I’ve never been invited into a house like this before, the kind that looks like a fancy hotel lobby inside, furnished with postmodern glass chandeliers and banks of video screens that run the entire length of a corridor wall. Grant introduces me to some of his friends and colleagues, each one more self-possessed than the next, dressed in expensive sport coats and blue jeans or little black dresses. At one point I slip away from the party. I find myself wandering the house and admiring its floor-to-ceiling windows and taking in the art installations. This level of abundance, at once overwhelming, grand, and thoroughly awesome, produces a blend of feelings in my chest, including the sense that I’ve desired something like this my whole life and never known it until right now.
But more than that, there’s a thought that I am more than a bit out of my league, drifting among prestigious tech leaders, Silicon Valley celebrities, founders of online platforms, and PhDs in everything from engineering to organizational behavior. An unusual sense of inadequacy displaces any confidence I had at the start of the evening. So I retreat to the kitchen, where I notice a young man standing quietly by himself. His skin is brown. He’s cultivated a short length of stubble around his thin mouth and dimpled chin. His shirt is bright red, his slacks sharply pressed. Like many of the faces I recognize tonight, I know him by the mark he’s left on the world, which stands out from the other achievements represented here at the party. Unassuming though he is, quietly munching on a plate of sugar cookies he holds in one hand, a couple of years earlier Wael Ghonim, this mild-mannered Google techie, sparked the Egyptian revolution that upended the dictator Hosni Mubarak.
To pass an idea on to others is to spread a kind of truth. To catch it is to acquire a passion to infect others with it. In 2010, Egyptian police arrested and murdered a young man in Wael Ghonim’s homeland, and Ghonim, in turn, created a Facebook page denigrating the injustice. Perhaps he felt a kinship to the boy, a connection forged through generational ties and country. Or maybe turning to social media is just what young people do these days in response to emotions that not even they fully understand. Regardless, the sentiment moved a quarter of a million people to “like” his page. Ghonim then challenged his followers, the working-class Egyptians, silent activists, and disgruntled government employees, to channel their anger at the government into demands for reform through widespread pro-democratic demonstrations. For his efforts, Egyptian officials arrested Ghonim while he visited the country in January 2011. Swift international pressure mounted for his release. Twelve days after his abduction, Ghonim emerged from captivity a hero.
From there, the social contagion of courage he stoked from the portal of his computer spread far and wide. Anti-Mubarak protests cascaded into Tahrir Square with an unparalleled expression of fury and determination. At the Motivation Lab, Peter Gollwitzer told me that everyone has the potential for courage due to the representation of bravery within their character just waiting for a cue to prime them. We catch courage through vicarious prompts, he said, through symbols and stories and by hearing about courageous people.
History is full of soldiers and citizens and artists exploiting primes to steel the masses against fear. The English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about courage, epic poems on political attitudes and revolutions, narratives on nonviolence and social justice, cantos as vectors for bravery. After his death, his words spilled over the lips of revolutionaries. Mahatma Gandhi referred to Shelley as the source of his courage, as did Martin Luther King Jr., who suffused the civil rights movement in freedom songs that stirred and roused to, as he said, “give people new courage.” Resistant art spreads courage to stand up against power holders. Activist art channels it to influence the political climate and proves to be a contagion as formidable as the sharpest of weapons. Courage remains a virtue in every religion and culture. Carl Rogers calls it the energizing catalyst for choosing growth over safety; Alfred Adler, the core of one’s growth; Aristotle, the place in between the extremes of cowardice and foolhardiness; Confucius, bravery beyond the virtue of the noble warrior; Albert Bandura, the prime pronouncement of self-efficacy. No matter how one refers to valor, it is a quality we catch through vicarious modeling, by reading biographies and stories, by hearing about courageous acts, by listening to emboldening music. Even indirect exposure to people who act courageously increases the probability it will inspire the same behavior in others.
I’ve seen courage in Palo Alto, born out of necessity. Truly, it’s an ongoing fight between the social contagions of bravery and fear. We fight to stand together in the face of loss and ask hard questions about ourselves along the way as we face an endless cycle of bad news. Sometimes it feels as though the fear is so much stronger than the courage. The writer William Ian Miller makes the case about the unequal weight of contagious emotions. Bravery is catchable, he writes, but with fear the effects are more lasting and intense.
I suppose, then, that the trick to passing along lasting courage is one of overwhelming the system with examples of it, flooding the environment with models of generosity, authority, demonstrations of personal responsibility, and examples of calm in the heat of battle.
Ghonim has seen wondrous things happen as a result of his example. The social contagion of courage he let loose in Egypt stole across the borderlands. Pro-democratic movements erupted in Libya and led to the first free national elections there in six decades. Demonstrators in Jordan forced King Abdullah to dissolve the parliament and remove the prime minister. The people of Bahrain demanded political freedom. Demonstrations in Saudi Arabia led King Abdullah to impose new economic reforms and granted women the right to vote.
