Contagious

A groundbreaking Harvard Medical School led by Dr Nicholas A Christakis once revealed that Obesity is contagious. For the purposes of the study, they followed 12067 subjects for 32 years. And they found that when someone became obese, the odds of that person’s close friends becoming obese tripled.

Proximity didn’t matter. It even spread across geographies. What happens is that we change our idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around us.

Another study showed that when college males were paired with a dormitory roommate who drank frequently in high school, they saw their GPA’s drop by 0.25 on average.

Marriage, smoking, shaking hands to greet someone, wearing fashionably fluffy boots and investing in Google are a few examples of an endless list of contagious behavior.

We imitate people around us especially when a situation is ambiguous. For ambiguous situations, think starting in a new job or starting out as a freshman in university.

Essentially, if we want to change things, we have to pay close attention to social signals.

I was very inspired when I heard this on ‘Switch’ this morning. It brings to attention (again) the question of the season – Who do you spend your time with? :)

And more importantly, the presence of a behavior like ‘marriage’ amidst low GPA’s and tobacco reinforces that fact that all kinds of behavior have hope.

The Silicon valley has proved that over time with an incredible tolerance for failure and mistakes.

Perhaps the daily learning habit and ‘learner’ behavior will get contagious as well. Someday.