Social contagion involves behaviour, emotions, or conditions spreading spontaneously through a group or network. The phenomenon has been discussed by social scientists since the late 19th century, although much work on the subject was based on unclear or even contradictory conceptions of what social contagion is, so exact definitions vary. Some scholars include the unplanned spread of ideas through a population as social contagion, though others prefer to class that as memetics. Generally social contagion is understood to be separate from the collective behaviour which results from a direct attempt to exert social influence. Two broad divisions of social contagion are behavioural contagion and emotional contagion. The study of social contagion has intensified in the 21st century. Much recent work involves academics from social psychology, sociology, and network science investigating online social networks. Studies in the 20th century typically focused on negative effects such as violent mob behaviour, whereas those of the 21st century, while sometimes looking at harmful effects, have often focused on relatively neutral or positive effects like the tendency for people to take action on climate change once a sufficient number of their neighbours do. Throughout history all social contagions have had a single thing in common: the people who follow them genuinely believe their group is only doing positive effects, and cannot rationalize negative effects from within their group.
History
Metaphoric use connecting the concept of infection with imitation (mimesis) dates back at least to Plato, and continued into medieval and early modern literature. The term "behavioural contagion" was first introduced into modern scholarship by Gustave Le Bon in his 1895 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Further scholarly works on the subject were at first released slowly, only one or two a decade until the 1950s. Herbert Blumer was the first to specifically use the term "social contagion", in his 1939 paper on collective behavior, where he gave the dancing mania of the middle ages as a prominent example. From the 1950s, studies of social contagion began to investigate the phenomena empirically, and became more frequent. There was no widely shared definition of social contagion in the 20th century, so many of the studies had little in common. In 1993, David A. Levy and Paul R. Nail published a review where they stated that social contagion captures the broadest sense of the phenomena, as opposed to subtypes like behavioural or emotional contagion. In a 1998 review, Paul Marsden suggested that social contagion is a similar phenomena to memetics, a field of study inspired by Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Marsden suggested that the two fields could be complementary, in the sense that work on social contagion largely lacked a coherent theory, but contained much evidence-based analyses, whereas memetics was rich in theory but lacking on the empirical side. From the 1990s and into the 21st century, interest in social contagion grew rapidly, based in part on cross fertilisation with the then emerging field of network science, especially its application to the Internet. With respect to positive social contagions, a series of experiments and field trials since 2009 (by Nicholas Christakis and diverse collaborators) have shown that cascades of desirable behaviors can be induced in social groups, in settings as diverse as Honduran villages, Indian slums, online, or in the lab. Diverse other experiments have documented the social contagion of voting behavior, emotions, risk perception, and diverse other phenomena.
Definition Scholars have long reported that the study of social contagion has suffered from the lack of a widely accepted and precise definition. Definitions have often, though not always, classified social contagion as a method of transmission that does not rely on a direct intent to influence. Other definitions have suggested that social contagion involves spontaneous imitation of others, rather than being based on conscious decisions. In their 1993 review, Levy and Nail proposed that social contagion should be defined as the spread of affect, attitude or behaviour "where the recipient does not perceive an intentional influence attempt on the part of the initiator".
Typology
Various typologies have been proposed for social contagion.
By what is being transmitted Social contagion can be broadly split into behavioural contagion and emotional contagion. The spread of ideas is sometimes considered a third broad category, though that is often considered part of memetics. Paul Marsden has said behavioural contagion can be split into six subcategories: hysterical contagions, deliberate self-harm contagions, contagions of aggression, rule violation contagions, consumer behaviour contagions, and financial contagions.
By causal pathway Three main causes of social contagion have been proposed: disinhibitory contagion, echo contagion, and hysterical contagion. Disinhibitory contagion involves a type of behaviour that the person already has some desire to engage in, but from which normally they would refrain due to a desire to comply with social norms. When they witness others in the crowd performing the behaviour, this can break the inhibitory effect. Echo contagion represents the spontaneous imitation of a behaviour, or transition into conformance with an emotional state shared by others. Hysterical contagion represents the unwanted transmission of a behaviour, emotion or affect among a group by unknown means. Unlike with echo or disinhibitory contagion, what is being transmitted may in no way be desirable or attractive, yet it transmits anyway.
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