She’s a moving violation from her conk down to her shoes
This week, a study found that drinking habits are socially transmissible. Last month, a paper said that both cooperation and selfishness can spread like a virus. In February, a study found that poor sleep and pot smoking are contagious among teens. All of these revelations come from the works of two scientists, Harvard’s Nicholas Christakis and U.C. San Diego’s James Fowler. They first brought fame to contagion in 2007 with a widely publicized paper suggesting that obesity is “socially contagious” and that it can spread like a pox from one friend to another, and then another, and then to one more. More contagions (depression and divorce) are in the works. In their 2009 book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Christakis and Fowler write that connection and contagion are “the anatomy and physiology of the human superorganism,” and that “everything we think, feel, do, or say can spread far beyond the people we know.”
The studies have provoked excitement in the public health community but also some head-scratching. Many were surprised by the claim that obesity, for example, could be transmitted from one person to another. We thought we knew the major causes of fatness: genes, for one thing, along with eating too many calories and living a sedentary lifestyle. The finding that loneliness can be contagious also caught some readers off-guard
photo { Bryan Formhals }
