Social Contagion theory

[Rob Thornton]

I was hoping some of learned folks might share some thoughts on Social Contagion. I've been listening to Daniel Goleman's book Social Intelligence on the drive and he's pitched some pretty interesting ideas that I think are relevant to the way terrorism is used - particularly in the way it has been used in Baghdad.

When the violence seems to defy all reason and logic, when its physics resemble that of a large scale wild fire, how do you contain and manage it. Goleman makes a good case for the theory, and is able to bring in some hard science in the relatively new ways scientists are experimenting on brain cells. I just wanted to see if any of us had considered this theory and what their thoughts are.

Regards, Rob

[Dominique R. Poirier]

Mr. Thornton,
I willingly subscribe to your visible efforts to find solutions, but with all regards to it I have the sentiment that venturing on this way might turn out to be misleading at some point.

The basis sustaining the previous opinion is fifteen years of professional experience in communication, advertising, and media and substantial personal studies on social sciences. No offense.

Sincerly,

[Rob Thornton]

Dominique,
None taken. Just looking for causal reltionships & how certain theories in human behavior in one area might be used in another.
Best Regards Rob

[slapout9]

Rob, one of the examples was employees in a hospital setting. I can tell you from personal experience as recently as last week that there is something to this theory. If certain key players are behind a project it can be amazing how it spreads from person to person. Both for it and against it. I am going to have to get that CD. Could you expand on this theory a little more. I also experienced this alot in LE especially with gangs or crime families.

[Dominique R. Poirier]

Rob, one of the examples was employees in a hospital setting. I can tell you from personal experience as recently as last week that there is something to this theory. If certain key players are behind a project it can be amazing how it spreads from person to person. Both for it and against it. I am going to have to get that CD. Could you expand on this theory a little more. I also experienced this alot in LE especially with gangs or crime families.

I acknowledge I have not been that explicit on my previous advice.

Sorry.

Actually, it would claim quite a long comment to make my point perfectly clear and that’s why I didn’t do it.

Wholesome, you start today with this “Social Intelligence,” and you’ll be immersed into existentialism tomorrow. In the meantime you’ll have wasted some of your time reading Pierre Bourdieu, of course. Holly cow; I did waste mine with it! But I had the excuse to be young, at least.

I am sorry to be that offhand in my way of expressing myself this time, but wake up! Or, one day you’ll end dressing psychedelic style, smoking marijuana, and playing tam-tam during anti-war protests.

I insist, no offense. But better warning you and taking the risk to be upsetting than to passively let you engaging in such fairy tales.

The only way I see to make profitable use of that kind of stuff is, at best, relevant to psyop applied to Northern hemisphere countries. But that is another story…

Sincerely,

[Rob Thornton]

Dominique,
You'll have to get to used to what we do here - most of us are professionals in our own right and as such have formed opinions about what might or might not be useful. We may start with one thing and by the end of the thread wind up somewhere very different. We generally are inclusive, and open. We are also fairly good analysts about applicability of a topic or theory. You are certainly welcome to chime in and provide your view; in fact that is what makes the site good. However, please don't expect that we will simply drop a subject we are interested in, unless you offer a compelling counter-theory to explain the topic at hand - in which case the initial subject served its purpose.
And please call me Rob, I don't use a pseudonym for a reason - Mr. Thornton sounds much too formal for continued discussion

[Tom OC]

Rob, I'd love to talk about social contagion theory. I'm worried you might be getting a misunderstanding of it from that Netherlands site (good link, BTW, I bookmarked it) which seems to be some version from the field of communications studies. I also have no idea what the social intelligence connection is, unless, of course, one borrows from social network theory or small group theory. Instead, the version I'm most familiar with comes from the field of sociological criminology, a route one can trace from LeBon to Tarde to Durkheim to Phillips, and some cites on the latter show the criminological connection:
Phillips, D.P. (1980) Airplane accidents, murder, and the mass media: Towards a theory of imitation and suggestion. Social Forces 58, 4: 1000-1024.
Phillips, D.P. (1983) The impact of mass media violence on U.S. homicides. American Sociological Review, 48 (Aug): 560-568.
Ideas in this area have evolved from mob psychology (LeBon) to imitation (Tarde) to sociogenic currents (Durkheim) to homogeneity (Phillips). Press a symbolic interactionist, and they'll tell you it's about "the flux of situated identities" (Simmel being the sociological godfather of this, but more along the lines of how rumors, hoaxes, and lies spread). Press a structural-functionalist, and they'll tell you it's about "emergent norms" (which by definition don't exist since all norms must have emerged already). Of course, anyone trained in sociology would be familiar with Durkheim's famous theory of anomie (things change too fast) vs. fatalism (things never change) vs. altrusim (people do for others) vs. egotism (people do for self), and the sociogenic currents are those things (interpenetrating values) which float between and around those four polar endpoints, leaving patterns of expectations (norms) about conformity in their wake. Hence, people suffering from anomie occasionally get hit with a spell of fatalism; and people suffering from egotism occasionally get hit with a spell of altruism, etc. The social systems theorist, Parsons, picked up on this best of all, but it was Tarde (Durkheim's whipping boy during 19th century debates) who offered the more useful concept of "budget" (what we know as equilibrium or carrying capacity).
Homogeneity and closeness (propinquity) are factors which constrain budgets in terms of how many different values a society can tolerate, and to be sure, we are mainly talking about destructive or deviant values here (the concern of most criminologists). In criminology, much of this thinking is known as the question of how much crime can a society tolerate. To say that some crime is imitative or copycat misses the point about how social contagion is at the heart of the whole process. Hope this helps.

