In previous posts of the Forensic View and elsewhere (e.g., Sharps, 2024), we have seen that violence and criminal behavior can be promoted by certain forms of brain damage, as well as by the desire for gain, and that the “good” nature believed by many people to be inherent in the human species is no guarantee against criminal violence. But what other psychological factors, outside the prospect of gain, can promote violent or criminal behavior, especially when all the perpetrator is likely to gain from such behavior is a prison record?

Bandura (1977) showed that human beings tend to imitate those who appear to be powerful, or to be rewarded for their actions. When a ”model” was observed by children to assault a ”bobo doll” punching bag, the children generally tended to attack the bag with greater frequency and intensity, especially if the model was an adult (and hence relatively powerful by child standards), or was seen to be rewarded for the violent action. This “modeling” behavior was basic to the development of social learning theory.

Bandura’s studies were conducted with children, of course, but the imitative impulse is by no means eliminated by the onset of adulthood. Fashion stands as an excellent example. Practically nobody wears a disco shirt anywhere today, but in the 1970s there were settings in which, if a male wasn’t wearing one, his romantic prospects dropped practically to zero. Even today’s adults, many of whom believe themselves to be immune to the vagaries of fashion, don’t typically show up at funerals wearing Grateful Dead T-shirts; and whatever we wear to a funeral, we typically don’t even use the term anymore; we imitate others in using the euphemism ”celebration of life,” and the use of the older term may be seen as insensitive at best.

Imitative modeling also operates powerfully in the realm of weapon selection, both in the criminal realm and outside of it. In the 1970s’ “Dirty Harry” movies, the hero, a San Francisco police inspector, wielded a .44 Magnum revolver, a weapon that under most conditions is completely inappropriate for law enforcement service, as well as for the needs of most private citizens. Yet large numbers of private citizens, on seeing the movie, went out and bought not only .44 Magnums, but the exact model and type of .44 enthusiastically employed by Dirty Harry; many people bought one for the express purpose of “home defense,” even though some of the purchasers proved unable even to handle the massive weapon effectively (see Sharps, 2024).

In more modern times, many terrorists have chosen a semiautomatic version of the M-16 or AR-15 military rifle (the only version typically available to civilians) as their chosen weapon of destruction, even when that specific weapon was entirely inappropriate for their nefarious purposes (e.g., Sharps, 2024). The M-16 in its fully-automatic version is of course a military weapon; military personnel are typically seen as powerful and as rewarded in a variety of ways for their actions, so it’s not terribly surprising that people, including criminal terrorists, would tend to imitate them in terms of weapon selection.

But wait a minute. The M-16 is no longer used as a primary weapon, at least in the American military services. It’s been supplanted by more modern firearms. True; but one sees the weapon being used all the time by actors portraying soldiers on TV and in the movies.

We are perfectly capable, as human beings, not only of imitating other living people, but also of imitating whatever we see in media and in video games; and just* being *on TV, or in the movies, or being the subject of a video game, may render a character sufficiently powerful and rewarded to be worth the modeling.

If you doubt this, recall the 2014 homicidal attack on a young girl by two of her female friends, who were inspired to stab her 19 times to appease the “Slender Man,” in part to prove that this completely fictional supernatural character was real! This attempted human sacrifice to what, in essence, was an admittedly sinister cartoon character was found to have involved mental health concerns on the part of the would-be murderers; but the fact remains that they were inspired to model behaviors that, at least to their knowledge, were only to be found on the “creepypasta” sections of the Internet.

Still, most people don’t have similar mental health concerns, and they’re probably not spending very much time in the creepypasta world. A lot of us just watch good old-fashioned TV.

So, one afternoon last week, about the time that schoolchildren are generally coming home, I examined the offerings of a popular satellite TV service. I looked at 50 channels. Five were immediately discarded, as they provided only news and weather coverage.

But the remaining 45 channels, simultaneously and in combination, offered the discerning viewer 5 instances of juvenile delinquency; 3 cases of swindling and embezzling; 6 instances of narcotics use and sale; 10 instances of supernatural violence, nine of which were horribly lethal; 10 homicides of varied and imaginative types; 4 sex crimes; 6 kidnappings; and 4 other cases of sublethal violence. Interestingly, in the majority of these instances, substantial levels of approval or at least justification were provided for the given crime. Many of the killers and criminals were at least tacitly powerful and/or rewarded.

Other than those channels, and the news and weather, you had a choice between a couple of guys building a fish tank and a guy wandering around a junkyard trying to find something to buy. Also, there was a riveting show about pottery.

The intent of the Forensic View is not to make societal recommendations, nor to castigate anybody; but scientifically, we do know that human beings imitate the powerful and rewarded. We might therefore question the wisdom of saturating modern media users, a category which includes practically everybody, in a mighty media swamp of examples of how best to gain a prison record through crime and violence.

References

Bandura, A. 1977. Social learning theory. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice‐Hall.

Sharps, M.J. 2024. The Forensic View: Investigative Psychology, Law Enforcement, Space Aliens, Exploration, and the Nature of Madness. Amazon.