Crime, Compulsion, and Social Media
The Internet and the myriad devices attached to it certainly have their uses, and they are extremely popular. In any public space, practically everybody's eyeballs are virtually glued to the potentially fictitious reality dancing across the screens of their cell phones, and similar trends are ubiquitous when they’re at home as well.
Yet this omnipresent virtual world has a dark side. Many people, especially young people, have been inspired to commit crimes in imitation of what they've seen on social media, ranging from first-person shooter games to the veneration of homicidal imaginary entities. There are, of course, many possible contributing causal factors in such cases; but violent media have been implicated in a significant (p < .001) 2.45-fold increase in reported violent behavior with each incremental increase in baseline violent media diet (Ybarra and colleagues, 2022). Imitative processes with reference to violent social media are also well established (for example, Shah and Kaushik, 2025; Gerbner, Jahlly, and Kilbourne, 2014). There are a great many examples: in the 2024 Tooele homicide in Utah, a child killed his father with weapons and methods from a Call of Duty game, which the child frequently played (KUTV-CBS, 2024). In 1998, a teenager, with the help of his cousin, murdered his mother with knives and a screwdriver, citing Scream and Scream 2 as their inspiration (for example, Morin, 1999). An archetypal example of media influence on juvenile violence is probably to be found in the 2014 Slender Man attempted homicide (for example, Davey and Yaccino, 2014), in which two girls stabbed a classmate nineteen times as a kind of sacrifice and affirmation of this imaginary but sinister “creepypasta” character.
Not everyone starts to believe in the malign reality of what they may see on social media, of course, and one frequently encounters some reluctance to consider the people who do; it is perhaps not surprising that media might not focus intensively on the negative aspects of a media industry that generates multibillion-dollar media profits.
But why does anybody commit media-inspired violence in the first place?
Human beings tend to imitate what they see, of course, especially if the people they're imitating are powerful or rewarded (for example, Bandura, 1979). People also tend to conform to popular norms and to obey powerful authorities (see Sharps, 2024, and Sharps and Price-Sharps, 2026, for a review of the interactive cognitive and affective influences of these factors). But why do the Internet and social media appear to have so much power in these regards?
As a somewhat superannuated psychologist, I spent most of my life, to date, in the far-off times of the 20th century; and I would not, in that remote and antiquated era, have invested much in the development of popular computation or cell phones, at least not for future roles in entertainment or amusement. Squatting for hours to peer into such devices simply seemed, at the time, to be too remote from the realm of what human beings evolved to be. We are social creatures with high sex drives and powerful competitive and acquisitive tendencies in physical reality, as our human and pre-human ancestors were for millions of years, and as most of the animals with which we share this planet continue to be. The idea that hordes of even young, healthy human beings would choose to spend their waking hours interacting with laptops, essentially flat typewriters spot-welded to very flat TV sets, or staring into cell phones, essentially futuristic and battery-powered 3x5 cards, or that they would do so to the general exclusion of social, physical, and even sexual interactions in the real world, would have seemed unbelievably bizarre to me, and to many other people at the time.
How could we have been so spectacularly wrong?
Living creatures are subject to the influence of supernormal stimuli, exaggerated versions of things that would normally elicit a response in the given creature. For example, breeding male stickleback fish, which normally attack the red coloration of rival fish, attack anything more intensely red, whether it’s a fish or not, with even greater intensity. Herring gull chicks, which normally peck the red spots on their parents’ bills to elicit regurgitated food, peck much more frantically at more intensely, supernormally red spots (for example, Tinbergen, 1960). There are male beetles that preferentially try to mate with beer bottles, since the bottles are supernormally glossier than actual female beetles. Similar processes may be observed in human beings: for example, the exaggerated sexual cues of much pornography elicit stronger sexual arousal in many people than do the cues of typical real-world sexuality, perhaps to the disappointment of their real-world partners.
Social media provides us with many specific examples of supernormal stimuli, but there may be something more general and fundamental going on as well. Human nervous systems evolved to monitor our surroundings and the continuous activity of the real world around us, especially in the social, sexual, and violent/dangerous realms. As we scroll through social media, we are provided with continuous coverage, both visual and verbal, of these topics; yet we are provided with this coverage at a much higher rate, and with much more comprehensive and visually compelling coverage — greater intensity than is typical in the real world. Therefore, in a very real way, social media systems are essentially operating as supernormal stimuli themselves. Our brains are naturally programmed to monitor the progression of events in the real world; the Internet provides this progression with supernormal intensity, and at a far greater rate than does physical reality. Our brains may therefore respond accordingly, compelling us to fixate on the screen-based sources of this information with a laser-like focus practically unmatched in the natural world, and the concomitant physiological and psychological arousal may therefore make it easier for us to dissociate (Sharps and Price-Sharps, 2026) and to confuse wholly fictitious images and verbal material with concrete reality.
This may, of course, involve the confusion of fiction with reality in the realm of violence, including sexual violence, murder, general mayhem, and the attempted sacrifice of classmates to the Slender Man.
Internet systems are capable of providing us with continuous and ongoing supernormal coverage of supernormal stimuli, including supernormal accounts and images of horrendous violence. As biological creatures, we can anticipate that our human nervous systems will respond accordingly.
Therefore, at this point, it might be a good idea to focus on technological solutions that would prevent susceptible individuals from becoming so dissociatively wedded to the sinister images set forth by their electronic buddies, the cell phone and the laptop, that they go after others with guns, knives, or other pointy accoutrements.
After all, however much we may cherish the Internet, we must at least consider it inelegant for any human being to die as a sacrifice to creepypasta.
