Strange Contagion

by Lee Daniel Kravetz

  The more I read, the more I fully grasp the sweeping implications of this discovery. They stretch far beyond the effects of our own rather trivial online lives. No issue in politics or public interest is spared from the savviest of operatives stoking emotions through words and images online, intent on curating empathy and anger as a means to move others to act. The Department of Defense has taken such an interest in the infectiousness of emotions online that it’s dedicated significant time and resources to a project called the Minerva Research Initiative, a Pentagon-led endeavor to model civil unrest and learn how to control, facilitate, and combat contagions through emotional manipulation via social media.

  Experts in suicide prevention worry that public memorials for those who have died glamorize suicide. Vigils, they worry, invite vulnerable people to emulate these acts of self-destruction. The truth is, in terms of stopping kids from assembling memorials for their friends, the town criers sounding alarms in Palo Alto never had a chance: The twenty-first-century versions flourish in that online troposphere that hangs just above their reach. In the land that’s perfected Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, if anyone is using social media, it’s these kids. UCLA researchers highlight a decline in children’s face-to-face social skills due to their growing use of digital media, yet the same children are also far more comfortable sharing personal expressions in this faceless void than within the realm of the tactile and the corporeal. The Palo Alto incidents, now numbering eight, spur an outpouring of online responses. To the extent that the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania has any sway on how people report suicide, there is no such oversight on social media. Here, where classmates meet, online platforms become a kind of a de facto town square. Conversations bourgeon with questions and rampant speculation about the emotional motives of their friends. For many of the students I speak to, it doesn’t feel like it’s a bad thing to participate. In fact, it feels pretty good.

  I pull up findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2012 it verified the dangers that online forums such as these can create, where the sentiments of good people can eventually cast an unintended pall. By now I’ve come to expect that the sources of contagious influence are rarely so obvious as the words and images themselves. The mind is left to translate pictures and text, to interpret tone, to distinguish meaning. I reflect on how we become complicit in spreading emotions online, guileless and unaware of the kind of effect a comment, a repost, an uploaded photo, a thought in 140 characters, can unconsciously have on others. In an effort to show support and solidarity, what are we propagating by clicking the “like” button on a friend’s post? When is an emoji not just a shorthand emotional expression but a vessel carrying active ingredients of a virulent strange contagion?

  Along with the dangers of social media as a vector for emotional spread, I also see its promise. At some point the tool of exposure becomes a vehicle transporting a viable emotional cure and not simply a mouthpiece for the strange contagion. We can use its unlimited reach to administer our healing balm.

  I consider the flow of helpful emotions and the impact that something as powerful as companionate love has on people participating online. I want to know if a cascade of empathy and support can buttress people from problematic emotional runoff. Might we employ Gary Slutkin’s Cure Violence model and create interrupters and responders out of the most casual of online participants? I’m curious about what it will take to galvanize the strongest of emotions online the way that Wael Ghonim spread courage and outrage, inspiring people to channel their vigilance into a kind of antidote for something rotten and corrupt. As a network of highly interconnected minds, there is no limit to the reach of emotional contagions and no person they cannot touch.

  Chapter 25

  Stress Is a Gateway

  I’m standing at my desk, my fingers laced together behind my head. I’ve printed out studies by Sigal Barsade, those by Facebook, reports by the Department of Defense, and others by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. I’ve laid the sheets of paper in front of me. It’s midday, and I’ve been staring at these two-dimensional cases for a long while, rereading their highlighted portions, assembling their conclusions in my head, and thinking, in light of everything that’s happened these past few weeks in Palo Alto, Where do we go from here?

  At a quarter past one I sort the pages into a green cardboard filing box system that I’ve created to organize myself. I replace the lid and then add the file box to the stacks of others I’ve arranged against the wall of my home study. Every box in the barricade of green cartons represents a different element of the two strange contagion events. Some contain evidence on the spread of hysteria, work ethic, greed, and unbridled emotions. Others hold information on vectors for spread like mirroring, charismatic leadership, and primes like economics, heroes, and role models. Still others contain the treatments, from heightened awareness, to prosocial suggestion, to the work of interrupters.

  Taking it all in, I’m struck by how tidy the first and the second strange contagion events look when I have them contained in small boxes. The latest developments remind me just how unwieldy this phenomenon really is. Its ungainly nature is one of constant change. Every new component that adds power to the storm makes it that much harder to classify. I used to believe that coming up with a definition would somehow make it simpler for us to find a solution, but the definition is difficult to peg. I’m standing here, looking at this puzzle of boxes, taking into consideration that there are now eight dead young people.

  I have to know what it is that makes Palo Alto so good at creating strange contagion events. The obvious cause is one that people have pointed to from the beginning, one that many believe to be an incontrovertible fact about this place. Stress, a biological response to demanding circumstances in our lives, remains a crucial factor. If true, what is it about Palo Alto that makes stress so dangerous?

