Is obesity contagious?

Is Obesity Socially Contagious?

Is obesity contagious? Social networks vs. environmental factors in the obesity epidemic.

This note's aim is to investigate the sensitivity of Christakis and Fowler's claim [Christakis, N., Fowler, J., 2007. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. The New England Journal of Medicine 357, 370-379] that obesity has spread through social networks. It is well known in the economics literature that failure to include contextual effects can lead to spurious inferenc...

Feeling cold is contagious

Seeing someone plunge into an ice-cold bath induces feelings of cold. However, it was recently demonstrated that ie ing another’s skin temperature change also induces a small congruent temperature change in the observer. This synchronization suggests topdown influences on peripheral temperature regulation mechanisms and lends supports to somatic-simulation theories of inter-subjectivity.

Is Dishonesty Contagious

When an individual believes that peers are predominantly untruthful in a given situation, is he/she more likely to be untruthful in that situation? We study this question in deception experiments patterned after Gneezy (2005) and conducted in Arizona, California, and India. We find evidence that dishonesty is indeed contagious.

Is Crime Contagious?

Is Crime Contagious? Understanding whether criminal behavior is “contagious” is important for law enforcement and for policies that affect how people are sorted across social settings. We test the hypothesis that criminal behavior is contagious by using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing-mobility experiment to examine the extent to which lower localarea crime rates dec...