“We could move into that bigger house, but the schools here are wonderful,” Sanjeet Thadani says as we share slices of apple off a dish together in his living room one evening. I ask him if they’re at all concerned about the kind of intelligence the system is passing along to its children, the kind that places significant weight on excelling. “Who is the system? What system? It’s we,” he asserts. “We push kids too far. We place importance on outshining others, believing that it’s the best path to the top.” Indeed, we all want our children to be successful. Each of us believes we can and should try to engineer outcomes for our kids. We feel better when our children are achieving. We want them to aim high. But Thadani also believes that when we measure people by their grades, their achievements, their test scores, and their abilities, only bad things happen.
The real problem is in the we, he says. The us. The interlopers.
At some point we all become part of the fabric of a place, contributing the social and behavioral contagions simply by virtue of being here. We catch and become carriers of standards, buy into the culture, perpetuate cascades of ideas and behaviors. I’m no different. My family and I have lived in Silicon Valley for more than four years at this point. I’m chasing bigger writing contracts and a livelihood devoted to rousing people by shining a spotlight on innovation and big thinkers taking on enormous problems with radical solutions. Then there’s my wife, an executive for a company that famously hires graduates mostly from Ivy League universities. Her job in human resources is, in so many words, to add to the region’s deep pool of highly educated and motivated people. We’ve bought into the mythology of this town. We’ve contributed to Silicon Valley’s impossibly high standards. We are among those who claim the dream is easy, that it is attainable, and that it is expected of us.
In terms of the strange contagion, this perfect storm of infectious ideas, behaviors, and emotions, we are complicit in creating and nurturing it. We’ve contributed to this nocebo effect. Our overblown responses to the deaths that happened here years ago have made us culpable in the promotion of hysteria and in pushing the social contagion of irrational fear that the specter of some immutable influence might guide our children into harm’s way. We are as culpable as anyone is for creating an environment that supports achievement, and for the actions of five teenagers who walked on the tracks, just as we are for protecting the children of this town. We’ve poisoned the well with contrarian positions, that unassailable sense of hopelessness even as we look to the future with promise and the belief that we are going to achieve more and do better, earning promotions, raises, and bigger book contracts.
If people catch knowledge by proximity, it seems to me that perhaps we have an opportunity to redefine intelligence and what it is our children are learning by proximity.
We can add primes for new behaviors that promote resilience. We can introduce the knowledge to seek help when we’re struggling and begin to break the stigma around mental health. We can redefine the belief systems around success: that it’s not just about the right scores, the best accolades, the shiniest awards. We can insert prosocial story lines, weave in examples of those who have responded to failure and met hardships and yet continue to live and to live well.
Thadani finishes his slice of apple and leans forward on the sofa. “I’ve started more failed start-ups than I can count,” he says joyfully. “That’s what I love about this country. Here you get second chances.” He suggests that, like the maxim of Silicon Valley, in life there is always time for course correcting and iterating until we get it right. But, of course, not all of us get second chances. Five children are gone. Families remain irrevocably harmed. A community is forever changed by the weight of these irreversible losses.
When my son faced exposure to a herpes virus at his child care center, we calculated his chances of catching it and debated the value of removing him from the classroom, always painfully aware that our puzzling over this dilemma carried no assurances one way or the other. Before removing him from the program, our psychological processes provoked interminable debates, each argument between my wife and me a prelude to mornings spent second-guessing every treaty we’d come to the previous night, until each conclusion was one we reversed a dozen times.
But this situation is different. The odds are smaller but the stakes are so much higher. By staying, we have the opportunity to make changes to the culture, the classroom, and the community. Like Dumas, we’ll infiltrate systems. Like Sean Southey, we’ll introduce behavior changes that others might catch by proximity. Like Peter Gollwitzer, we’ll utilize primes to activate behaviors that pull toward psychological well-being. Like Gary Slutkin, we’ll teach people to become interrupters, reinforcing the knowledge until it becomes memory ingrained deeply in the muscle. We’ll do this, I believe, even if we have to reach one person at a time.
A couple of days after my meal with Sanjeet Thadani, my iPhone pings with a text message from my friend, the economics teacher Roni Habib. My daughter woke up earlier that evening crying in her crib. She fell back asleep on my shoulder as I paced the hallway in my gym shorts and socks, her cheek warm against my bare shoulder, the top of her head smelling of baby shampoo.
I carefully reach for the phone and tilt the screen toward me, careful not to wake her.
It reads: “There’s been another one.”
The hopefulness I’ve been carrying since my conversation with Thadani instantly dims, the familiar questions immediately returning, along with a familiar lack of understanding. We still have so much further to go to find the answers, and what we’ve found isn’t enough. Will it ever be?
