Abstract for: Scripting the Terror Contagion Hypothesis: Development of a Novel Criminal Script & Preliminary Analysis on 3 Terror Contagions

The terror contagion hypothesis is a novel approach to understanding public mass killing terrorism that spreads as a form of social contagion through cultural scripts. These attacks, though less frequent than other forms of mass killings, are often far more violent and target our schools, universities, grocery stores, houses of worship, and public places. In this work, we demonstrate preliminary results through two experiments that terror contagions can be differentiated from one another, as well as from all other mass killings. We conduct these experiments by developing a traditional criminology tool, a crime script of terror contagions and populate them with robust, high-quality data from two existing field-recognized data sources. We demonstrate how the Columbine-style school shooting, VA Tech, and Incel terror contagions are not only different from one another but also from all other mass shootings in the US from 1995-2022. Though these findings are not statistically significant due to the low sample size they demonstrate the promise of using crime scripts to study terror contagions. This is a novel merging of criminology and system dynamic computer simulatinos, both in general and specifically related to public mass killings.