Why did Mr. Clark Shoot Innocent Surgeons?

               Netflix and chill…That’s what I did during fall break aside from working at the YMCA.  During my Netflix sessions, I decided to re-watch some of my favorite episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and analyze them in the lens of Chapters 5 and 6.  Best of both worlds…got to Netflix and chill while doing social psychology at the same time, how much better could life get!!!  I revisited Season 6 Episodes 23 and 24 titled, “Sanctuary” and “Death and All his Friends” respectfully.  SPOILER ALERT.  The husband of a patient who was taken off of life support comes back to the hospital to seek “revenge”, “an eye for an eye” against Dr. Shepard, Dr. Weber, and Dr. Grey.  As with all drama television shows, they do a great job exhibiting the behaviors and emotions that real people could portray if they were in a similar situation of an active shooter.  My goal is to explain why the shooter felt the need to seek revenge against the surgeons that tried to save his wife’s life. 

                The shooter’s agitation (Mr. Clark) level increased and was exhibited by harsher tone and being less tolerant to those who were too busy to help him find the chief-of surgery, (Dr. Shepard) and shot those who did not care for his need to see the chief.  As people continued to not point him in the direction of the chief of surgery claiming to be surgeons and already busy enough, he assimilated the “busy surgeon” mentality to the care that he felt Dr. Shepard, Dr. Weber, and Dr. Grey failed to give to his wife.  He generalized this schema to cover all surgeons and when he encountered Dr. Bailey, Dr. Percy, and patient, he questioned them, “Are you a surgeon,” this simple “yes or no” question decided whether he shot them. 

The question that I had was why was Mr. Clark shooting innocent doctors instead of only shooting his three target people?  Did the revenge feel more justified by killing the generalized surgeons?  To answer this question, I visited the literature specifically the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology to an article titled, “Displaced revenge: Can revenge taste “sweet” if it aims at a different target?”  They tested this by randomly assigning participants to a 2 x 2 between-subjects design in which the first condition was entitativity: low vs. high and the second condition was revenge: direct vs. displaced.  Entitativity is a word to describe the connectedness of the target group.  Participants read a vignette to arouse the desire to take revenge which was then assessed  through a 6-point Likert scale.  There was then a second vignette which described how the revenge took place and participants then assessed their justice-related satisfaction on the same scale.  This study concluded that displaced revenge against a member within a group with high entitativity alleviated negative feelings such as regret and increased the satisfaction of the revenge process.  This can be linked back to Mr. Clark because in a hospital setting all the surgeons wear the same color scrubs which physically show high entitativity.  Additionally their high entitativity is shown when Christina and her surgical team perform heart surgery on Dr. Shepard to save his life, the shooter ends up shooting another doctor because he came in between Mr. Clark and his number one suspect, Dr. Shepard.  The strong cohesiveness of the surgical residents and attending physicians allowed Mr. Clark to generalize that all surgeons were bad like Dr. Shepard and that further justified him to shoot the uninvolved surgeons.

Gollwitzer, M. & Sjostrom, A. (2014). Displaced revenge: Can revenge taste “sweet” if it aims at a             different target? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 56(2015), 191-202.                                   http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsep.2014.09.0160022-1031/.

Corey LaForest-Roys