  To examine the validity of this theory, I drive north on El Camino Real toward Menlo Park. I pass Palo Alto High, a Spanish mission–style group of buildings surrounded by oak trees that also serves as Gunn High’s rival school. The crest of Hoover Tower on Stanford University’s campus passes on my left above a skyline of palm trees. There’s a high-end shopping mall, and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turnoff for Sand Hill Road and Tesla Motors’ first showroom. I pull into a small restaurant situated just steps away from the Caltrain tracks. The writer Julie Lythcott-Haims is dressed in a light-colored T-shirt and jeans, her hair curled tight, as though each strand is wrapped around an invisible dime. As we wait for our food, she tells me a bit about her two children, both students at Gunn High, and their experiences within the school system, with all of its cumbersome and sparkling virtues and its manifestation of an achingly determined generation of youth.

  Lythcott-Haims has witnessed the effects of stress among the young of Palo Alto firsthand, both as a mother and as the dean of freshmen at Stanford University for ten years. She has since become a kind of spokesperson advocating the end of highly orchestrated parenting that steers children forcefully toward a small number of colleges and careers, and something she sees as a direct path for passing stress onto children. Yet overparenting is but one of many sources of stress rampant in this town, she says. “After so long you have to step back and look at all of the people and institutions putting pressure on these students,” she tells me. For instance, a school system that’s invested in maintaining its top position in both the state and the nation. A culture that nurtures compulsively ambitious people who’ve mastered the art of delayed gratification, willing to put in eighty-hour workweeks for the promise of some potential future wealth. Jump on a plane to Silicon Valley, she says, and you’ll find yourself among an accumulation of people who harbor over-the-top expectations and set unreasonably high bars for others and themselves. All of a sudden you’re part of a community that prides itself on setting outrageous standards and lives under the sort of cond
itions Apple’s Bud Tribble famously called a reality distortion field, a purposeful bending of one’s perception of what is possible. It’s this very thing, this focused warping of one’s sense of proportion and scale of difficulty, that leads people to incredible innovation and achievements. It also places a great amount of stress on them.

  We see the reality distortion field in a now-familiar refrain about a school and some parents that demand too much of their students, Lythcott-Haims says. We hear it as well in the way young people require too much of themselves, feverishly working to impress college admissions officers by stacking their records with AP courses to get into the right classes, to earn the highest scores, to rack up the best accolades, to win the shiniest awards, to enroll in enough sports and activities, to join the best clubs, and to volunteer for community service programs. “The authors of this stress have led young people to believe they will literally have no future unless they meet outrageous benchmarks of success.”

  As she says this, I think back to something else Peter Gollwitzer told me in New York. Personal ambition, he said, is largely dependent on community norms and how we view ourselves measuring up to them. Motivation becomes a tug-of-war between the mastery one needs for achievement and the fear of failure. Lythcott-Haims tells me now about the common pressure for children to reach a high and arbitrary standard that has become the status quo in communities of privilege all over the country, a social contagion of Western ideals, a bastardization of the American dream, or perhaps just a twisted interpretation of it that has gone viral. It’s not difficult to imagine a school filled with students caught up in this madness, hungry for accomplishment, and regarding its lofty bar as perfectly reasonable given the community values into which they were born and raised. In any endeavor where one’s self-worth is at stake, never misjudge the lengths one will go to in order to succeed. Those who find themselves fearing failure, or achieving less, will succumb. And a community that prides itself on bottling, scrutinizing, pressurizing, idealizing, and lording over its children with the assiduousness one offers rare and precious stones will inevitably polish some and inadvertently crush others.

  Americans, meanwhile, continue to experience more stress than ever, with one study I read citing an increase of more than 1,000 percent in the past three decades. Student burnout as the result of “stress as they try to get into some of the most competitive colleges in the country” finds young people in a “cycle of school, homework, extracurricular activities, sleep, repeat,” writes the New York University researcher Noelle Leonard. “Students in these selective, high-pressure high schools can get burned out even before they reach college.” At Stanford, Lythcott-Haims saw it happen, the expression of this toxic disorder, this all-encompassing sense of diminishing, this lassitude among students. Contracting stress-related burnout is no more complicated than seeing, experiencing, or sensing someone else’s symptoms. Ninety percent of those who experience it are members of peer groups having at least 50 percent of all members suffering from it.

  “But why Palo Alto? There have to be dozens of places more stressful.”

  “Right,” she says. “Why Palo Alto?” When I lift my eyes to hers, I see her face set, earnest and sad. Look around, she suggests. Consider what the application of just a little bit of pressure can lead to. Not just advances in technology, a great education system, and prosperity, but the things beneath all of that, the underbelly of this town. Take the elements I’ve collected in my green file boxes at home and then add this: if stress is a biological response to pressures, then it is also a gateway that produces a deluge of emotions.

