Agent-Based Models of Copycat Suicide

Abstract

In 1774, soon after Goethe published his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, there were reports of suicides commited in the protagonist’s distinct manner. These may have been the first noted instances of copycat suicide. This phenomenon results in geographic, temporal, and/or social clustering, and has become known as theWerther effect. However, suicide is very difficult to study experimentally, not only because it is under reported, but also because it is extremely difficult to predict the influence of social contact in real-life situations.We use agentbased modeling to study the effect of social influence on suicide rates. Our results demonstrate that both the scale of an individual’s social group and the presence of celebrity suicides influence aggregate suicide rates by small, but measurable, amounts.