48: Behavioral contagion

Things we consider to be matters of personal choice have implications far beyond personal well-being

Aug 29, 2020

Termitenhugel in Sennar. Illustration for Brehms Thierleben Allgemeine Kunde des Thierreichs (Bibliographischen Instituts, c 1880–90).

For the past 72 years and counting, epidemiologists have been monitoring the behavior and health of thousands of individuals over long periods of time in the unassuming town of Framingham, Massachusetts, which is just about 20 miles west of my house. The now-famous Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 in order to shed light on the causes of coronary heart disease, of which researchers knew very little at the time. The cohort began with 5,209 volunteers, and is now on its fourth generation of participants.

The study is one of the most fruitful in medical research history, and in 1961, identified major risk factors for heart disease that still guide prevention and treatment. But as different resarchers dug around in the heaps of data Framingham has emitted over the decades, they also began to find some unexpected phenomena regarding social networks. Specifically, that the actions of people surrounding an individual were strongly correlated with the individual’s own actions.

So when it comes to unhealthy risk factors, the data has shown that if your spouse, friends, and co-workers, say, smoke cigarettes, your likelihood of smoking significantly goes up, like way up. Same thing if they quit. That’s maybe not that surprising, but the effects reach even beyond people you know, as far out as three degrees of separation (the friends of your friends’ friends).

What that means is that behaviors of people you don’t even know change the probabilities that you’ll behave in certain ways. Only at four degrees of separation do the network effects become negligible. Even as national rates of smoking declined over the years, clusters of smokers continued smoking, suggesting that people were quitting, or not quitting, based on their own networks’ behavior. Similar outcomes have been observed surrrounding obesity rates and even happiness.

I think about this study a lot because, for one, it suggests that our lives, actions, feelings are much more a product of the collective than we might tell ourselves. So from a public health standpoint, it suggests that things we might consider to be merely matters of personal choice have implications far beyond personal well-being. It also challenges the idea that, in order to change societal behavior, you merely need to appeal to individual preferences or self interest.

This last idea has been the research focus of the somewhat rogue economist Robert H. Frank, who has been hammering on the idea that social pressure is a far more powerful tool than self-interest when it comes to incentivizing certain behaviors, and you can apply that pressure strategically. Frank has a new book out on the topic, and recently made this case in the New York Times regarding climate change and carbon taxes.

In his Times column, Frank points out that sky-high taxes on cigarettes actually didn’t change most smokers’ behavior. They liked smoking, after all, and it was a cool thing to do. But a small minority did quit as a result, and that sparked “behavioral contagion,” which is what actually drove down smoking rates over the years in the US. Over time, laws prohibiting smoking took hold, but the social attitudes changed first. Smoking is now anything but cool and when people who are definitely not me sneak a drag they do it in shame and isolation. Frank suggests that a revenue-neutral carbon tax (this means you tax and give the money back to the public to spend) would influence the behavior of a small number of households, but that would then spread like wildfire or like infectious disease two metaphors that you perhaps have some familiarity with right now. He cites a 2012 study that suggests if one family installs solar panels, one neighbor will see the panels and follow suit within four months, then two more, and on and on and on.

Frank’s insights run a lot deeper than my own explanation here, and I really like and generally agree with his thoughts on behavior and social pressure—except for this particular policy solution, which I think amounts to “pass a law people don’t like and over time they will start to like it.” To me, behavioral contagion is more of an argument for movement building and cultural organizing (arts, media, etc). If you can leverage these intense social currents, the potential power is such that you can blow way past weaksauce legislation like a revenue-neutral carbon tax and get to actual transformation.

(I am aware here that my own social network is probably influencing that conclusion just like Frank’s is influencing his, but that’s a little too far down the well let’s just back away from that.)

I imagine there are a lot of ways you could build that social pressure, but one in particular that the Framingham study and Frank’s work make me think about is communicating online. The kind of activity that is often referred to, almost always derogatorily, as “virtue signaling,” as in wanting to demonstrate to your peers on social media that you are a good person. At its worst, the term is used to shit on people for caring about something. Sometimes it’s more of a competitive sentiment that someone doesn’t really care about a thing that you care about.

If we are friends on Facebook you will already be aware that I am actually a big fan of virtue signaling so sorry about that I guess. Literally the only things I share on Facebook are this newsletter (which is at times a form of virtue signaling itself), and photos from some kind of protest or activist thingy. This is entirely intentional, in the way that many forms of activism, like public protest, are largely about sending signals. A signal of potential democratic power, a signal of growing discontent, and yes, a signal of a shared virtue. So I am hoping that people I went to high school with, people I used to work with, people in my family who have not unfollowed me, will at least casually notice that XYZ is a thing that I care about. Not because I’m so awesome or that people should give a shit about what I think, but merely because I am a person in their social network.

