that's interes

An example of hysterical contagion, like that described on a factory floor in this classic study by Kerchkoff & Back in 1965. Unsurprisingly, such physical contagions are now spreading online via social media.

The most interesting thing I find about this story is that it offers more evidence about how influence spreads via online connections, and specifically, that it spreads via proximate - both in terms of “physical” (common networks) and emotional - connections. This is identical to the many offline descriptions of diffusion behaviours, from hybrid corn seed adoption to phantom illnesses.

I write about this a lot in my PhD research (zipped pdf), which looked at how attitudes and behaviours spread through online social networks.

from HuffPo (HT @fitbitchuk).