Dramatic events can evoke feelings of compassion, fear, or threat, and can affect public opinion regarding controversial issues. Such an event was the drowning of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy whose body washed up on a Turkish shore, and was photographed, producing an iconic image that was...

Terrorist attacks can have profound consequences for the erosion of social norms, yet the causes of this erosion are not well understood. We argue that these attacks create substantial uncertainty about whether norms of civic conversation still hold. Observing breaches of these norms then leads...