In her great book on social movments that I reference here often, Twitter and Tear Gas, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci defends what was often called in the late 2000s “clicktivism” or “slactivism,” first by challenging the very idea that the online world is separate from the real world, noting that it often reflects actions also happening in the physical world. She then points out that,

When Facebook friends change their avatar to protest discrimination against gay people, they also send a cultural signal to their social networks, and over time, such signals are part of what makes social change possible by changing culture. Many protesters I talked with cite their online political interactions as the beginning of their process of becoming politicized.

Critics of online political expression and organizing (rhymes with Smalcolm Smadwell) claim that such platforms rely too heavily on “weak ties,” which don’t yield meaningful action. But Tufekci counters that, “for people seeking political change, though, the networking that takes place among people with weak ties is especially important.” People with strong ties already share similar views; it’s the weak ties that “may create bridges to other clusters of people in a way that strong ties do not.” Social scientists call these connections “bridge ties” and “weak ties are more likely to be bridges between disparate groups.”

In other words, a bridge tie is the friend of the friend of the friend who quits smoking, and influences whether or not your immediate cluster quits too. In Egypt, during the Arab Spring, Tufekci documents how, as these online, symbolic actions piled up, it “created a new baseline for common knowledge of the political situation…not just what you knew, but also what others knew you knew, and so on—that shifted the acceptable boundaries of discourse.”

None of these signals have to be shared online, of course. And what I don’t know, and maybe nobody knows, is how the manner in which these signals are sent influences people. There’s some evidence that trying to convince others of something often has the opposite effect so I don’t know maybe don’t try to do that. And let’s face it, this stuff can be kind of annoying. Even on an issue you care deeply about, one can only handle so many text-on-pastel-background Instagram stories. There’s also the fact that, given the gravity and emotional intensity of what is happening in the country—the latest police murder of Jacob Blake, racists driving cars into crowds, a 17-year-old Trump supporter with an AR-15 killing anti-racist demonstrators—a status update can feel pitifully insufficient, a mismatch.

But I do think that sharing what you believe, talking about your politics or race or climate change online and offline, saying out loud what makes you angry or sad or hopeful, has a contagious effect. Because we are social networks and not mere collections of individuals, the sentiments that you share are not just your own, but one part of the collective sentiments of a whole.

These symbolic actions are not the entirety of activism, by any means, but they are part of it. Like the teens wearing green bandanas in modern-day Argentina, or professionals and working class people shouting anti-Shah slogans from their rooftops at night during the Iranian Revolution, then going to work in the morning. These actions signal not only mere personal virtue, but social virtue—that something that was once tolerable will no longer be tolerated.

Podcasts

I don’t want to let virtue signaling totally off the hook here, because a lot of the time people hate it for good reason, like when it means sharing a sentiment while simultaneously acting in opposition. This is especially the case when the sentiment feels good but the action will cause some level of personal discomfort or sacrifice, which people do not like at all no siree.

I want to write more about that problem at some point, but a really good demonstration of it in action is the podcast Nice White Parents, which is about supposedly well-intentioned people who impede school integration and draw resources away from communities of color, all in the name of securing their own children’s education. It’s a frustrating podcast in that gee whiz This American Life isn’t racism fascinating way (many of the parents are not actually that nice!), but the story is brutally revealing about the progress people say they want, but will not act on due to self-interest or the perceived interests of their children.

Listening

He was a good boy

This is “riot dog” Negro Matapacos, a stray in Santiago, Chile who in 2010 began joining student demonstrations fighting for free education and would famously would attack and bark at only riot police. He died three years ago this week. You can read his story and buy shirts and posters with him on it here.

Television

This week I’m going to recommend rewatching any show that you once really loved. It feels kind of like hanging out with an old friend. I’m currently rewatching Hannibal and The Sopranos season 4, which I just finished and it has some low points but the final episode when Tony and Carmela separate is some of the best acting in the history of television holy shit.

Silvio is not that good at interventions.

I endorse

Buying a $35 wi-fi extender so you can work in the backyard now that we are entering a brief window of tolerable weather.

You know one of the disorienting things about living in a society that certainly seems like it is mid-collapse is not just the badness, but the weirdness. Like today, to safely ensure our votes were counted in what is purportedly a democratic and wealthy nation, Jamie had to drive our ballots into downtown Boston and drop them into a box, the one box in the city where you can do this.

Also, we have coin-op washers in our building and, because there is a coin shortage—a shortage of the little things that mean money—we had to have our landlord unlock the washer and trade us quarters we had previously owned so we could wash our clothes.

The other day an online ad recommended that I buy a large supply of zip ties.

Another good one is I read this article in New York Magazine by a writer who is pregnant and had to drive for 13 hours, so she constructed her own portable roadside bathroom out of a little tent and a bucket she kept in her car, and all in all she was pretty stoked about it.

I showed it to Jamie and was like, “Jesus doesn’t this feel like something out Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? But it’s being presented in this cheery can-do tone like it’s out of…”

“HGTV?” she said.

“Exactly. It’s like we are living in The Road as told by HGTV.”

So I will leave you on that note this week. Welcome back to season two or volume two or something of this newsletter. Chatty one this week, shaking out the cobwebs. Let’s keep doing the thing.

Tate

Crisis Palace by Tate Williams

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