Social Cognitive Deficits & Distortions Columbine High School Shootings Discussion Read the following brief article about the Columbine High School shootin

Social Cognitive Deficits & Distortions Columbine High School Shootings Discussion Read the following brief article about the Columbine High School shootings from Slate (2004) by Dave Cullen. If you are unfamiliar with this tragic event, conduct an internet search for more information. 1. What’s your overall feeling about this article?2. Do some research on “Social-Cognitive Deficits and Distortions,” and identify two social-cognitive distortions or biases that you think were evident in either Klebold or Harris. In your answer, be sure you describe each bias and clearly link to the thinking and behavior of Harris or Klebold. The Depressive and the Psychopath: At last we know why the Columbine killers did it. Five
years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates and teachers at
Columbine High School. Most Americans have reached one of two wrong conclusions about
why they did it. The first conclusion is that the pair of supposed “Trench Coat Mafia outcasts”
were taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable for them. The second
conclusion is that the massacre was inexplicable: We can never understand what drove them to
such horrific violence.
But the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists have reached an entirely different
conclusion. They believe they know why Harris and Klebold killed, and their explanation is both
more reassuring and more troubling than our misguided conclusions. Three months after the
massacre, the FBI convened a summit in Leesburg, Va., that included world-renowned mental
health experts, including Michigan State University psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg, as well as
Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, the FBI’s lead Columbine investigator and a
clinical psychologist. Fuselier and Ochberg share their conclusions publicly here for the first
time.
The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the popular narrative about
the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafia and to abandon the core idea that Columbine was simply
a school shooting. We can’t understand why they did it until we understand what they were
doing.
School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their rage: students and faculty.
But Harris and Klebold planned for a year and dreamed much bigger. The school served as
means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life.
Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by resentment of
them in particular. Students and teachers were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh
described as “collateral damage.”
The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of
the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its
anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting “the most deaths in U.S. history.”
Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale.
If they hadn’t been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would
have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing
survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs,
would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The
climax would be captured on live television. It wasn’t just “fame” they were after—Agent
Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—t hey were gunning for devastating infamy on the
historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and
apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.
Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the “worst school
shooting in American history.” They set their sights on eclipsing the world’s greatest mass
murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis
in precisely the wrong direction.
Fuselier and Ochberg say that if you want to understand “the killers,” quit asking what drove
them. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were radically different individuals, with vastly different
motives and opposite mental conditions. Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more familiar type.
He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his problems.
Harris is the challenge. He was sweet-faced and well-spoken. Adults, and even some other kids,
described him as “nice.” But Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal. “Klebold was hurting
inside while Harris wanted to hurt people,” Fuselier says. Harris was not merely a troubled kid,
the psychiatrists say, he was a psychopath.
In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a “psychopath.” But in psychiatry, it’s a very specific
mental condition that rarely involves killing, or even psychosis. “Psychopaths are not disoriented
or out of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations, or intense
subjective distress that characterize most other mental disorders,” writes Dr. Robert Hare, in
Without Conscience, the seminal book on the condition. (Hare is also one of the psychologists
consulted by the FBI about Columbine and by Slatefor this story*.) “Unlike psychotic
individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior
is the result of choice, freely exercised.” Diagnosing Harris as a psychopath represents neither a
legal defense, nor a moral excuse. But it illuminates a great deal about the thought process that
drove him to mass murder.
Diagnosing him as a psychopath was not a simple matter. Harris opened his private journal with
the sentence, “I hate the f—ing world.” And when the media studied Harris, they focused on his
hatred—hatred that supposedly led him to revenge. It’s easy to get lost in the hate, which
screamed out relentlessly from Harris’ Web site.
It rages on for page after page and is repeated in his journal and in the videos he and Klebold
made. But Fuselier recognized a far more revealing emotion bursting through, both fueling and
overshadowing the hate. What the boy was really expressing was contempt.
He is disgusted with the morons around him. These are not the rantings of an angry young man,
picked on by jocks until he’s not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone
with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling
inferiority. It may look like hate, but “It’s more about demeaning other people,” says Hare.
