Class Canceled!

You just knew it had to happen. After the horrific tragedy at Virginia Tech, where a student gunned down numerous faculty and students, it was to be expected that there would be overreactions to any perceived threat at Universities around this shocked nation.

Well, we were all informed (via email in a timely manner) that a professor the University of Minnesota Twin Cities had found a bomb threat and this resulted in the campus being evacuated and classes being canceled. Of course, the campus had no choice but to do this. To me, the interesting fact is that this reaction is quite different now, because of the situation, than it would have been had we not been so temporally close to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

I can imagine opportunistic organizations taking advantage of this to sell expensive "remote student contact" systems to campuses at astronomical prices. Administrators will probably fall over themselves to show that they are being responsible by pointing to huge expenditures on high-priced, high-tech systems that will allow every student to be instantly contacted should there ever be a repeat of the Tech situation. Is it worth it? Well, I'd say yes if you consider the costs and benefits not purely in economic terms but social and psychological terms. Think how you would feel if you didn't do it and then faced a crisis where the system would have helped.

Psychologists refer to this as "counterfactual thinking" and it has a huge influence on our present behavior. While traditionally counterfactual thinking has focused on our thinking about a past that did not happen, there is increasing interest in future counterfactuals (thinking about a possible future) and its impact on our behavior. A Google search for "counterfactual thinking" or "counterfactual thought" should provide you with enough research articles to keep you busy through the next crisis.

Interestingly, a whole other stream of research suggests that "copycat" killings are more likely after such a widely publicized incident. In psychology, this has been referred to as the "Werther Effect" and the findings by researchers studying this are chilling. Although the Werther Effect has dealt with the impact of highly publicized suicide stories on the suicide rate, the underlying psychological factors would apply just as well to highly publicized murder stories. Let's hope we don't see a spate of such killings on campus in the next couple of months.