He offers me a cookie from his small blue plate. I’m thinking now, I tell him, that what Silicon Valley needs is heroes, vectors for spreading constructive social contagions like courage and fortitude, social contagions to counter fear and hysteria and bolster resolve in the midst of the kind of uncertainty that arrives after five children take their lives. Luckily, this town comes by heroes easily. Even if you haven’t heard of them, you’ve seen their work. You’ve integrated their contributions into your life either by function, by lexicon, or both. And when Ghonim returned from Egypt to Silicon Valley, we gained one more.
He puts his plate of cookies down on the counter and rubs a paper napkin across his lips. He then proceeds to tell me just how very wrong I am. Sometimes heroes spread more than just courage.
Chapter 17
Where Role Models Are Just Another Prime
Palo Alto is filled with stories of Ivy League achievements, of college dropouts turned billionaires, of geniuses in denim. For his part, Ghonim doesn’t believe he merits the banner of hero. His contributions to the Egyptian revolution were relatively small by comparison to others’, he says. But he’s a representation of the good that role modeling offers, I counter. The problem, he replies, is that young people are trying really hard to emulate their role models and heroes when the reality is they are just buying into a kind of mythology of a person, which may or may not be all or even partially true.
This isn’t a new argument. Thus far in my search, I’ve seen how compelling leaders spread charisma and how business managers inspire a strong work ethic that promotes both cutting-edge innovation and perfectionistic tendencies. The literature proposes that heroes serve a comparable function in arousing enormous ambition, a persistent and generalized striving for success, attainment, and accomplishment. Given this, I question how good role models can possibly be bad.
The truth is they’re not. Drawing upon data from a longitudinal research study on high-ability children, organizational psychologists in 2012 published findings in the Journal of Applied Psychology that distinguish the ways that “persistent and generalized striving for success, attainment, and accomplishment” has constructive long-term implications. Ambition has acquired something of a bad reputation, as though it’s part of a suite of traits that includes a lack of emotional empathy and drive and that supersedes all else. But ambition, according t
o the study, doesn’t constitute a character flaw that leads to dissatisfaction or creates feelings of unquenchable desires for outcomes.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be, though, writes the Oxford psychiatrist Neel Burton. Highly ambitious people, he suggests, are sensitive to resistance and failure. They experience an almost constant dissatisfaction or frustration. “To live with ambition is to live in fear and anxiety.” The level of accomplishment Ghonim brings to Silicon Valley becomes yet another model of unparalleled achievement for children to look up to, and for some to struggle mightily to emulate. Ghonim has returned home to Silicon Valley as just another prime.
And this feeling I’ve experienced on my way into the house tonight, astounded by a lavishness that stokes a longing in me to own a piece of it, if only for the couple of hours I meander through the party, is exactly the kind of thinking that spreads through Silicon Valley, riding the countenance of role models. A person who falls short, finding himself unable to emulate a kind of achievement in a community rich with success stories, will either become highly ambitious, writes Burton, or “withdraw in the belief that he is fundamentally inadequate,” leading him to become “dismissive or even destructive.” One has to wonder if our heroes, like the charismatic leaders in our midst—these vectors for social contagions—are doing more damage than good.
Ghonim launched his campaign on Facebook, and the momentum of the Egyptian uprising ensnared hundreds of thousands of strangers. The funny thing is that fewer than 20 percent of people in Egypt had Internet access. Most demonstrators were entirely unaware of Ghonim’s online presence from which he put out his call to action. Rather, they caught an echo contagion so powerful that it overrode competing logic and rational fear to leverage a prevailing desire for change at any cost. This tells me that role models are so influential that oftentimes we don’t even know whom we’re modeling—or that we’re modeling them at all. And that at once enthralls and frightens me. When are our behaviors not our own? I wonder. Even though Gollwitzer said primes cannot cue us to do anything that’s not already within our nature, this still leaves a lot of territory to guard.
After the lavish house party Ghonim’s story stays with me. I return to the archives and begin digging again. I come across two remarkable scenarios in which primes cued strangers to enact violence. In one of his early behavioral studies, the psychologist Fritz Redl described a spontaneous food fight at a camp for troubled youth. The scene involved dozens of campers and a flurry of flying heavy plastic plates. If I were to follow the substrate of influence back in time, maneuver over tumbling flatware, duck under spinning projectiles, and swerve around half-cocked arms and wide-eyed youngsters, I’d zero in on an instigator whose singular act of bad behavior interrupted the harmony of the mess hall by influencing eighty campers to jump into a fight.
I also find a story in the New York Post about an argument that broke out between a few members of a prestigious sports club. Details remained scarce, but according to witnesses the source of discord was a woman. Hearts were involved. Tensions rose. When words no longer sufficed, one member of the club threw a punch at another. Fist met jaw, and the air crackled. Serotonin levels dropped. Anger moved across the room like a destructive electrical pulse, blowing out prefrontal cortex circuits that ordinarily controlled their moral judgments. It overloaded emotion regulation capabilities and activated the clobbering impulse in people not otherwise involved in the dispute. The ensuing barroom brawl pulled dozens into the mix. Police moved in and arrested three of the club’s distinguished members. Ambulances carted others away for medical treatment to repair broken noses and fractured eye sockets.
