Strange Contagion Read online

  Dedication

  To Alec and Chloe

  We catch each other.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Part I: The Valley of the Shadow Chapter 1: Arrival, Part I

  Chapter 2: Mirror/Mirror

  Chapter 3: A Perfect Tempest

  Chapter 4: A Particular Predilection for Catching

  Chapter 5: A Quest in Earnest

  Part II: The Perfect Model Chapter 6: How to Start a Contagion

  Chapter 7: Stumbling upon a Cure and Its Unintended Consequence

  Part III: The Frenzied Chapter 8: A Dilemma of Contagion

  Chapter 9: Shifting Strategies, I Turn to Tracking Hysteria

  Chapter 10: Discovering the Wrong Responders

  Chapter 11: Tracking Nocebos and the Mystery of the DeKalb County Windmills

  Part IV: The Motivators Chapter 12: Discovering the “Hard Drive” Virus

  Chapter 13: On the Trail of the Motivation Lab

  Chapter 14: We Have a Problem of Primes

  Chapter 15: Tripping the Fail-safe

  Part V: The Interrupters Chapter 16: Finding the Man Who Launched a Rampant Revolution of Courage

  Chapter 17: Where Role Models Are Just Another Prime

  Chapter 18: On the Trail of a Cure Model

  Chapter 19: If It Can Stop Violence, It Can Stop This

  Part VI: The Interlopers Chapter 20: The Impossible Reach

  Chapter 21: Considering the Piggyback Treatment

  Chapter 22: Catching the Ivy Leagues

  Part VII: The Conversation Chapter 23: Arrival, Part II

  Chapter 24: Finding Hope Within the Barsade Cascade

  Chapter 25: Stress Is a Gateway

  Chapter 26: How to Catch Happiness

  Chapter 27: Applying the Salve of Emotional Attunement

  Part VIII: The Community Chapter 28: All the Answers Lead Back Home

  Chapter 29: A Plague of Yellow Jacks

  A Note on Support

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Sources

  About the Author

  Also by Lee Daniel Kravetz

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  I chase narratives for a living. As a science writer, when I seek out stories I’m really looking for specific qualities: a struggle to understand and classify human behavior; unique characters confronting high stakes, moral dilemmas, and a question of personal culpability; heroes facing opponents; and oftentimes a situation in which life hangs in the balance.

  In 2009, these qualities announced themselves within a twenty-five-square-mile expanse delineated by the trappings of Silicon Valley, homeland for technology pacesetters surrounded by abundant icons of immense wealth, as well as luminous environmental conditions ideal for cultivating revolution. Palo Alto, California, found itself in the middle of an extraordinary psychological outbreak when numerous students from a single high school died by suicide. This was not the result of a pact; in most cases the children didn’t know one another. Even more confounding, on paper at least, they had everything going for them: They came from loving families and environments of plenty. Each was popular, valued, talented, and happy. They were also thriving in one of the highest-ranked public schools in the country. Despite these considerations, something switched within the minds of relatively well-adjusted people, leading inexorably to moments in which each chose to step in front of an oncoming commuter train.

  Unlike other narratives I have pursued, though, this time the stakes were personal. The people I interviewed were neighbors. The train that killed these students ran not five minutes away from my apartment. I saw the community’s outpouring of grief. I witnessed the town scramble to understand why this was happening. And then there were my own worries to contend with, as well as my growing intellectual curiosity.

  Examining events through social contagions, the ways in which others influence our lives through catchable thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, was the only method I found to both understand and describe the events as they transpired. Learning this language, however, first required me to redefine contagion, to separate the menace from the meaning. Through the epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, who I came to know well during my search for answers, I learned to view social contagions as neither inherently good nor bad. Instead, he said, they lead to either positive or negative consequences. He reminded me that a social contagion’s intent doesn’t exist under scrutiny, and that good and bad are not scientific words. Our job is to understand them deeply, he said, and everything that they influence—such as the way we raise our children, engage in commerce, scale ideas, educate the youth, and care for the sick—so that we do what we can to improve well-being.

  The science of social contagions suggests that influence travels through observation. It rides on cues in the environment and traverses the space between people on both spoken and written words. Telling the story of this tragedy, then, meant creating a potential vector for everything it purported to illuminate and protect people from. How was I going to write about something I wasn’t supposed to write about without increasing the risk of others catching it?

  I decided to go about this with a careful and delicate investigation, undertaking a balancing act of reportage and empathy. I adhered to media guidelines proposed by the US surgeon general and the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. I avoided romanticizing facts, neither turning victims into martyrs nor insulting their memories. I managed to do so by recognizing early on that this particular story of Silicon Valley was not the story of specific individuals but that of the collective. While, thankfully, few will ever experience the tragedy of this suicide cluster, we have all seen social contagions at work in our lives: we need only look at stock market sentiment to know that greed is communicable, or count the number of campus shootings to watch violence spread. Personal drive, happiness—even our innate senses of generosity, courage, and work ethic—are as transmissible to others as the flu. Researchers from Yale University to the Department of Defense and the Pentagon have invested millions to understand and channel this science, because social contagions covertly impact all elements of our lives, from memories to moods, and often do so beneath the surface of our awareness. My own investigation became a haunting example of just how high the stakes can be, and my goal became one of understanding not why these things matter to us all but how.

