On March 24, two boys,11 and 13, walked to their school in Jonesboro Arkansas and opened fire killing four students and a teacher. This added yet another incident to the growing list of school shootings in recent years. We focused on the this in our news analysis. We dealt primarily with three social psychological principles: aggression, attribution, and altruism.

    With aggression, we tried to determine the reasons why these intentional and malicious events happen. It was pointed out that in recent years violent crime has decreased in the population as a whole but has increased within teenagers. One student mentioned that with increased media attention being given to these incidents, kids are being influenced by these incidents. This could contribute to "copy-cat" crimes. Yet another possible cause mentioned was that of desensitization of both the kids and their parents. We also discussed nature vs. nurture in regard to aggression. This raised the question of whether aggression was innate or learned.

    This provided a natural transition into our discussion of attribution. In this incident, there was a fundamental question of who to blame. In a chapter on attribution, Gilbert (Tesser, 1995) discusses the attributional equation which states that a person's behavior is thought to be the joint function of both situational factors and the person's predisposition to act. When outside observers mistakenly conclude that an idividual's behavior corresponds to that person's disposition without taking situational factors into account, the outsiders have fallen prey to the correspondence bias. Many people, while trying to figure out exactly who or what is to blame for the shooting deaths at Westside Middle School, have made numerous attributions about Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, the two boys who have been charged with the crimes. While some individuals have attributed the shootings to unknown situational factors, numerous others committed the correspondence bias by attributing the crimes to the boys' personalities or or character. A neighbor of the suspects is quoted as saying that the boys are "coldblooded, evil children" and that Johnson was "demented" and "evil-acting". People have also made attributions about the parents of these two boys. Primetime Live (3/26/98) did a show the day after the shootings and insinuated that the parents deserved some of the blame as the crimes could be attributed to poor parenting. The show made it seem as though the parents were guilty because they brought their sons up around guns. In the class discussion, someone brought up the suggestion of Southern Culture being somewhat to blame as well.

    We also dealt with altruism. This is defined as a motive to increase another's welfare without conscious regard for one's self interests. In this tragedy, a hero or several heroes may have emerged. Perhaps one would be the caller to 911, or perhaps the rescue workers or paramedics, or even the police who made the capture could fit this description. But the more obvious hero was Shannon Wright. Mrs. Wright was a teacher at Westside Middle School, who stepped in front of gunfire to save the life of one of her students, Emma Pittman. Did Shannon Wright act this way because of altruism or for other reasons? In the class discussion, some suggested that this action demonstrated more responsibility than pure altruism. However, there were other teachers who didnot sacrifice themselves. They instead became bystanders. Many of them, along with the majority of students, first froze and then reacted.