Strange Contagion

by Lee Daniel Kravetz

  Sean Southey and organizations like PCI Media Impact have since used the Bandura-Sabido method to change behavior in populations across the globe. A music video campaign in Nigeria led to a fivefold increase in the number of people seeking contraception every quarter. In parts of India, the radio series Tinka Tinka Sukh steered the way toward the discontinuation of child marriages. Sixty percent of Tanzania’s population under the age of forty-five tuned into the radio broadcast of Twende na Wakati, which fed a 150 percent increase in condom distribution to stop the spread of HIV.

  Southey’s personal early work with Canada’s department of the environment and climate change and the United Nations led him to conclude that if you really want to change the world, you don’t engage the government or social programs. You’ve got to interact with everyday people responsible for making wise decisions in their own lives. “It’s the only way to get individuals thinking and changing what they do, and taking ownership for their social well-being, mental well-being, physical well-being, and all of these attributes that make up life,” Southey tells me. PCI Media Impact has produced 5,000 episodes of entertainment education television and radio for social change using the Bandura-Sabido method, broadcasting from Peru to Guinea, Mexico, and Uganda, in total numbering forty-five countries.

  “And none of them know that you’re weaving educational cues into the stories?”

  “We’ve found that if you’re transparently educational in any way, then you’ve failed,” Southey says.

  “For the viewers it’s purely entertainment.”

  “Exactly. To work, you’ve got to be understated, delicate, and strategic in how you plant your messages.”

  It occurs to me that I’ve run into yet another contradiction that rattles my comprehension of the strange contagion. I bring up the Cure Violence model and Gary Slutkin’s construct for changing people’s behavior by making the invisible visible. He believes, I explain, that he can stop the spread of undesirable conduct, and the thoughts and emotions that lead to them, by teaching people about the invisible, by making people aware of the contagion and its pattern of spread. The more people who know about the contagiousness of violence, the more interrupters he creates.

  Sean Southey’s theory is exactly the opposite of Slutkin’s. Changing people’s behaviors requires change agents to be invisible. Southey’s work relies on his ability to keep the processes in the realm of the invisible and forever concealed beyond conscious detection. Preach and you perish. “Our shows are 100 percent entertainment and 30 percent education,” Southey says. “The 30 percent is hidden.” Instead, what Southey needs in order to change behavior on a massive scale is a blockbuster hit. For contagious behavior and ideas to catch, his producers carefully bury the takeaway messages within a compelling story to such a degree that no one is ever the wiser. Like the space shuttle riding on the back of a 747, the learned behavior change piggybacks on the story drama and moves into the psyche, an interloper to the mind.

  “You have a toddler back at home,” Southey says, and I nod. “Just wait until he starts doing the opposite of everything you say.” I remember urging my son to drink cherry-flavored medicine to ease his fever once, and the fight he put up that ended in Children’s Tylenol dripping down the front of my white shirt. I understand the difficulty of encouraging a foreign country to change deeply ingrained behaviors to benefit public health when doing so pushes against strongly held cultural norms and values. Sometimes, I suppose, it’s just easier to slip the medicine into chocolate milk.

  “The power of narrative is change,” he says. “Story is a way to define and understand the world. Story is a sense-making tool. And the beauty of media is that your rate of return on modeling is beyond measure. You can never communicate every behavior we need to make the world a better place. But if you fall in love with the vision of who you could be, through the eyes and actions of a character you fall in love with on a show, that changes things.”

  And from there, he says, viewers develop into role models for other people. You don’t have to see the soap opera to adopt a new way of thinking and behaving. At some point the meme takes over a community; at some point you catch an echo contagion; at some point you adopt the culture of change around you, having scarily noticed that you, too, have become a role model for others.

  I’m thinking about Peter Gollwitzer at the Motivation Lab again, and how he’d spoken with me about hidden cues, subtle and sometimes deeply concealed primes that activate and modulate people’s behaviors, thoughts, and emotions without their knowledge. Am I looking at the same thing now, I wonder, only on a much larger scale? Where Gollwitzer planted photos on his walls to prime his creativity or sharpen his focus, here at PCI Media Impact, producers plant subtle messages in stories to prime for extensive changes.

  To be honest, it makes me nervous, this slippery slope. The inherent moral ambiguity, however humble and true the mission, remains dubious. In their findings, the researchers William J. Brown and Arvind Singhal present social intervention as a series of unwinnable dilemmas. Producers face decisions over which problems and social groups to address and which to ignore. Tools of social intervention destroy values as often as they create them. Anyone who believes in self-reliance has to accept that this faith disappears under the auspices of priming people for the greater good. As a tool for engineering specific changes “in knowledge, attitudes, or practices,” prosocial media is inseparable from the notion of “what ought to be done” to attain a certain goal. Deciphering goals, however, becomes difficult when cultures rarely share moral and ethical values. “At the heart of the prosocial content dilemma is determining who will decide for whom, what is prosocial and what is not,” Brown and Singhal write. In the best cases, these manipulations save lives. In the worst, they result in horrendous government abuses and unintentional consequences. Even television shows that espouse positive social messages can, in some people, reinforce their problematic beliefs.

