Size Effects?

Photograph: Antonin Kratochvil/VII, for The New York Times

A recent study found that friends who gain weight influence how much weight their friends gain. The researchers attribute this effect to “social networks.” Weight gain can be spread through social networks similar to how a common cold is generously shared among friends or children in grade school.

Gina Kolata has an interesting piece on this in the NYTimes. Click on the post title, Size Effects? above to read her article. Here is a excerpt:

"Now, scientists believe that social networks not only can spread diseases, like the common cold, but also may influence many types of behavior — negative and positive — which then affect an individual’s health, as well as a community’s."

This got me thinking that if negative and positive behavior can be "spread like a cold" imagine the consequences of a community where almost everyone feels badly about what's happening. Do hatred, bigotry, intolerance, unhappiness spread like a cold? If so, what's the cure?

Judith Herman (1993) in her book, Trauma and Recovery, wrote "Trauma is contagious." The idea that social networks spread emotions and behaviors is not new, but what we still haven't figured out is how to cure an unhealthy community which continuously reinfects itself through close contact. It seems then that small communities especially need to be mindful of how negative behavior spreads quickly and before you know it, everyone is sick with it. Is the cure to quarantine and isolate or to make a healthy community for everyone? You decide.