A recent article on the Brexit
debate suggested that there is a fear among Governments that Brexit would lead
to ‘referendum
contagion’. The term ‘contagion’ here denotes not only the idea of
behaviour spreading rapidly, but also that this spread is uncontainable and undesirable
in some way. It is a term that seems to be ubiquitous today. But it appears
perhaps most regularly in three particular contexts: explanations for the
spread of emotion; accounts of stock market ‘panics’; and explanations for the
spread of violence.
On the one hand, the concept of
‘contagion’ seems to do a good job in describing the fact that behaviours
spread from person to person. It seems to be the only way to conceptualize the
phenomena when we seek to explain how, as in 2011,
riots began in London but then seemingly similar rioting then subsequently occurred
in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, apparently as a direct consequence of
these first riots. The core idea of
‘contagion’ is that, particularly in crowds, mere exposure to the behaviour of
others leads observers to behave in the same way. As well as being a popular
cliché among journalists, ‘contagion’ is found to be a vital tool in academic
accounts. In a recent Google Scholar search, we found 500 hits for 2015 alone,
and very few of them referring to spreading disease. In research, ‘contagion’ is
now used to explain everything from ‘basic’ responses such as smiling and
yawning (where the mere act of witnessing someone yawn or smile can invoke the
same response in another) to these complex phenomena we have mentioned, like the
behaviour of financial markets and rioting. What is more, laboratory
experiments on the ‘contagion’ of simple responses (such as yawning) serve to
underpin the plausibility of ‘contagion’ accounts as applied to complex
phenomena (such as rioting).
Despite this widespread acceptance, the ‘contagion’ account
has major problems in explaining the spread of behaviours. In particular, there
are boundaries to such spread. If men smile at a sexist joke, will feminists
also smile in response to the men’s smiles? If people riot in one town, why is
it that they also riot in some towns but not others? For example, in 2011, disturbances
spread from London to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham but they
did not spread to Sheffield, Glasgow and parts of Leeds.
The concept of ‘contagion’ cannot answer such questions.
‘Mere touch’ (literal or metaphorical) may be necessary, but it is not
sufficient for influence. The notion of ‘contagion’ assumes that transmission
is automatic. It does not take account of the social relations between the
transmitter and receiver. The best it can do is simply re-describe, in a
limited way, the fact of involuntary influence, rather than explain it. At
worst, it pathologizes influence in crowds and elsewhere, by likening it to
the action of a disease.
This month, we (Steve Reicher, Clifford Stott
and I, along with research fellows Fergus
Neville and Roger Ball) started work on an ESRC-funded project to test a
new account of behavioural transmission, based on the social identity approach
in social psychology. This approach suggests that influence processes are
limited by group boundaries and group content: we are more influenced by
ingroup members than by outgroup members, and we are more influenced by that
which is consonant with rather than contradictory to group norms. The social
identity approach is therefore ideally suited to explaining the social limits
to influence, both for ‘basic’ phenomena and rioting.
Because the concept of ‘contagion’ has been employed across
a range of settings, we will be using different research designs to address it
and test an alternative. These include a series of experimental studies to
examine generic processes, but also make use of a large body of secondary data
to look at the specific case of the 2011 riots, where ‘contagion’ was one of
the explanations mobilised to ‘explain’ the spread of behaviours. We
will use our findings to generate a wider debate about the nature of
psychological transmission and the practicalities of addressing them.
This research is funded by the ESRC, Ref ES/N01068X/1
