Study title

This study was designed to investigate the role of social influence on the transmission of behaviour. The study was carried out online and compared the degree to which the transmission of yawning behaviour between an actor, presented in a video, and participants was influenced by social identity; in this case, gender. There were significant main effects of ingroup/outgroup on shared identity and social identification, but not the dependent variables. Shared identity significantly predicted urge to yawn but not self-report or observed yawns. There was a significant serial moderated-mediation (Condition – [ID] – Shared Identity – Urge to Yawn – Observed Yawns). The model was also significant if observed yawns swapped for self-reported number of yawns, total duration of yawning, or time to first yawn. How and why do behaviours spread from person to person? In particular, how does aggression and violent behaviour spread? When, as in 2011, riots began in London, why did they then occur in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool? One of the most common ways of addressing such issues is through the notion of 'contagion'. The core idea is that, particularly in crowds, mere exposure to the behaviour of others leads observers to behave in the same way. 'Contagion' is now used to explain everything from 'basic' responses such as smiling and yawning (where the mere act of witnessing someone yawn or smile can invoke the same response in another) to complex phenomena like the behaviour of financial markets and, of course, rioting. What is more, laboratory experiments on the 'contagion' of simple responses (such as yawning) serve to underpin the plausibility of 'contagion' accounts as applied to complex phenomena (such as rioting). Despite this widespread acceptance, the 'contagion' account has major problems in explaining the spread of behaviours. In particular, there are boundaries to such spread. If men smile at a sexist joke, will feminists also smile in response to the men's...