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Behavioral Contagion and the Rise of Convent Education in France.(Statistical Data Included)
Europe in the seventeenth century suffered doubly from terrible epidemics. Plague did not end in England and northern Europe until after the 1660s and in southern France until after 1720. Estimates vary as to how many people were killed in witch-hunts between 1550 and 1700, but the number was certainly in the tens of thousands. Both of these scourges were contagious; that is, in both cases the risk of becoming affected increased when other people in one's neighborhood, family, or social circle became affected. The rise of convent education in seventeenth century France was mostly beneficial. Yet it too, we argue, was contagious. [1]
The contagious spread of ideas and behaviors has usually been regarded with disfavor. For example, The Economist comments on a tendency for present-day currency crises to spread by contagion from one country to another that "'rational' causes predominate."
Currency crises, says The Economist, are not so contagious as to produce "mass hysteria in the markets." [2]
In nineteenth-century France the idea of contagion was tightly linked with psychopathology and given a materialistic interpretation. Contagion, it was thought, was propagated by sympathetic vibrations of the nerves, as if they were strings. Susceptible individuals, for whom "each sensation is a tremor and almost a compulsion," were more likely to emit "strong nervous vibrations" and also more likely to resonate to vibrations emanating from others. Women were thought to be much more susceptible than men, and both sexes were more susceptible in crowds. [3]
The concept of contagion, as used in this article, has no such pathological or materialistic connotations. The spread of ideas or behaviors is a normal phenomenon. The mode of transmission may be an active attempt to emulate others or a simple compliance with social pressures. No psychopathology is implied. Nor is the spread of behaviors or ideas by example to be interpreted as irrational. For example, the legal practice of judging cases according to precedent (stare decisis) is a form of behavioral contagion and not considered irrational, but just the reverse.
Behavioral contagion is a historiographical tool. It neither substitutes for historical narrative nor applies to every historical investigation. Although, by itself it does not explain either why an "epidemic" starts or why it ends, it is helpful in understanding the course and dynamics of a social movement.
Social movements are not adequately understood as responses, even very complex responses. What people do is conditioned on what other people do. The result is a collectivity knit together by innumerable strands of mutual interactions. The theory of behavioral contagion is a formalization of this view. It has the advantage of lending itself to quantitative analysis and, as an added attraction, can borrow from the theory of biological contagion's extensive mathematical development. Most important, contagion is a powerful idea; it generates many testable consequences, a good number of which are distinctive, not commonsensical, and not easily explained in other ways. It can also be definitively ruled out as the evidence warrants. [4]
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