Researchers have discovered that people are remarkably responsive to what other members of their social group are doing. “Social Contagion” is the term social psychologists use to describe the tendency of a behavior, attitude or belief to spread among people who are close to each other.
As much as we may not want to believe it, what we think everybody else thinks or does matters to us. Family harmony often depends on a certain level of conformity. We make friends based more on similarity than differences. Advertisers count on our tendency to be influenced by our perception of what is popular with that mythic “everyone else.”
Some social contagion is decidedly self-destructive. In 2008, 17 high school girls in one small town made a pregnancy pact, all of them trying to get pregnant before graduation. A retrospective study that same year found that adolescent girls are more likely to engage in non-suicidal self harm if their best friends are doing it. Another study found that teens with four or more friends who were abusing drugs and alcohol were also likely to abuse substances. The suicide of one or more people in a group often leads to other people attempting or committing suicide, especially if they were already struggling with depression.
Not all conformity is negative. People are more likely to register to be organ donors if members of their family do the same. Recovery groups are built on the idea that replacing a social group of users with a support group of people with the same recovery goals is a powerful support for positive change. Conservation efforts, composting, and belonging to a farm share are also likely to spread among members of a friend group. You know that card on your hotel pillow asking if you’d like to help the environment by reusing your towels? You are more likely to say “yes” if people you know do it.
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