Part VII
The Conversation
“I am not what you see and hear.”
―David Foster Wallace
Chapter 23
Arrival, Part II
The train sees things that most people do not, like the purlieu of cities and bluish tree groves hidden from the highways. Aesthetically, Caltrain is industrial and functional; there’s nothing luxurious about its mottled cloth and pleather double seats or the sluggish interior light it offers passengers.
Yet, as a metaphor for connection, really there’s none better than a train. Coupler heads join its cars. Its commuters are fixed to one another, even in their isolating silences. Its construct merges new technology with one of the world’s oldest modes of transportation. Its very function marries departures with arrivals.
As a metaphor for severing, a train also does the trick. The construct is engineered to put space between people. It maintains distinct gaps amongst seats, rows, upper and lower levels, as well as the cars themselves. It cuts the land and the sky by way of a distinct horizon.
And in the near dark of a late-October day in 2014, a nineteen-year-old boy named Quinn Gens, a recent graduate of Gunn High standing on the tracks, was there and then he was gone. This unique moment joined every other moment, both before it and after it, although it was also a moment distinct and separate from time. The train stopped briefly as the tracks were cleared. Soon it would start up again.
A couple of weeks after receiving Roni Habib’s distressing text message about the sixth teen from town to die by train, he forwards me an early morning e-mail the school superintendent has sent to teachers: authorities have now also recovered the body of a seventh Gunn High student on the rails, a boy named Cameron Lee. Then, four weeks later, an obituary appears in papers for a Gunn High student named Harry Hann-yi Lee, unrelated to Cameron Lee except by hometown and school. The teen jumped off a rooftop.
The eighth suicide takes the form of widespread wretched shock. There’s pain and heartache residing within the quiet homes that make up the pretty little neighborhoods, but there’s also anger raging in there like never before. Its ferociousness reveals itself in the public outcry, in the op-eds and posts that appear online, in the community forums where parents shout at teachers and the district deflects and the students feel they must stand up to defend their schools against an onslaught of critic
ism. But mostly there’s just sadness. A broken, aimless kind.
And we know the reason that this sadness feels different from the sort we felt before. For a couple of months after any place experiences a suicide cluster, it exists in a kind of danger zone, with a higher-than-average risk for echo clusters. After Brian Bennion Taylor’s death in January 2010, things quieted down, and we were hopeful that the calm might last, and then when it did we gradually came to believe that the cluster was over. Now, in the winter of 2014, with this gift of hindsight we now know that we were likely right. Epidemiologists and psychologists do not articulate metrics to determine the end of a cluster any more than they have defined the condition itself beyond instances of multiple suicidal behaviors within an imprecise accelerated time frame and area. After so much time passes between one and the next, we begin to view these instances as unique pockets of activity. Frequency between concentrated episodes allows us the space to wrap our heads around experiences that will never add up logically. In such scenarios, I suppose time is the best definition we really have.
What we are experiencing today isn’t a resurgence so much as the manifestation of a second cluster. The sadness feels more profound than before because we now have evidence there’s something specific about this place, this community, this town, that cultivates strange contagions. We’re broken by both the knowledge and the ignorance of our fated makeup.
After Henry Lee’s passing, grief counseling services and Stanford University psychiatrists visit Gunn High with the same frequency they did at the peak of the first cluster. Crisis response teams deploy to area schools. The mayor issues a statement pledging to dedicate resources, support more public conversations about mental health, and extend the hours for track guards at crossings. At public forums, psychologists talk about the need to destigmatize mental health issues, build new mental health facilities, make resources more readily available to kids in school and in the community, and expand them to accommodate more kids.
Roni Habib tells me he’s worried this might be 2009 and 2010 all over again. Around town it certainly feels like it did four years ago, with emotions tender and bleeding and the fear sharp in our guts. The stakes remain the same but the picture has changed. We’ve done everything right to fix what’s broken, employed safety measures and taken into account the ways social contagions matter in our lives, appointing interrupters and considering the primes in our midst. These measures prove not to be strong enough to address our particular type of strange contagion. Or maybe we simply haven’t uncovered all of the dimensions of it yet.
So we arrive at new conclusions. One of the dominant theories about the two suicide clusters is that the deaths are specifically tied to a problem of unacknowledged depression, anxiety, and stress cascading through the school. The sheer scale that such a possibility suggests is massive. I e-mail Adam Grant. I wonder if he’s ever encountered an emotional contagion of this scope in organizational psychology before, and, most important, if we can somehow use this knowledge to our advantage.
Grant replies within the hour. There’s someone’s work I need to know.
