1. Exploring Social Contagion from Behavioral and Emotional Perspectives
Daniel Faierman
Yale University
Thesis Advisor: David Klemanski
Secondary Reader: Margaret Clark
PSYC 492, Thesis for BA with Distinction
Abstract
The term “contagion” encompasses a variety of definitions across many areas of study.
Although it is most commonly used in the public health sector to describe the process in which a
disease is spread, contagion has also been researched in tremendous detail in the field of
psychology through examination of behavioral and emotional contagion, two facets of social
contagion. This phenomenon was first observed by Gustave LeBon in the late 19th century
through observation of crowd behavior and has since been investigated in a diverse array of
contexts, yielding many interesting findings. Nevertheless, a consistent conceptual framework
that is unanimously agreed upon by psychologists for clearly understanding social contagion is
lacking as very few have attempted to compile and analyze the majority of relevant research on
this phenomenon in a single study. Thus, the present literature review aimed to explore the most
important prior research on emotional and behavioral contagion in hopes of approaching the
formation of a truly logical and encompassing structure for comprehending social contagion and
its associated mechanisms. This was challenging as research directly differentiating related
concepts such as learning theory and mimicry was nonexistent. Despite several gaps in literature,
this review successfully exposes how an expertise of social contagion can be valuable in a
variety of social environments, while also highlighting future directions of research that will
further enable the creation of a framework for fully understanding this complicated concept.