  In telling this narrative of Palo Alto, I hope that we can better understand the ways in which each of us, despite physical boundaries, is truly linked to one another. By uncovering this largely covert yet highly commonplace world of social contagions, we recognize their importance as well as the ways in which they contribute to the trajectories of our lives. We learn how to guard against the ones that can lead to potentially harmful outcomes, like hysteria and fear. We come to understand how to spread the ones that lead to healthy results, such as happiness and resilience. We acquire the ability to direct them in order to create the relationships, the community, and the culture we desire.

  Given the infectiousness of thoughts, the stickiness of the most subtle of emotions, and the transmissibility of others’ behaviors, the chronicle of what transpired in this small town, which just happens to be one of the biggest towns in the world in terms of innovation and scaling of new ideas, will prompt us to take better stock of the invisible forces that sway us. It will also allow us to gain insight into those we ourselves propagate. Ultimately, my hope is that this tale of Silicon Valley will spread a catchable sense of personal responsibility for one another in a world that demands so much of it.

  Part I

  The Va
lley of the Shadow

  “Second verse, same as the first.”

  ―Traditional

  Chapter 1

  Arrival, Part I

  We’ve been in the new apartment for a week. My wife, six months pregnant, belly large in a turquoise blouse and hair cut short, arranges the terra-cotta planter pots on the balcony. I’m in the living room, flattening and folding empty cardboard moving boxes. Over the past decade I’ve become pretty competent in this routine of packing and unpacking. In our twenties we moved around a lot, for work, for graduate school, for adventure and opportunity, living in Boston, New York, and briefly Baltimore, followed by a fifteen-month sojourn in San Francisco. We’ve decided that 2009 will be the year that we settle down and create a permanent home in which to raise a family. My wife began looking for a job that would bring us out of the city. My work as a freelance science writer unmoored me from any particular location, thus her offer from Google moved us from the trendy Mission District to the sleepy hamlet of Palo Alto.

  An ambulance siren is going off maybe a mile away. Another siren closely trails behind it. “I wonder what’s going on out there,” she says offhandedly. I finish making my morning coffee in the kitchen, and with mug in hand I head to the balcony where she is looking over the railing. “There must be an accident nearby.”

  Even before entering the low heat of the summer I can hear the traffic that’s gathered two stories below. Just beyond our apartment complex, maple trees block the partial view we have of Hoover Tower rising above Stanford University, a pink-hued emblem of the region and those who have brought to it a touch of wunderkind in the form of geniuses, masterminds, idea incubators, and dream originators. Below us, cars collect along El Camino Real and east along Oregon Expressway toward the interstate. The streetlights cycle through from green to red and the traffic doesn’t budge. Somewhere overhead a helicopter thumps the sky.

  Later that evening I read online that the bumper-to-bumper traffic was due to a fatality not on the road but on the Caltrain tracks close by. The casualty halted the lines for hours. Delayed commuters scrambled for alternate routes to work, causing an ugly cascade of backups on the roads. While I’d been deconstructing our moving boxes up in our apartment, down below a boy named Jean-Paul “Han-Wei” Blanchard, a junior at nearby Henry M. Gunn High School, was walking off of the campus. He’d moved along Arastradero Road, past dozens of tidy, brightly painted homes, crossed the wide span of El Camino Real, and, in broad daylight, stepped onto the railroad.

  We’ve been in town for less than a week, but I’m still certain that a train hitting and killing a local student is unusual in Silicon Valley, where the spectrum of intellect runs a parallel track to a kind of acceptable madness of professors, scientists, writers, investors, and entrepreneurs who run this distinct Bellevue of ambition.

  The news is doubly unusual given the particular school the boy attended. By academic measures the students at Gunn High—and all the schools in the area, for that matter—are among California’s brightest. In the past five years, Gunn High in particular has boasted more National Merit Scholarship Program semifinalists than 90 percent of schools in the country. Recently, half of its students took roughly two thousand Advanced Placement tests for college credit, 93 percent of whom scored three or higher on a scale of one to five. These are the kind of facts people in this town like to quote, especially those who’ve moved here expressly so that their children can take advantage of the public school system.

  But for a couple of days the litany of academic praise ends. Short sound bites and tiny paragraphs in local newspapers carry the unusual story of the boy’s death. People talk about it. Then they stop talking about it. They return to their lives, and I return to unpacking.

  It has been three weeks since Blanchard’s suicide when all of the trains on the Caltrain line receive an emergency order to stop. Passenger cars in the night stagnate at points along their routes. The Santa Clara County coroner investigates what appears to be another body on the same length of tracks near Gunn High.

