Why viral airline bust-ups are contagious
Divorce, suicide and even viral airline bust-ups are socially contagious
Iknew it was going to be a rocky flight before we even took off from NewYork to San Diego last month. As I buckled into my aisle seat, the man next to mein the middle removed his shoes, crossed his legs and pressed his left sole against the armrest of the man by the window.
“Get your dirty feet away from me,” windowseat man said.
“Say that one more time,” shoeless man said, making a fist. “Say that one more time and see what happens.”
I braced myself for the worst (a viral video!) — and, I admit, reached for my phone. Images from the worst airplane brawls flashed through my mind: an airline attendant hitting a mother on the head with a stroller as she holds her baby; two lawyers threatening legal action over a headrest; an American Air- lines passenger shoving an off-duty pilot after he felt “disrespected” on the flight.
The two men stared at each other for what felt like an eternity. Eventually window-seat man looked away. Crisis averted — this time, at least.
It’s not your imagination. Flying has become more unbearable since the video of United airport security ejecting a bloodied 69-year old Dr. David Dao from a plane went viral in April. According to the US Department of Transportation, consumer complaints about airplane service rose 70 percent in April 2017 from a year earlier.
Psychologists say this “Dao effect” comes down to social contagion — the idea that bad behaviors, like inair aggression or blatant indecency (like the man who cheated on his pregnant fiancée in an airplane seat), grow like communicable diseases. The more times Dr. Dao’s video and others like it are shared on social media, the more people get “infected,” like some sort of airborne pathogen that spreads bad behavior.
Research indicates everything from smoking to drinking to obesity is socially contagious. You can “catch” divorce and depression. Gun violence is particularly infectious. A teenager with a friend who’s used a deadly weapon to commit a violent crime is 140 percent more likely to do the same. An epidemiological analysis of shootings in Chicago by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that social contagion was responsible for 63.1% of all incidents that occurred between 2006 and 2014.
We even spread “low intensity negative behaviors” without realizing it. Research out of the University of Florida shows that experiencing rude behavior makes you ruder. This is partly because once you’ve been
“primed” by rudeness, you are more likely to see nastiness where it doesn’t exist.
“Contagious thoughts mimic natural laws like those overseeing the mutation and transmission of germs. Under the right circumstances, corralled within perfect conditions, thoughts spread, catch, activate and — through certain people — proliferate to others,” writes Lee Daniel Kravetz in “Strange Contagion” (Harper Wave).
History is filled with weird but true stories of social contagion — from dancing manias in the Middle Ages to nuns pretending to be cats in the 19th century to laughing epidemics of Tanzanian school girls in the 1960s.
In the 1980s, lurid tales of satanic rituals in child-care centers spread like a plague across the country thanks to a now discredited bestselling memoir called “Michelle Re- members” about a young woman’s abuse at the hands of a devil-worshiping cult.
In 2012, a “twitching epidemic” hit a small town in upstate New York sickening 18 teenage girls from one high school with Tourette’s-like movements. A slew of consultants — including famous crusading whistleblower Erin Brockovich — headed to that upstate town of Le Roy to investigate and concluded that the girls were suffering from a mass psychogenic illness called conversion disorder.
Gustave Le Bon first described this condition at the turn of last century as a kind of mob mentality, calling it the “madness of crowds” and identifying the three stages of contraction: submergence, contagion and suggestion.
Then in the early 1960s, Stanford psychology professor Al Bandura revealed that we don’t even need the influence of crowds to spread copycat behaviors. In his experiments, children were made to watch adults interact with a blow-up doll. Those who watched adults kick or punch the doll were far more likely to mime those same aggressive behaviors.
Kravetz, a psychotherapist, focuses “Strange Contagion” on a suicide cluster in Palo Alto that resulted in the deaths of 10 teenagers — six deaths in 2008-09 and four more in 2014-15. His book is an attempt to investigate the causes — a particularly topical pursuit since the release of “13 Reasons Why,” a Netflix show that has been criticized for glamorizing and, thus, encouraging suicide. Before the social-media age, children’s access to books and shows could be more easily controlled. But what can we do now when everything is so connected and social contagion is most virulent?
Kravetz doesn’t offer much of an answer in his book, which is probably because there isn’t one. You can’t shield kids from the Internet as much as you can’t stop people from posting viral videos of bust-ups on airplanes.
Often the community helps to spread the contagion — as in the Palo Alto cluster case, where helicopter parents piled too much pressure on students and not enough help was given to teens suffering from mental distress.
What we can do — and this is a bit pat — is simply be kinder. Because just as bad behaviors are catching, so too are good ones, like cooperation, exercise and generosity.
“I’ve come away now with a more holistic understanding of the necessity of individuals to care for one another, to watch out for each other, to take on an awareness of what it is we are capable of communicating as well as our powers to influence,” writes Kravetz.
In other words, we can all learn something from window seat guy, who showed an almost Buddha-like level of patience with his shoeless neighbor. When we’re up in the air, it’s usually best to just let it go.
Social contagion is when bad behaviors, like in-air aggression, grow like communicable diseases.