Chapter 24
Finding Hope Within the Barsade Cascade
Early in her career, the management professor Sigal Barsade was working for an innovative photo processing technology start-up saddled with an unpleasant colleague. When the coworker went away on business, Barsade experienced a palpable difference in the office. She and her coworkers were happier, chattier, and overall more amiable than usual. Of course, when the unpleasant coworker returned, the environment tensed up once again. Later, in graduate school, Barsade developed this casual observation into a theory of emotional contagions in groups, the way in which they persist, and what this effect means within the world of emotional organizational culture. Later she continued this work, in part, by studying the degree of caring, compassion, and tenderness that employees showed one another, an effect known as companionate love.
Over the course of seven years, Barsade and her colleagues conducted a study at a long-term health care facility. There they mapped the new idea of emotional culture among two hundred employees operating within thirteen treatment units. Monitoring facial expressions, body language, and vocal tones, Barsade measured the frequency that group home employees expressed companionate love to each other, gauging flow and reverse flow of positive and negative emotions within work groups. By unconsciously mimicking facial expressions, tone, and body language, the facility’s social workers, psychologists, nurses, and even food service personnel caught companionate love. Along with better cooperation, its spread led directly to less employee absenteeism, conflict, and burnout.
Even more remarkable, Barsade watched the positive culture ripple outward to influence the center’s patients. The correlation tracked perfectly to the units with higher companionate love scores among staff. These residential units in turn housed people with greater reported quality of life, greater observed positive moods, and fewer unnecessary emergency room transfers. The residents surrounded by care teams with higher companionate love scores likely found themselves experiencing the emotional states of their caregivers.
Barsade went on to track the phenomenon of a culture of companionate love through workplace populations in biopharmaceutical companies, technology firms, financial services, higher-education facilities, real estate businesses, travel companies, and public utility plants. Regardless of the differences in environment or population size, the results remained consistent.
I continue to move through the research and find that while good influences present in companionate love impact collective energy and create a competitive advantage for companies, the opposite is also true. Negative emotions percolate through group culture as well.
Positive or negative, Barsade found that most of the time, we have no idea that we’ve caught an emotion at all. In one experiment she divided students into groups and assigned each with the theoretical task of distributing bonuses to employees. A confederate she secretly planted in each group acted out a preassigned emotion. When the confederate was enthusiastic, he “smiled often, looked intently into people’s eyes, and spoke rapidly.” When the confederate simulated depression, he “spoke slowly, avoided eye contact, and slouched in his seat.” A measure of baseline moods before and after the experiment concluded that students caught the actor’s positive or negative emotions but they attributed these emotions to their own processes, with no clue that another was influencing them. The methods for catching this social contagion, that amalgam of behavioral mimicry and facial guesswork, audio cues, or word triggers, lead associated memory networks to fire and convince people who are “contaged” that these emotions are their own, when in reality they’ve caught them from the people in their environment.
And just because transferring an emotion to another person requires direct visual contact, anyone sufficiently empathetic to others is susceptible to vicarious contamination, too. We can be in contact with people we have neither met nor had direct interaction with, except in the mind’s eye. When people ruminate, they are in essence continuing to infect themselves.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) researcher J. C. R. Licklider first envisioned interconnected computers back in 1962. Mostly remembered today for his contributions to computer science, he was, however, first and foremost a psychologist. His big idea was to create what he called a galactic network from which to send and retrieve data through a community of linked processors. Three years later Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was among the original host computers to link to an early version of the Internet, a nexus called ARPANET. In 1965, SRI received the first host-to-host message. It wasn’t long before it was connected to computers at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. Today, online networks unite more than 3 billion people and connect them to 2 million terabytes of data.
And forty years later we learned that the Internet also transfers emotions.
Five miles away from the world’s first inter
connected computer node, Facebook used sophisticated linguistic software to analyze text. The program took a word like proud and categorized it as a positive emotion, or a word like furious and sorted it as a negative emotion. Facebook then manipulated the algorithm by which the social media service pushes posts into personal newsfeeds. When Facebook reduced the number of positive expressions in users’ newsfeeds, users produced more negative posts themselves. And when the company pruned feeds to display only positive expressions, Facebook users posted more positive messages.
The 2009 study I come across in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences speculates that Facebook’s results constituted evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. While researchers like Sigal Barsade were underscoring the importance of direct contact for transmission, Facebook was able to provide empirical data that physical proximity was no longer a restriction for the social contagion. Shortly after Facebook released the results of its study, Indiana University conducted a follow-up experiment that measured emotional contagions on Twitter. Users tweeted positively or negatively depending on how much contact they previously had with other positive or negative tweets. Exposure to roughly 4 percent more positive or negative content tipped the scale one way or the other.
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