  Reporting on the incident within hours of her death, media reveal that authorities have recovered Sonya Raymakers, a graduating senior preparing to attend NYU’s prestigious theater program in the fall. The town is already beginning to speculate about her motivation. People point to the region’s ethos of scholastic pressure, its common burden to achieve, its unspoken but understood dictum of success at any cost. They consider the effects of undiagnosed or undisclosed mental illness. They talk about copycat behavior.

  Growing up, you heard about kids who died by suicide, but oftentimes these tragedies were isolated situations, happened behind closed doors, and remained private family affairs. These two events, however, took place in an unbelievably open fashion, practically forcing public outcry and reflection. I don’t know much about the pathos of suicidal thinking, but I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection between the two children. Then again, reading into these tragic moments might simply be an exercise in attempting to reason away the unreasonable.

  Even as a relative newcomer to this community and stationed on the sidelines of grief, I find myself caught up in the shock. At the same time, the natural distance of my station grants me some perspective. I watch the town absorb the wave without it knowing quite what to make of its power or source. People in turn pivot to focus on everyday tribulations, relying on the trajectories of life as usual to steady them from the blow; no one can stand to have this glue mucking up the chambers of their heart.

  And neither can I, frankly. I’m about to be a father. The most pressing personal issue at the moment is the nursery I have to build. I frame illustrations and hang the pictures from blue ribbon on the walls. Climb a stepladder and lock metal rings through heavy curtain fabric. Stand before sections of a white crib spread out on the floor like kindling, uncertain how to decipher the instructions or interpret how the pieces fit together.

  Chapter 2

  Mirror/Mirror

  When my son is born, I wrap him in folds of a thin and gauzy blanket and place his warm body in the crook of my wife’s arm, where he will remain, more often than not, for the next three months.

  He is enamored with her. Endlessly stares into her face. Watches her eyes widen and her mouth turn out big expressions. He responds to her as though engaged in conversation, his own eyes opening wide, and his mouth mimicking her smile.

  From our first moments, our understanding beyond the womb is dependent on our natural instinct to mirror. We are built to receive and perceive cues, to understand displays of happiness, fear, and sadness, and to create with others a harmony of movements. While writing The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin observed the collective makeup of human countenance. Despite age, ethnicity, and gender, people articulate the same state of mind as someone they observe. Every person is unique, and yet by way of a smile, a frown, a grimace, a wince, they hold universal commonality. Expressions cue recognition and activate in us similar empathetic responses. Remarkably, the mechanism for mirroring others takes place so fast and automatically it’s nearly imperceptible. The social psychologist Elaine Hatfield credits this to a kind of automatic attunement bred by a nonconscious imitator within each of us. We capitalize on moments during which the mind registers the tiniest flickers of expression from the world around it, activating a primal process of reflecting and aligning.

  I watch my son, a face surrounded by folds of a moon-colored blanket, his eyes gray as old nickels. His brain is wired to register a kind of neural Wi-Fi, unconsciously picking up cues from other people. Through clusters of mirror neurons, the amygdala instantly reacts to prompts of facial expressions, creating a mental response that mimics what it believes it’s seeing.

  While we’re left scratching our heads about why two children took their own lives, in watching this enthralling exchange between my son and his environment, I’m beginning to think that mirroring might be a large part of the puzzle. I’m now assembling a new science-bas
ed framework to help put recent events in context. It’s built on a foundation of social contagions, or discrete infectious characteristics found within the makeup of the school and, perhaps, the town that feeds it.

  Is it possible that the two students mirrored specific thoughts? The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls this particular kind of social contagion a meme: “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the [idea’s] propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.” I find his virus parallel to be rather apt. Contagious thoughts mimic natural laws like those overseeing the mutation and transmission of germs. Under the right circumstances, corralled within perfect conditions, thoughts spread, catch, activate, and—through certain people—proliferate to others. Like biological viruses, which begin to amass abilities, interact with our bodies, and replicate along the way, thoughts begin with random cues, gestures that harm nothing, and interact with the psychological characteristics of the host. And while biological viruses are dependent on taking over a cell to work, thoughts implant in people and are absolutely dependent on taking over the mind.

  In terms of how we unconsciously spread our thoughts to others, the scientists Nicholas Christakis at Yale University’s Human Nature Lab and James Fowler at the University of California, San Diego, suggest that this particular kind of social contagion crosses the transom by relying on elaborate and complex relationship networks that “branch like lightning bolts, forming intricate patterns throughout human society.” Which thoughts people mirror depend on the makeup of the community in which they exist. This is why certain groups of friends consider dissolving their marriages within two degrees of separation of another divorcing couple, why the stock market fluctuates on the suggestion of trouble, and why children struggle under the weight of outsized achievement expectations in school. In this case, maybe the two students from Gunn High caught ideas around achievement or failure.