From Fashion to Suicide: Why We Imitate Each Other

Source: Juan Carlos Munoz | AdobeStock

• Social influence can help explain a vast array of human behaviors, from everyday forms of learning and relating, to long-term increases in mental illness and violence.
• Basic forms of imitation begin in infancy, and involuntary mimicry is evident in phenomena like contagious yawning.
• Imitation and suggestibility are features of being human, but may have many harmful side effects.

In 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). In the novel, the main character Werther shoots himself with a pistol after he is rejected by the woman he loves. Shortly after the book’s publication, there were reports of young men dressing in yellow pants and blue jackets like Werther and shooting themselves in acts of hopelessness. This resulted in the book being banned in several places.

The phenomenon of copycat suicides, which has been verified numerous times by research in recent decades, has become known as the Werther effect. It is a form of social contagion, and is thought to be mediated by social learning, whereby a vulnerable person identifies with someone depicted in the media and may be inclined to emulate their suicidal behavior. The effect seems to be greatest in youth, a group that is highly susceptible to social learning. The effect appears to be especially great when the publicized suicide is that of a celebrity, and when that person is romanticized or glorified. As a result, many countries have in recent years implemented media guidelines on suicide reporting.¹

What Is Social Contagion?

Social contagion² is a more general phenomenon extending far beyond suicide. It is the spread of ideas, attitudes, or behavior patterns in a group through imitation and conformity (among other factors).³ It is a complex and incompletely understood phenomenon, with various conscious (volitional) and unconscious (involuntary) processes contributing to it. The American Psychological Association’s definition of social contagion⁴ lists a few of those processes:

• Imitation—copying the behavior of another person or group, intentionally or unintentionally.⁵ In some situations there can also be an element of mimicry, in which people, without conscious awareness or intent, automatically copy other people’s physical movements.⁶
• Conformity and the pressure to conform: conformity is the adjustment of one’s opinions, judgments, or actions so that they become more consistent with the group.
• Universality, which refers to the tendency to assume that one’s attitudes or behaviors are common to everyone in the group and are permissible ‘because everybody’s doing it,’ as in the case of rule-breaking by a crowd or mob. This has a disinhibiting effect, as well as a reciprocally reinforcing effect, setting up a circular reaction. Anonymity, impulsivity, and feelings of invincibility also play important roles in mob situations.⁷

Some other factors mediating social contagion might include:

• The need for approval and affiliation.
• Sharing the other’s goals, or inferring/understanding their intentions and motivations.
• Being ‘inspired’ and impressed by the other, and in some cases trying to gain recognition and even notoriety by surpassing the ‘accomplishment’ of the other, as in the case of antisocial/psychopathic acts such as mass shootings.
• Emotional contagion—the rapid spread of an emotion from one or a few individuals to others, as in a political rally or a sports stadium packed with fans, or even just a room full of friends.
• Group-think, as may occur for example in political organizations, or in corporations—in which cohesiveness or the desire for cohesiveness within a group produces a tendency among its members to agree at all costs, which leads the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation. Members of a group can often feel peer pressure to ‘go along with the crowd’ for fear of rocking the boat, or out of concern for their teammates’ perceptions of them.⁸
• Presence of a highly influential/domineering/authoritative role model.
• Social facilitation⁹
• The human propensity to be strongly swayed by compelling narratives.
• Suggestibility—social contagion is accelerated by a high degree of suggestibility.¹⁰ Suggestibility is a highly potent, underestimated force, with manifestations extending far beyond social contagion.

What Is Suggestibility?

Suggestibility is the quality of being inclined to accept and act on the suggestions of others,¹¹ or being easily influenced by other people's opinions.¹² It also usually implies a state of uncritical compliance with an influence.¹³ Another important factor playing into suggestibility is expectation. The brain is a prediction machine, and expectations have a powerful influence on how we perceive and experience things. Other people’s experiences, not just our own, can shape our expectations. Suggestibility may operate with and without awareness, i.e. consciously and unconsciously.^{14, 15}

Suggestibility and expectation are central to placebo effects. Sometimes placebo response rates for certain kinds of treatments might even increase in a society over time, as a result of rising societal expectations for the effectiveness of particular treatments.¹⁶ Some conditions have higher placebo response rates than others. A sizeable portion of antidepressants' effect sizes is attributable to the placebo effect (with the medications being modestly superior overall, on average).¹⁷

