Implicit Power Drives in the Manifestos Preceding Autogenic Massacres

Dr. Heather Leffew Fielding Graduate University, School of Psychology Originally presented 2017

Autogenic Massacres

Mullen (2004) coined the term autogenic massacre for an act of mass killing arising from the perpetrator's own internal world rather than from political, religious, or organized group affiliation. The defining feature is that the violence is self-generated, often planned in isolation, and almost always carries a written or recorded artifact that the perpetrator intends to be read after the fact. Manifestos, communiques, and final statements are common. The literature consistently finds that these documents are produced; less consistently understood is what, if anything, they share linguistically.

Mohandie (2013) proposes four categories of violent offenders within this broader population. The twenty-three writers analyzed here all fell into either Type I (N = 8) or Type II (N = 14), with one document not categorized for the analysis. The question the study asked was narrow on purpose. Set aside content and theme. Set aside political affiliation, demographic background, and reported motive. Look only at one LIWC dimension, the implicit power drive, which Pennebaker, Boyd, Jordan, and Blackburn (2015) describe as tracking words relevant to status, dominance, and social hierarchy. Does this drive show up at a measurably different rate in the manifesto corpus than in baseline writing genres?

Results

All three comparisons reached significance. The manifesto mean of 3.00 exceeded the published baselines by margins ranging from 0.65 to 0.98 percentage points on a dimension where typical values across genres cluster around 2. The two largest gaps, versus blogs and expressive writing, cleared p < .001. The narrower gap, against the multi-source composite, still cleared p = .02. The 95% confidence intervals for the mean difference did not include zero in any of the three tests.

Findings and Limits

The implicit power drive showed up at a higher rate in this manifesto corpus than in three different baseline writing genres. The elevation held across blogs, expressive writing, and a multi-source composite that itself averaged over genres, which is the breadth that makes the finding interesting. A signal that survives comparison against several different reference distributions is harder to explain as an artifact of any one of them.

The poster's own conclusion was deliberately narrow. From the limitations section: "This is a preliminary, exploratory study intended not to provide predictive data of the psychological characteristics and motivations of the perpetrators of autogenic massacres, but rather to provide direction for future study." The point of the work was to identify a linguistic phenomenon worth investigating at a larger scale, not to build a classifier. The dissertation that followed picked up that thread and ran the typological work that this study only gestured at.

Elevation on one LIWC dimension across 23 documents is not a tool for identifying future perpetrators. It is an observation about a text class whose membership is already known. The interpretive direction it points toward, group affiliation and collective positioning rather than individual aggression, is consistent with the warning-behavior literature on identification and pathway warning behaviors (Meloy et al., 2012), and that connection is what made the dissertation step worth taking.

References

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