Copycat Crime & The Media

Those people known as "copycats" are influenced by the medias effect on their emotional values. This influence appears to depend upon their individual state of mind, and the circumstances that surround them. The copycat uses the media as an instructional model of their individual behavior, which seems to have a direct correlation to their psychological defects. Thus, we get copycat murders that work their way across America like a virus spread by the six o'clock news. .
             How does the media's portrait of predator crime become social reality to the copycat? According to the world-views of George Gerbner, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania has done many studies on the cultural impact of the media. He said to understand the process of the copycat mind; it is useful to conceptualize social reality as a changing, socially created phenomenon and not fixed or universal but as evolving and subjective. It is not a fixed or universal entity, but is evolving and subjective. In dealing with society, people use world models to group and understand factual information. This enables them to simplify and direct their decisions and social behavior. These models are constructed over time from information gained through social interactions and personal experiences. An individual's direct experiences make up what has been termed "objective reality." Because its knowledge is first hand, this objective reality has the strongest influence on the social reality an individual constructs, and subsequently on their behaviors, attitudes, and perceptions. .
             The second source is termed "symbolic reality" and is obtained from our extensive capability to manipulate abstract symbols as representations of objects and concepts. Examples of symbolic systems include written and spoken language, art, music, and mathematics. Symbolic reality provides a vast amount of communicated knowledge of the world and allows individuals to employ knowledge of experiences that they have not directly undergone, and to incorporate that knowledge into their world models.