Social Contagion and Suggestibility in Mental Disorders

The manifestations of social contagion and suggestibility are wide-ranging. Here are a few examples in the mental health field in which a problem has probably been at least amplified by social contagion effects and/or suggestibility:

• Suicides, as already noted.¹⁸
• Non-suicidal self-harm especially self-cutting, the prevalence of which has increased greatly in the last couple of decades. When I trained as a psychiatrist in the early 1990s, self-cutting was considered practically diagnostic of borderline personality disorder, whereas today it is merely a common way that anxious or depressed teens distract or soothe themselves when upset.
• Mass shootings, such as school shootings—these have increased greatly since 1999, especially in the U.S., in what has clearly been shown to be a copycat effect ("the Columbine effect").
• The apparent anxiety epidemic and mental health crisis in youth today.
• Psychosomatic symptoms.
• Functional Neurological Disorders, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, some cases of Chronic Lyme Disease, and some cases of post-concussion syndrome. Note: all of these syndromes may indeed have a physiological/neurobiological basis, some of which may be mediated by stress—it’s complicated. While there may be a significant element of suggestibility involved in some of these disorders, and their prevalence may have been at least partially amplified by social contagion effects, they cannot be dismissed as simply "all in your head."¹⁹
• Mass psychogenic illness (what used to be called mass hysteria)—there have been a great many famous examples in history.²⁰
• Anorexia Nervosa is probably another example of a now well-entrenched disorder with its origins partly in social contagion and suggestibility, with cultural factors fueling the epidemic. Common personality factors predispose certain individuals to develop anorexia, such as perfectionism and a high need for control (traits with a heritable basis). Cases of anorexia continue to be driven upwards by social contagion in vulnerable groups, sometimes quite consciously and intentionally, as in social media sites that foster competition in weight loss between teenage girls, in a race to the bottom.
• There have actually been quite a number of examples of disorders/diagnoses within psychiatry that have increased over the years, some of them legitimate disorders where increased recognition accounts for the increase in diagnoses, others more dubious—such as the 1980s/90s rise of so-called multiple personality disorder.²¹ Similarly, in those same decades, the supposed uncovering of repressed memories—from which valuable lessons were eventually learned about how easily false memories could unwittingly be induced by the insistent suggestion of well-intended but misguided, fervently believing therapists.²²

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Social Contagion Is a Broad Societal Phenomenon

Social contagion effects are at play far beyond mental health, in such disparate examples as the very divergent behaviors of communities during a pandemic (e.g. widespread mask wearing versus widespread flouting of public health measures), the proliferation of political conspiracist groups, the behavior of stock markets and financial manias/crashes, moral panics, witch hunts, religious manias and cults.²³ And of course the entire phenomenon of fashion, fads, and crazes (not to mention marketing, which intentionally exploits social contagion and suggestibility effects).

Social contagion is in many ways a side effect of the central place of social learning in human development, group coherence, and culture. Humans are intensely social primates. Observation and imitation of others is one of the most important ways in which we learn ("monkey see, monkey do," or "aping"). We do this from a very young age. Some of it is unconscious and hard-wired, such as the social smile—a fixed developmental milestone that has infants automatically smiling back when smiled at, beginning at around two months of age. Or, the way we yawn when we see others yawn (the physiological and evolutionary reasons for which remain something of a mystery). The process of toddlers acquiring language is another early developmental example.

Indeed, the transmission of culture itself operates in large part by imitative processes of social learning, contagion, and suggestibility. The inclination to conform to those around us and adopt their behaviors, consciously or unconsciously, is often irresistible—such as the way immigrant kids will usually adopt the accent that is prominent in their new home.

Culture has many definitions. One useful way of defining it is: all of the information that individuals acquire from others by a variety of social learning processes, including teaching and imitation.²⁴

There are many ways of understanding how culture spreads. One way is memetic theory, which is almost synonymous with social contagion.²⁵ The term meme, coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is intentionally similar to gene. Memes are units of cultural transmission that spread through processes similar to natural selection, in ways analogous to genes, or like viruses infecting minds. Memes spread especially profusely in humans in part because we are such a prodigiously imitative species and because we have the cognitive capacity, especially linguistic ability, to imitate very complex memes.

A Feature, Not a Bug

Our propensity to imitate each other in dysfunctional ways is thus a side effect of the centrality that imitation and suggestibility play in social learning and culture. There is much more research needed on this still incompletely understood phenomenon. We would do well to heighten our awareness of its profound, far-reaching influence on our behavior, personal health, and societal functioning.²⁶

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

—Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841