The Rock & Roll Shrink Ep 12 – Perspective, Perception, & the “Reaper of 2016”

The hashtag #Reaper2016 actually heavily trended on social media in the last year. This has not happened with the same vehemence as any recent prior year, but it indicates something about the psychology of perception and perspective that nearly nobody has publically observed at the same time.

2016 news stories and social media were burgeoning with comments about the year 2016 being The Reaper – people painted the amount of famous deaths as some kind of giant, freakish anomaly where so many more famous and beloved notable people passed away than in any other year before it. We are going to talk about that fallacy tonight, and the likely way that it happens to our public perception.

To be clear to our listeners, we are not in any way implying that it is psychologically inappropriate to mourn celebrities or other notable figures who have died. There is something in our collective psyche that causes us to want to cope with the loss of our icons and role models. We are solely focusing on the psychology of the public insistence that 2016 was somehow vastly different in the amount of loss that happened, and we will discuss how we do this to ourselves, and why.