Earlier in the year the Bay Area was stunned by a series of suicides at Palo Alto's Gunn High School. The question of "why" always comes up in the wake of a cluster of suicides, as survivors seek meaning in the chaos. Now Alex Mesoudi, a scientist at Queen Mary University, London, has developed a computer model to study the phenomenon of copycat suicides:

Mesoudi then cycled the simulation through 100 generations. He found the simulated people acted just as sociologists' theory predicted.

They were more likely to commit suicide in clusters, either because they had learned this trait from their friends, or because suicidal people are more likely to associate together.

"This is a general phenomenon," says Mesoudi. "Think of an American college: the jocks will group together and so will the goths."

Mesoudi found that the mass media played an important role in either encouraging or discouraging copycat suicides.

The simulation suggests not only that suicide "point clusters" can occur in small social groups, but how media reports of celebrity can actually trigger "mass clusters" of suicides. (via New Scientist).