  Where there is a disagreement about rightness and wrongness of social beliefs and behaviors, producers make a case that, in matters of epidemics and pandemics, the conversation no longer belongs in the realm of subjective right and wrong. Saving lives is—objectively—the objective.

  As hesitant as I am to accept this rationale, I truly do sympathize with it. The politics of saving lives is the politics of parental responsibility, and to a larger extent the responsibility of anyone upholding a standard for which no standard exists. This is tantamount to secretly adding medicine to my child’s drink. We do it because we want what’s best, because we know what worse can look like.

  Maybe the trick to making sure the suicide cluster in my town is gone for good comes down to taking what we know about social contagions and using it to our advantage. In Palo Alto, we can add something curative to the mix by way of subterfuge.

  Southey thinks it’s an interesting idea. “But I’m not sure what the Sabido method might look like if we applied it to Palo Alto,” he comments.

  We’re seated now at a small vinyl booth in a sushi restaurant on East Forty-Fourth Street. The place is crowded and cramped. The air smells like tempura. He carefully brings a bite of pink tuna to his mouth with a pair of chopsticks. “The Sabido method works. We have the studies to prove it,” he says, chewing. “But we’ve run into a problem. Not every behavior we introduce catches.”

  This isn’t entirely a surprise to me. At the Motivation Lab, Gollwitzer pointed out that in order to prime someone for a certain behavior, the behavior change already has to be a part of a person’s makeup. But all things being equal, until now I’ve suspected that in matters of what might be considered fairly universal characteristics, we’re all equally susceptible to common primes. However, later I’ll find a 1995 collection of national data on age showing that fear spreads most readily among the middle-aged and eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, suggesting age is a boundary for certain social contagions. I’ll also read studies by Elaine Hatfield theorizing that women are more susceptible
to emotional contagions than men; they read facial expressions with far greater accuracy, establish eye contact with others faster, and process, store, and retrieve social stimuli better. Another study by Hatfield reveals that, beyond gender boundaries, occupations are limiting factors, too. Physicians, for instance, are more susceptible to the social contagions of anger and sadness than Marines.

  Inasmuch as television producers have gotten the Sabido method down to a fairly precise equation, some issues remain incredibly difficult to crack, partly because some are just so big that there’s no one specific behavior to isolate within a problem, Southey explains. Other times, limiting factors make it so that curative behavior contagions don’t catch like he’s hoped they might.

  But when they do catch, the benefits are vast. So, after our meal and over small porcelain cups of hot tea, Southey and I engage in a speculative exercise, something I’m becoming good at initiating. I ask him what a curative entertainment education program might look like if he were to bring the Bandura-Sabido model to Palo Alto.

  The process, he says, always begins with formative research and local coalition building with people in business, education, local government, and health care. Southey’s producers pull in key policy makers. Locate NGOs deeply involved in the issue. Drill down to key enabling factors, including all of the psychological, emotional, and behavioral social contagions they can identify. They then gather their findings, hauling their knowledge to the writers’ room. There they spread a silk parachute cloth along a wall and add pushpins to its corners. In felt-tip marker on green note cards they create character profiles. With 3M adhesive, they stick the cards to the cloth to form a sprawling narrative map.

  Instead of creating a telenovela, not nearly as popular in the US as they are in Latin America, we’d produce a radio drama. Or, better yet, a Web-based series. Or, better still, an enhanced video game with social features. In our hypothetical, the team creates the gameplay settings and plot points, perhaps set within the high-pressure, high-stakes world of a simulated Silicon Valley start-up.

  And, someplace within the immense weave, Southey will plant a single narrative thread engineered to instill a behavior change: perhaps to view one’s self-worth beyond letter grades, or to accept failure as growth, or to seek help, or to become an interrupter—a story line as fine, in fact, as the thread spooling through a Singer sewing machine.

  Chapter 22

  Catching the Ivy Leagues

  I’ve never met my neighbors in the apartment across the landing from us. They live out of state, and most of the time their unit is empty. They haven’t so much purchased an apartment as they have an address for their grandkids. Despite its more recent history of student suicide, the school district of Palo Alto remains one of the highest rated in the country. Sometimes people hold on to properties to fool the district and get their children or grandchildren into the education system. The risk, if you’re caught, is a child’s expulsion. But it’s worth it, isn’t it? To get your children into the best school, what wouldn’t a parent do? On some level we believe, or hope, that intentional proximity to good education and intelligent people rubs off on our kids, giving them the best shot at a good life, maybe even a great one.