A second confirmation of the diagnosis was Harris’ perpetual deceitfulness. “I lie a lot,” Eric
wrote to his journal. “Almost constantly, and to everybody, just to keep my own ass out of the
water. Let’s see, what are some of the big lies I told? Yeah I stopped smoking. For doing it, not
for getting caught. No I haven’t been making more bombs. No I wouldn’t do that. And countless
other ones.”
Harris claimed to lie to protect himself, but that appears to be something of a lie as well. He lied
for pleasure, Fuselier says. “Duping delight”—psychologist Paul Ekman’s term—represents a
key characteristic of the psychopathic profile.
Harris married his deceitfulness with a total lack of remorse or empathy—another distinctive
quality of the psychopath. Fuselier was finally convinced of his diagnosis when he read Harris’
response to being punished after being caught breaking into a van. Klebold and Harris had
avoided prosecution for the robbery by participating in a “diversion program” that involved
counseling and community service. Both killers feigned regret to obtain an early release, but
Harris had relished the opportunity to perform. He wrote an ingratiating letter to his victim
offering empathy, rather than just apologies. Fuselier remembers that it was packed with
statements like Jeez, I understand now how you feel and I understand what this did to you.
“But he wrote that strictly for effect,” Fuselier said. “That was complete manipulation. At almost
the exact same time, he wrote down his real feelings in his journal: ‘Isn’t America supposed to be
the land of the free? How come, if I’m free, I can’t deprive a stupid f—ing dumbsh— from his
possessions if he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his f—ing van out in plain sight and in
the middle of f—ing nowhere on a Frif—ingday night. NATURAL SELECTION. F—er should
be shot.’ ”
Harris’ pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the
bullet points on Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist and convinced Fuselier and the other leading
psychiatrists close to the case that Harris was a psychopath.
It begins to explain Harris’ unbelievably callous behavior: his ability to shoot his classmates, then
stop to taunt them while they writhed in pain, then finish them off. Because psychopaths are
guided by such a different thought process than non-psychopathic humans, we tend to find their
behavior inexplicable. But they’re actually much easier to predict than the rest of us once you
understand them. Psychopaths follow much stricter behavior patterns than the rest of us because
they are unfettered by conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement. (The difference is
so striking that Fuselier trains hostage negotiators to identify psychopaths during a standoff, and
immediately reverse tactics if they think they’re facing one. It’s like flipping a switch between
two alternate brain-mechanisms.)
None of his victims means anything to the psychopath. He recognizes other people only as
means to obtain what he desires. Not only does he feel no guilt for destroying their lives, he
doesn’t grasp what they feel. The truly hard-core psychopath doesn’t quite comprehend emotions
like love or hate or fear, because he has never experienced them directly.
“Because of their inability to appreciate the feelings of others, some psychopaths are capable of
behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling,” Hare writes. “For example, they
can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we
carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.”
The diagnosis transformed their understanding of the partnership. Despite earlier reports about
Harris and Klebold being equal partners, the psychiatrists now believe firmly that Harris was the
mastermind and driving force. The partnership did enable Harris to stray from typical
psychopathic behavior in one way. He restrained himself. Usually psychopathic killers crave the
stimulation of violence. That is why they are often serial killers—murdering regularly to feed
their addiction. But Harris managed to stay (mostly) out of trouble for the year that he and
Klebold planned the attack. Ochberg theorizes that the two killers complemented each other.
Cool, calculating Harris calmed down Klebold when he got hot-tempered. At the same time,
Klebold’s fits of rage served as the stimulation Harris needed.
The psychiatrists can’t help speculating what might have happened if Columbine had never
happened. Klebold, they agree, would never have pulled off Columbine without Harris. He might
have gotten caught for some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have
gone on to live a normal life.
Their view of Harris is more reassuring, in a certain way. Harris was not a wayward boy who
could have been rescued. Harris, they believe, was irretrievable. He was a brilliant killer without
a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood
and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have
done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something even worse.

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