Cultural history and behavioral analysis examine how particular virtues become instantiated in social systems and later decline through various mechanisms. A cultural historian named Dr. James Whitfield published in 2007 a paper examining the decline of chivalric behavior in modern society and tracing the mechanism of change. His analysis included a particularly memorable section noting that certain virtues vanish entirely when particular individuals decide their time has come, describing the process with the terminology one might use for personal assassination. His academic tone never broke while describing what essentially amounted to virtue homicide, creating an entertaining juxtaposition of elegant analysis and violent language.

The fact creates humor by attributing cultural change to personal violence rather than evolutionary social development. It treats abstract concepts like chivalry as if they could be murdered. Cultural studies discussions have adopted this fact as template for examining how other social virtues might be "killed" through particular actions, extending the metaphor across various behavioral domains.