#contagious behavior

Brain Hardwired to Respond to Others' Itching: Mouse Study

Some behaviors -- yawning and scratching, for example -- are socially contagious, meaning if one person does it, others are likely to follow suit. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that socially contagious itching is hardwired in the brain.

Are we in the Middle of a Rudeness Epidemic? | Part-Time Genius

After author Danny Wallace received the world's worst customer service (and possibly the world's worst hotdog) from a hotdog vendor, he decided to search for the root cause of rudeness.

This interview is a hilarious discussion of the exasperating topic of rudeness.

I've definitely noticed contagious rudeness that spreads.

I know someone who's so outrageously rude on a regular basis that it would be really funny if it didn't cause such insufferable annoyance to so many at regular intervals. The person appears to go out of their way to be rude in ways that take a real effort too. I also know someone who has told me of someone they know who has a rude manner, a sort of curmudgeonly disposition. Different type of rudeness, but the commonality is that I'm told in this case it actually appears that this person has to make much more effort to be rude than to not be rude.

Despite the appearance of effort, it doesn't seem likely that these people actually set out with the goal of being rude, making people angry, or alienating themselves. So then I wonder how often many of us have unwittingly made efforts to be rude because we caught the contagious rudeness bug. I only recently realized how I managed to unwittingly sort of pass on some rudeness I've experienced on the receiving end. And I noticed it mainly because I was suffering from contagious cold & flu illnesses and noticed the parallel between the cold & flu viruses going around and the rudeness cycles.

The part about surgeons experiencing rudeness having a detrimental effect is really quite scary to me because of the potential deadly catch 22 there where surgeons are sometimes rude, and doctors often seem a bit thin skinned when it comes to perceived disrespect. The upside of that being that I've typically felt doctors to be particularly empathetic when hearing of experiences of disrespect, including in the medical setting, so long as the source was somebody else being accused of rudeness.

So cognitive biases are the beating heart of behavioral economics and finance. But where do they come from? Are they innate or learned? Or are they epigenetic, some complex combination of the two where environmental factors trigger a gene for one or more of them?

But there’s another possibility, namely that you catch them. Yep just like a cold, measles or Ebola. But in this case the method of transmission is social rather than bacterial or viral. Kind of like spreading a yawning fit.

Did you know that if you spend a lot of time with obese people, you are likely to be obese yourself? And actually, it’s not just obesity but your weight so it applies but also to slenderness. And no, it’s not just that you all eat the same stuff together because you live in the same household. It is actually stronger with friends than with your roommates or significant other. So the researchers concluded that weight is socially contagious.

Nor is just weight a major impact on the other party. The same thing occurs with healthy behaviors and exercise, as you might have guessed. Recently the same effect has been found in married people. If one exercises, the other is far more likely to exercise too.

So there’s every reason to believe that cognitive biases can also be spread socially. In fact recent research into how behavior spreads socially focuses on Twitter

If this is true it has some epic implications for us humans far beyond what has been considered so far. We know from recent research that if you are unemployed early in life (say because you had the misfortune to finish your education just as a recession hit), your lifetime income will be lower than otherwise. You will likely never recover from this hit.

Similarly the implication from cognitive biases being socially contagious is that early exposure to particular cognitive biases could also impact the rest of your life adversely (or maybe positively too).

Let’s take career planning as an example. Different companies will have preferred cognitive biases. If your first job is with a company with an adverse cognitive bias, say strong loss aversion, it could permanently impair your ability to do something entrepreneurial even if you are naturally entrepreneurial yourself. So your first job is even more important than you might have thought.

A wise career planner would advise you to only choose companies with good cognitive biases and to avoid those with bad ones. Some companies with great names might have bad cognitive biases so your Harvard degree might get you into great-looking companies with bad cognitive biases that will impair your career and your lifetime chances of doing well (at least by your own lights).

Speaking of Harvard, do different educational institutions also have different cognitive biases? Likely I would think. So instead of slavishly following the recommendations of US News and World report in choosing a school for your kids, you might want to choose them by their cognitive biases.

Oh whoops, there’s no list for that. And maybe likely never will be. Just like a company is unlikely to publish one even if they knew what it was. But that doesn’t mean their cognitive biases are any less likely to impact your future career and life.

But wait; there is a kind of way to find out the cognitive biases of schools and companies. Just look at the crowdsourced sites those rate teachers, company jobs and reputations to find out that’s going on there. They can give you valuable information and if you know enough about some cognitive biases, you can probably get some hint of what they are and the relative influence of the good and the bad ones. That’s better than nothing.

You can see where this is going right? How about the cognitive biases of your business partner? What about the leaders of that acquisition you are contemplating? You potential lifelong love? Come to think about it, what about your parents?

Sounds to me like there’s a product here. Rank colleges by cognitive biases to assess their likely impact on your future money-making behaviors. Rank companies by cognitive bias. Tinder for people who want to make money, not just find the perfect mate.

We can make money out of this social contagion thing. Where do we start?!