Inoculate Yourself Against Social Contagion

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In May, I visited the Portuguese village of Fatima, which is famous for its 1917 apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Today, it is a major shrine and a pilgrimage destination for millions of Catholics from all over the world, as well as for tourists interested in witnessing the phenomenon of a mass religious experience. Every night of the year, after the sun sets, thousands of people—each holding a lighted candle—proceed slowly around the shrine complex, singing prayers of praise and supplication.

Although I am a practicing Catholic, I am not much one for big group activities or movements, so I was hesitant to join the procession. Nevertheless, I did so on my first night in Fatima. I expected that I would observe the ritual with a social scientist’s gimlet eye. Instead, I found myself swept up and along, entering an almost trancelike state. All of our voices seemed to become one; our candles appeared to be a single flame.

I have no idea how long the procession lasted: Was it 20 minutes? Two hours? “What just happened?” I asked my wife afterward.

The whole experience was beautiful but also unsettling. I saw that I, in common with every human being, am capable of losing my faculties of perception and individual discernment when participating in a large group activity that involves intense shared emotion. This can be entirely good and positive, as at Fatima. But it also reminded me that this kind of loss of self and perspective is not limited to a ritual of love and goodness.

In our world today, people—myself included—have at times allowed ourselves to get swept up in collective emotions of hatred and anger, losing autonomy and personal responsibility. This easily occurs at the behest of manipulative activists and politicians who seek not to unite and elevate us in love, but to control us through shared hostility. I want no part of that. My best defense—and yours—against falling prey to destructive groupthink is to understand it.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Harvard’s golden silence]

Social scientists have studied what they call “the mind” of crowds for decades. A good deal of research describes group thinking as a source of positive wisdom. In the mid-20th century, the Nobel-laureate economist Friedrich Hayek wrote extensively about the order that emerges from apparent chaos when large numbers of individuals are presented with similar challenges. This observation largely underwrote his defense of the free-enterprise system as a governing model of modern economics. More recent work has reconceived Hayek’s emergent order as the “wisdom of crowds,” the process by which individuals, who may have partial and imperfect information, can learn from one another and solve problems.

This kind of crowd, however, is nothing like the merged entity that concerns me. It is actually heavily dispersed, composed of separate individuals all thinking independently; they feel no sense of oneness, which is precisely why they are collectively wise. At Fatima, we were purposely not thinking individually, and that led to a different phenomenon, known as “emotional contagion.”

Research over many years has shown that people can “catch” feelings by being in proximity to others who are experiencing those emotions intensely. This syndrome explains the sensation of being rapturously transported that people typically report when they participate in a mass exercise of praise and feel their inhibitions falling away. The result is an emotional positive sum, by which feelings of love and unity multiply through the group.

There can be a cost, however. Although this mind-melding is an emotionally rich experience, it may involve the crowd sacrificing its effective intelligence and wisdom. Scholars have demonstrated that crowds can become less discerning about factual accuracy than their individual members are. When social influence—the perception of whatever everyone else believes, what good people are supposed to believe, or what a particularly influential person thinks—is present, a crowd can become obstinately wrong. You might call this the “emperor’s new clothes” effect. Any of us can be susceptible to the subtle social pressure that induces groupthink: It’s perfectly possible that things you have come to accept unquestioningly as true might have been learned in this way.

Moreover, the emotional contagion of crowds isn’t necessarily positive; negative emotions are contagious too. Scholars have written not only about mass joy but also about mass fear and mass hostility—moments when people in a mob barrel through the usual social restraints and behave in destructive and dangerous ways. This explains events such as soccer-crowd disorders, in which violence breaks out among sports fans when mass emotional energy meets a clear adversary among the other team’s supporters.

Soccer hooliganism has deep historical roots long predating the modern game. A witness to an 11th-century mob in Byzantium wrote about the hate-filled participants: “They seemed different from their former selves. There was more madness in their running, more strength in their hands, the flash in their eyes was fiery and inspired, the muscles of their bodies more powerful.”

[Arthur C. Brooks: Google isn’t grad school]

You might ask why anyone would voluntarily submit to an activity that could raise their negative emotions while possibly lowering effective intelligence. The answer is fairly simple: It feels good. Almost all of the time, we spend energy and effort restraining strong feelings, both positive and negative. Giving in and letting go is a relief; at least in the short term, it’s very pleasant and easy to do in a group.

That can sound like a useful release valve—but it is one that can be manipulated to sinister effect. This is the idea of the “Two Minutes Hate” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which the citizens of Oceania all watch a film about the state’s principal enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, and are then encouraged to scream their rage. As the novel’s hero, Winston Smith, describes it:

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

If you have ever found yourself in a crowd shouting hostile slogans in unison about another person or group at the encouragement of a demagogic leader, you have experienced this phenomenon firsthand. And modern technology has made life easier for rabble-rousers, who can use social media to drum up a cyber mob. Online crowds can be as unthinking as in-person ones, and can be whipped up in much the same way. All that’s changed is that the soapbox orator of old has been superseded by an internet troll—someone typically animated by the “Dark Tetrad” of personality characteristics, which I’ve described before: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism.

[Katie Roiphe: Seven tips from Susan Sontag for independent thinking]

All of this brings us to the polarized moment in which we find ourselves, when a zero-sum, us-versus-them mentality has taken hold across the political spectrum—with the almost daily spectacle of crowds yelling angry slogans, trading insults, even erupting into violence. This outcome was predictable, as both political parties in the United States have become more extreme in their partisanship, policies, and rhetoric, by most Americans’ reckoning. Even Ivy League college campuses are seeing more hate-filled protest activity than they have in the recent past. The coronavirus pandemic only accelerated the process, perhaps as a response to pent-up anguish, which has then been exploited by ideological leaders.

No one thinks they are joining an angry mob, of course. That designation is reserved for the other side, whichever side that happens to be. But even if you prefer to see your crowd as a righteous multitude, you should be aware of how such intense emotional contagion can reduce your faculty for reasoning, impair your judgment, and expose you to manipulation.

So before you go to a rally, take part in a protest, or go on a march, here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

1. Do you want to lose your individuality through emotional contagion?
2. Imagine a less vigilant, discerning, intelligent version of yourself. Are you comfortable being that person?
3. Is the contagious emotion involved love or hate? Is that emotion one you want to “catch”?
4. Is the mass emotion being encouraged by a leader with pure intentions?

If your answers are “yes,” then at least you will be participating with your eyes open. But if any of your answers is “no,” you might want to think again about being part of this crowd. That might, in turn, prompt a reconsideration of how you want to participate in politics and public life during these difficult, contentious times.

Taking part and dissolving yourself in the mind-meld might make perfect sense—as clearly it did for so many people I joined in Fatima. But maybe not. My second night there, I opted not to join the procession. Instead, I watched it all happen from my hotel room. I found it beautiful, and it gave me inspiration. But I was not any less my full, conscious, individual self. That is the person I prefer to be in all parts of my life.