David Phillips’ break-through research on the Werther Effect.  Cornell professor, Janis Whitlock, does research on internet communities and the spread of self-injurious behavior.  See project page.  The aforementioned bulimia could be thought of as occurring in an ‘American’ cluster.  However all these issues— suicide, school shootings, bulimia, and self-injury— have become household concepts and parts of everyday life for most Western teenagers.  Clusters seem like a robust defense mechanism for the global network, but appear to only stop a cascade up to a certain point.  Real danger occurs when the behaviors break out of their clusters or components and into others, spreading across the network and around the globe.

Likewise, danger comes from how unpredictable disordered or violent behaviors can be.  Though some general profiling can be done based on gender, peer status and a few other factors, it is extremely hard to anticipate who is likely to adopt self-injury, an eating disorder, or aggressive violence. The behaviors break out of their original niches, cliques, or clusters and become absorbed into the daily norm for teenagers, making it hard for outsiders (adults) to pinpoint their origin or mechanisms.

If we could figure out what the deciding factors are that push individual teens and/or populations over their thresholds or what alters the nature of their network ties, perhaps we could better cope with these phenomenon and hopefully prevent a significant degree of human suffering.