[slapout9]

Hi Rob, The case of the college students becoming guards was a popular topic when I was in college in 1976. It is pretty much a total fraud. They picked college students and told them to "act" like correctional officers. They did not go through any type of employment screening process like would have happened in the real world nor did they go through any type of academy and a probationary period which would have happened in the real world.

However their is study that was published in military review on how to spot psychopathic behavior. If I can find it I will post the link.

Here it is.http://calldp.leavenworth.army.mil/e...CUR_DOCUMENT=2

[goesh]

Another thought that came to mind was the situation on the upper plains of the US during the Great Depression and the foreclosures of family farms. This was very serious because there were no viable means of sustanence for these farm families - no welfare, no commodoties, no food stamps, no jobs etc. Two tactics were employed to combat this with no readily identified leadership behind the actions:
1.) When sale time arrived, farmers would show up and not allow anyone else in except farmers, who would then buy equipment and livestock at bid for mere pennies and return them to the original owners.
or
2.) Several famers would bring mares in heat and 3-4-5 other farmers would bring stallions to the sale. When massive draught horse stallions get to fighting over mares in heat and going after them, people and objects are going to get hurt and the sale would be totally disrupted.

This tactics seemed to crop up out of nowhere and rapidly spread so one could say there were 'cell leaders' but no leaders of prominence.

Were these acts of violence? Not to me but to others, yes. I think the viability of the paradigm of contagion V leaders is best served when violence is defined in harsh terms.

[marct]

There's been a debate in history for a long time over social forces vs. "Great Men" that may be applicable here. Goesh's points about emerging social protests certainly illustrate that, in some instances, people self organize and "through up" "leaders".

In other cases, "leaders" seem to exacerbate social problems while providing a "solution" (TomOC, I'm thinking of the Social Constructionist literature here, e.g. Joel Best, Specter and Kisuse, Darwin Bromley, etc.). Probably the best (no pun intended) article in this strand of thought is

Best, Joel (1987) Rhetoric in Claims-Making: Constructing the Missing Children Problem, in Social Problems 34(2), 101-121

Most of the reason I really like this article is that it provides a simple, yet surprisingly useful, way of analyzing the mechanisms of the spread of an idea / perception.

Marc

[Tom OC]

The social constructivist paradigm is weak because it fails to give any obdurate (how I've longed to use that word in some forum) status to norms and roles. And forgive me if I'm stomping all over someone's favorite paradigm here, but people like Joel Best see norms as always emerging and roles as constantly entered and exited. They see society as always in flux, a fiction if you will, that only exists in peoples' minds. Hence, contagion for them is only useful as a concept which explains consequences of action, not as a concept which helps understand the causes of action. It's almost as if interactionists are trapped in studying second-order and third-order interactions. Take the typical interactionist approach to what defines a social problem; i.e., the five stages of deviatization:

1. defining (some problem as deviant)
2. prospecting (for some scientific fact)
3. claims-making (over who "owns" the problem)
4. turf-battling (over who gets to solve the problem)
5. designating (the solution in law or ritual)

Social constructivists hardly ever get past a discussion of stage three. I've taken an interest lately in extending these stages to what constitutes the securitization process from an international relations standpoint, and have found the constructivist paradigm lacking in that area too. It seems what the whole rhetoric of fear crowd is missing is what attribution psychologists call "veridicality" or what Walter Stephan (2000). "Intergroup relations" pp. 333-336 in A. Kazdin (ed.) Encyclopedia of psychology. Washington DC: APA calls "realism" as in realistic threat assessment. This constitutes the role of leaders to realistically characterize the threat and not cater to symbolic overtones. Interactionists firmly believe symbolic communication is more powerful than realistic communication, and that is both their virtue and vice. Long ago in criminology, the non-Marxist conflict theorist, Austin Turk, tried to point that out to them, and another criminologist, Leslie Wilkins, tried to quantify that social contagion of the symbolic type only moves the mean of deviance one standard deviation away instead of two as a realistic portrayal might do. Applying this to leadership, I would imagine that bad leaders manipulate the symbolism in sinister ways, and good leaders are more capable of realistic risk portrayal as in the way risk communication is supposed to be done in homeland security. In sum, contagion is an energy source for the causes of action. It can be managed, sure, but I think it has to be treated as a structural phenomenon if we are ever to understand its true nature. Thanks for letting me share.