  Stress can be problematic, but it’s not nearly as problematic as the emotions it creates. Stress opens the portal to experiencing feelings of defeat, inferiority, humiliation, frustration, sorrow, anguish, and even shame, emotions that are not only highly contagious but will also, as Sigal Barsade noted, cascade through closed environments. Even a high school.

  Those who are not naturally affected by stress are still susceptible to catching the emotions it produces in others. And now this is where Palo Alto finds itself, catching and spreading a plague of problematic emotions.

  As both a mother and a thought leader in this space, Lythcott-Haims maintains her faith in this town. She tells me she loves it and she continues to pull for it, because she has not given up on the idea that there’s a way to reduce this pain, that there’s a pathway to making things better and right again. About this she’s certain. People say Gunn High needs to get rid of class rankings and grades, two of the most important criteria that colleges use to determine who they let in, and one of the biggest contributors to student stress. Signs point to a growing willingness among parents, educators, and students alike to acknowledge the problem of stress and the storm of negative contagious emotions it produces.

  To that end, as the second cluster unfolds, the superintendent authorizes a new district policy to stop the practice of homework stacking. Gunn High students fill out time-management grids with counselors to map their schedules and even set aside blocks of time for sleeping. The district expedites the construction of a student wellness center at Gunn High, a full-service hub for physical, emotional, social, psychological, and spiritual health. Given these measures, she wants to be able to tell me that things have been getting better here. Instead, all she can really say is that her own children seem to be doing fine, all things considered. They’re popular and have strong groups of friends. One will be graduating from Gunn High next year.

  She asks me about my son and daughter. I scoot my chair around the table to her side, where we compare pictures of our kids on our iPhones. The images skate by with a touch of my finger. As we roll through the photo timeline, I remember struggling to assemble my son’s crib in his room all those years ago, right when the original strange contagion was first manifesting. I also remember my lack of faith in my skills as a father-to-be, which was why I enrolled in that parenting class. Would I know how to raise him and care for him and avoid the kinds of mistakes Lythcott-Haims is talking about, the kinds that ply our kids with too much pressure?

  Here I am now. Five years have come and gone. It’s a strange world that I find myself constantly trying to organize and define, as though setting out to put a name to this terrifying phenomenon would in turn guide me to be the better father, far more than those baby swaddling lessons ever did. Instead, I think I wanted to wrap his world in protective cotton, to identify and then to shield him from the dangers as seen in the forces of rampant social contagions. But emotions in particular are impossible to avoid catching. That fact alone is enough to subdue my own overparenting instincts and supplant them with a more constructive desire for both of my children.

  More than anything, I just want them to grow up happy, no matter what form that happiness takes.

  On some level I feel that happiness supersedes any benchmark of success and our own lofty dreams for our children. And, here in Palo Alto, happiness might just be the ointment that makes everything better again. It occurs to me that where Sigal Barsade recorded the effects of companionate love as it cascaded across a hospital, noting the accumulative effects of caring, compassion, and tenderness changing lives and even saving some of them, perhaps Palo Alto can employ a similar tactic. If the Pentagon can manipulate social movements and political discord with keystrokes, words, and subtext, I have to believe that we can counter alienation, loneliness, regret, hopelessness, numbness, rejection, and bitterness. The thing that all of the experiments in emotional contagiousness conclude is that positive emotions like joy spread rapidly. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering, authors of the Twitter study, determined that, regardless of personal susceptibility, those least likely to be affected by emotional contagions are still roughly twice as likely to be influenced by positive tweets as negative ones. Even more promising, the social contagion of happiness prevents and helps people recover from the contagion of depression.

  What might it take to purposefully launch a social contagion
, a cascade of companionate love and of happiness, across the entire breadth of this town? Even as I close in on the one person who I believe may hold the key to pulling off such a monumental feat, I have to wonder if happiness will be enough to counter all the others.

  Chapter 26

  How to Catch Happiness

  Each year, Gunn High’s theater department alternates between a Shakespeare production and a musical. It’s coming off of Macbeth, a brutal and blood-filled production of a truly Grand Guignol story of ambition and death. James Shelby, the department’s director, has chosen far lighter fare this season. When we talk, Shelby tells me about the fondness he’s nurtured in his heart for Cole Porter’s tunes: the joyful buzz of “There’s No Cure Like Travel/Bon Voyage,” the sizzling elation of “I Want to Row on the Crew,” the wallop of the alliteration of “It’s De-lovely.” Given the events of this past autumn and early winter, Shelby believes an exhilarating production of Anything Goes is the right fit for a community hindered by renewed despair. I feel it, too—we all do—the stress compounding, the need to depressurize, an overture to bring the community together.

  Rehearsals take place after school for nine weeks in the winter of 2015. The students tighten, block, and perfect their performances. As the premiere nears, it becomes more obvious to Shelby that something quite lofty rests on the shoulders of this production. Before starting its weeklong run, the school’s open throat of a theater sells out every show, making it the most anticipated musical Shelby has ever produced in his thirty years at Gunn High.