  To that point, I once read a feature in Fast Company about a nineteen-year-old university interloper named Guillaume Dumas. In 2008 he slipped into a large lecture hall at McGill University to take a political science class in which he was not enrolled. At Concordia University, he snuck into literature and philosophy classes. As spring quarter wrapped up, he had drinks with students from the Université de Montréal. If anyone asked him, he was auditing classes, or was a liberal arts major just scoping out his options. The thing was most times people didn’t ask. They assumed he was a student. Once he was in a class long enough, he faded into the fabric of everyone else’s reality. When he grew bored, he moved on to another city, to another campus he had no business being at. He held his own at Yale, performed well, even made some astute comments in lectures, although he appeared on no class roster. He gate-crashed Brown University, contributed to debates with students who’d legitimately earned their way into the school—unlike Dumas, who, through casual bravado and impish charm, attached himself through the art of the soft con. At UC Berkeley, a professor came close to reporting him, a bon vivant stimulated by art, philosophy, and science who was stealing knowledge as one might siphon a Wi-Fi connection. From there he booked it an hour south to Palo Alto and without much trouble he infiltrated Stanford University. Dumas claimed that attending these universities without actually graduating from any of them was a kind of experiment to figure out what, exactly, a university degree can get you in life. The cynic in me believes it’s just a story of another lost young soul.

  In the end he didn’t come away with an Ivy League degree, but that’s not to say this impersonator among the educated wasn’t catching intelligence. Beyond sitting through lectures and taking in information, his proximity to smart people also likely made Dumas smarter.

  At NYU, Peter Gollwitzer told me that in academia people unconsciously pass and catch ideas from others all the time, regardless of IQ, personal proficiencies, or intellectual deficits. We might catch intelligence in the same way we catch ambition or greed. Bucking forty years of research supporting the idea that students in smaller classes excel more than students in larger ones, Harvard University finds that students in large classes are better able to unconsciously develop skills that aid in learning and retention. The larger the class, the more opportunities an individual has to hear others challenge assumptions. That is, they catch new ways of thinking and questioning. They imitate study techniques. They pick up cues that aid in the development of stronger communication skills. The bigger the class, the larger the pool of knowledge from which to drink.

  I discover studies on cooperative learning from both Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas showing that individual gain correlates with group gain, just as cooperative learning increases individual learning in kids as early as kindergarten. From the classroom to the boardroom, group grades and team rewards stoke personal motivation. Existing within a group environment affects the brain’s synaptic plasticity. When one cell excites another repeatedly, a change takes place in one or both. In an experiment in the sixties, researchers placed lab mice into an enriched environment within large groups of other mice, allowing the animals the opportunity for more complex social interactions. Such enrichment enhanced memory function in the mice. They performed better than isolated mice on the water maze task and a running wheel task. The brains of the rodents also gained weight and size.

  For people, too, group learning is essential for adaptation. In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, the writer James Surowiecki highlights the importance of taking our cues from everyone else’s behavior. “Instead of having to undertake complicated calculations before every action, we let others guide us,” he writes, “. . . piggybacking as it were on the wisdom of others.

  “In a sense, imitation is a kind of rational response to our own cognitive limits. Each person can’t know everything. With imitation, people can specialize and the benefits of their investment in uncovering information can be spread widely when others mimic them.”

  The brain then becomes a muscle that responds to the group environment around it. By dropping himself into a setting full of highly intelligent people, Dumas forced his mind to rise to the occasion. To keep up at Yale, at Brown, at Stanford, Dumas had to think quicker. With increasing probability that a professor was going to call upon him to answer a question about a subject matter he was supposed to know, he needed to absorb information differently from the way he had before. He surrounded himself with students who used more sophisticated language, and his mind responded in kind, the way a traveler’s language center picks up words in a foreign country.

  In this way, I reason it’s good that we’ve found ourselves in this town with its magnificent school district. As long as we remain in Palo Alto, our kids will get the go
ld standard in education. This cache of highly intelligent students and teachers will influence the way my children think and learn by virtue of who they surround themselves with. There’s a good chance they will adopt a good work ethic, too, and healthy ambition.

  We take our chances if we leave town. When we follow this line of thought, as we find ourselves doing more often these days, my wife reminds me she didn’t go to a top-rated high school. She attended a public school in Maryland ranked somewhere near the middle of a good district. Despite this, perhaps because of it, she was able to get into Tufts University and later Harvard Business School. She worries today because the cost of living in Palo Alto is too high, and yet the cost of staying might be even higher.

  There is no getting around the fact that Gunn High, and the town that populates it, has become a cautionary tale. While the rate of completed suicide in Palo Alto over the past three years has now slowed, people still regard the district with suspicion. The lingering memory of the suicides continues to highlight the worst parts of an otherwise gleaming system. We are just as blameworthy for buying into this story, for having revisited a familiar uncertainty too many times to count: By staying, are we putting our children in harm’s way? We are experiencing the fallout of an event that has nothing to do with us. We didn’t know the five deceased children, yet we have entered these horrible acts into evidence as we build our case for either staying or leaving.

  Another couple, the Thadanis, in the condo underneath us, sometimes invites us to share traditional Indian meals in their home. The husband is a good, neat, and thoughtful man named Sanjeet, who, in the years we have grown to know each other, I’ve come to like very much. I’ve gathered through his vague stories that he’s started a couple of failed companies in India. He’s had better luck in Silicon Valley as a consultant. In seven months the surrogate he and his wife, Poonam, are using will be delivering a son for them. In terms of what the future holds for their young family, they tell us that they are planning to stay in their condo, even though they also own a big house in the next town over that he rents to a vice president of Hewlett Packard. They’re keeping the small condo so that their child will get into the Palo Alto school system and receive a Palo Alto–level education.