Towards a Functional Account of Mass-Shooting: Prediction and Influence of Violent Behavior
Mass shootings can be treated as fame-seeking operant behavior, giving BCBAs a clear path to disrupt the payoff.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Meindl and colleagues wrote a theory paper. They asked how behavior analysis can view mass shootings.
They treated the shootings as learned behavior. The payoff is fame and media attention.
The authors mapped the shooters' learning history. They showed how each step is reinforced by news coverage.
What they found
The paper does not give new data. It gives a new lens.
Mass shootings are seen as operant acts. The reinforcer is widespread notoriety.
The authors sketch ways to break that payoff. Change the contingency, not just the profile.
How this fits with other research
Hobson (1987) first urged behavior analysts to tackle big social problems. Meindl et al. (2025) pick up that call and aim it at gun violence.
Saunders et al. (2005) pushed the field from clinic rooms to public-health scale. The new paper answers by framing mass-shooting as a public-health contingency.
Malagodi et al. (1989) said we must study cultural contingencies. Meindl shows how media fame is one such contingency that can evoke lethal behavior.
Why it matters
You can use this frame when you consult schools or media teams. Teach them to deny fame: withhold names, photos, and manifestos. That removes the reinforcer. You can also shape replacement behaviors that bring status without harm. Policy briefs written in ABA terms may sway lawmakers better than moral appeals alone.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Mass shootings affect both local and national communities and prompt extensive efforts to understand and prevent future events. Current approaches typically focus on profiling and typologizing mass shooters. Although these efforts are useful towards prediction of mass shootings, they do not tell us how to directly influence a shooter’s behavior. Thus, our understanding of mass shootings remains incomplete. Given that behavior analysis is a systematic natural science approach to understanding all behavior, we believe it is poised to address this issue. This article focuses on fame-seeking shooters, which are a subset of all mass shooters. We first describe important behavior patterns and contextual events that have been associated with this subset. We propose that these behaviors are members of a larger response class which includes a mass shooting. We then provide a conceptualization of the selection process involved in the emergence of mass shooting behavior and its precursors. We close by describing several interventions aimed at disrupting the contingencies identified by the conceptual analysis. The goal of this article is to illustrate how behavior analysis may utilize and extend the currently existing and predominantly non behavior-analytic research (e.g., profiling and typologizing based on the form of behavior) to better enable the prediction and influence of mass shootings.
Perspectives on Behavior Science, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s40614-025-00483-z