Contagious Behavior

Anyone who has taught a last period class in a room with windows on a hot day has seen it: Third row over, second seat back, Don yawns. Fourth row over, fourth seat back, Judy yawns. In less than a minute, 11 of your 28 students yawn. And then you do it.

Yawning is what's called a "contagious behavior." Recent research has found it happens with chimps and sea lions. Some claim it happens with dogs too.

(Just for fun) If you want to try an experiment with your students you might try showing them this 30 second YouTube video of a man yawning. How many followed suit?

Yawning, as a contagious behavior, is harmless. A more serious incident of contagious behavior occurred in 1998 at a high school in Tennessee when a teacher thought she smelled gas in her classroom. She soon felt dizzy and became nauseous. A couple of students demonstrated similar symptoms, claiming they too smelled the gas. An ambulance showed up and transported the teacher and the students to a nearby hospital and suddenly the race was on: about 100 students and staff ended up in the emergency room with symptoms they thought came from the gas at school.

There was no gas at school. Thorough tests conducted by the school as well as local authorities and the gas company left no doubt: no gas and no fumes.

(Read more about this incident in a summary of the article published by the New England Journal of Medicine.)

Contagious behaviors probably involve both social and biological processes. Although potentially powerful, we are usually not aware of the behaviors that have influenced us: we simply act without really knowing why. What is amazing about this fact is that sometimes the consequences of these actions can be momentous.

If there is the possibility that some behaviors are contagious, what are the implications of grouping the "bad boys," for example, together?

Dr. Richard E. Tremblay, lead researcher of a large and lengthy study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health recently summarized their findings: "Most countries spend considerable financial resources to fund programs and institutions that group deviant youths together in order to help them. The problem is that delinquent behavior is contagious, especially among adolescents. Putting deviant adolescents together creates a culture of deviance, which increases the likelihood of continued criminal behavior."

The research, which took place over a twenty-year period, looked at boys from kindergarten who were at risk for delinquent behavior and who were enrolled at 53 schools from the poorest neighborhoods in Montreal. Some 779 participants were interviewed annually from the age of 10 until 17 years. By their mid-20s, some 17.6 percent of participants ended up with adult criminal records for infractions that included homicide (17.9 percent); arson (31.2 percent); prostitution (25.5 percent); drug possession (16.4 percent) and impaired driving (8.8 percent).

"The more intense the help given by the juvenile justice system, the greater was its negative impact," Dr. Tremblay concluded.

(Read more about this study: Delinquent Behavior Among Boys 'Contagious,' Study Finds. )

The implications?

Putting all the bad kids in one detention room at the end of the day might not be a great idea. "Saturday school" for miscreants might become a different type of "learning experience" for some of the attendees.

Are our detention and suspension rooms teaching the wrong lessons? We certainly hope not, for as far as expediency goes, many teachers and administrators would be frustrated without them. Perhaps the lesson here is one of warning: make certain students in detention and internal suspension rooms are on-task with appropriate materials that encourage them to focus on positive behaviors.

What about contagious behavior and truancy? Although it's early in the school year and we'd guess at this point (August, 2009) most schools can report perfect attendance so far, truants can wreck havoc with a successful school year. Truancy disrupts lesson plans. Disrupts tests and quizzes. Damages graduation rates. Hurts the standardized testing process. Costs schools money. And truancy seems to beget more truancy.

Truancy appears to be one of those behaviors that some students hesitate to do on their own. For many, the crowd plays a vital role: "They are doing it, therefore, I can do it too." Crowd behavior and contagious behavior here are entwined. Over 100 years ago Robert Park wrote a seminal book: The Crowd and the Public (1904) where he suggests that as the size of the crowd grows, the perceived annonymity of the participant increases.

We'll catch the truant, but only after he is truant. What we'd like to do is catch him while he's just thinking about it. And give him a couple great reasons to go to school. We have developed a new set of truancy packets to encourage truants to stop and think about their actions by focusing on the specific reason for their absence. You may not be able to get their attention before the fact but these packets may help prevent their next missed school day.