These two reports, with their cascades of fists and flinging dishes, speak to the effect of behavioral contagions, a kind of unconscious communication, a dialect of Mark Micale’s proto-language that takes place between people and that blooms from social influence. As I read about these scenarios, three things stand out to me. The first is that Redl observed that people who introduce these contagions of behavior—the role models—often don’t realize the high-prestige or heroic positions they hold within the community culture. The sociologist Mark Granovetter suggests that often the holders of these high-prestige positions are those with the lowest convincing threshold, meaning it takes little to move them to action. Ghonim falls unerringly into this category. So does the first sports club member to throw a punch and the camper who Frisbeed his plate across the mess hall and touched off an epic food fight.
The second thing that strikes me is that, like the instigators themselves, often the people who catch a social contagion of behavior have no idea who the high-prestige holder is either. While the holders of high prestige need no convincing from other people to throw a plate or a punch, the next people to join in have a slightly higher threshold and probably wouldn’t have started the fight without noticing someone else fighting first. The effect continues, with the last people to jump into the fray having the highest threshold. Unconscious behavioral influence has less to do with the people afforded high prestige and far more to do with the people around them.
Lastly and perhaps most significantly, while holders of high prestige spread courage and ambition, they also have the potential to spread bad behavior. At the tech executive’s house party, Ghonim told me that as peaceful as the revolution was, ever since he’d returned to Silicon Valley, he’d watched, heartbroken, as Egypt slid back into hostility. As much as holders of high prestige can prime people for peaceful revolution and courage, they also cue for one of the most contagious things in the register of human behavior: the social contagion of violence.
Which brings me back to my early concern. If our behaviors are not always our own, then holders of high prestige can influence some people to become violent toward others and themselves. It’s something I’ve thought about in recent years, too, particularly as violent episodes like school shootings have seemingly caught across America, often stirring in people the question of just how transmittable something like this actually is. I consider the risk of vulnerable people mirroring toxic thoughts and behaviors transmitted by media, by public discourse, by knowledge seemingly alive in the ether as another school shooting takes place at a rate of one a month in the US. That is, I’ve begun to recognize this pattern, seeing within it the telltale signs of a strange contagion on a national scale. Following this line of thought, I pull up research by the computational epidemiologist Sherry Towers, whose main area of study involves contagion modeling. Towers mapped incidents of school shootings over time and found that they, like fistfights and food fights, are beholden to the laws of social contagions as well. Towers calculated that 20 to 30 percent of school shootings result from one campus shooter priming the next. Perpetrators have either consciously or unconsciously caught the idea, behaviors, and emotions necessary to pull off such heinous events, not so much from a single holder of high prestige but from high-profile events that tend to get national attention.
And it is here, on this circuitous path from Wharton Business School to New York University to a house party in Silicon Valley and into a research vortex, where I stumble upon my next significant lead for a potential cure to the strange contagion at home.
My reading of Towers’s work on gun violence points me toward a little-known area of research involving approaches to eradicating the social contagion of violence. I circle a name in blue pen. If it’s true that someone out there is close to creating an effective therapy to end a phenomenon as rampant as violence, this person might bring us closer to ending violence of the self-inflicted kind.
Chapter 18
On the Trail of a Cure Model
Ever since the deaths of the five children in Palo Alto, I have found myself on at least a half a dozen commuter rails—the Metro-North Railroad, the Long Island Rail Road, the Metra, Amtrak, Caltrain, and, now that I’m back in Chicago, I’m riding the L.
As I travel east of the city I catalog the trains in my head, in particular noting their differences, the way t
hat each system renders unique environments and experiences. There’s the distinction between the sound of footsteps inside carpeted cars and those with linoleum floors. There’s the thrill of discovering the second level of a double-decker train, and then there’s the unanimity, the we’re-all-in-this-together‒ness, that exists among the people of the single-level trains. There’s the forking over of five dollars for a packaged Danish from the café car, and there are trains that don’t even serve coffee. There are the cheerful announcers, and there are the announcers who can’t be bothered, cutting off the intercom before completing their sentences.
As a kid I loved riding trains, though I didn’t take them often. I liked standing and walking in the aisle, trying to hold my balance as the car zipped like a Gimlet rocket. I enjoyed the effortlessness with which the train whisked me from zero to a momentum faster than that of a car’s, and the speed with which the landscapes brushed past the windows. The world looks different at these velocities.
You stop seeing the minutiae and start seeing its actual shape. The whole picture comes into greater focus the faster you go.
By now, though, the experience of riding the train has grown to provoke a feeling of melancholy. A man surrounded by the parts of a newspaper sits in the row across from me. In front of him, a guy with a cat T-shirt, torn pants, and dirty sandals is typing on his laptop in the seat. Two little girls a few rows up drink from tall cans of fruit punch. It isn’t hard to imagine the effect that stopping short at this speed would have on all of us, what the jolt might feel like, pulling my fellow passengers from the momentum keeping us on the tracks of our ordinary lives. If someone were to stand on the rails just ahead, would we feel the train strike a body? Would we see anything from our windows? Would personnel hide the carnage before allowing us to disembark? Would these images consume us forever?
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