Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego have concluded that smoking cessation may indeed be “contagious.”
The scientists tracked over 12,000 participants in the now-famous Framingham Nurses Study for over 32 years and found that quitting tended to occur in identifiable clusters of people — most of whom did not know each other — rather than on a strictly individual basis. The implication: Somehow, when a smoker “impulsively” or “for no particular reason” decides to kick the habit once and for all, he is not only affected by the actions of those to whom he is in some way related by culture or other factors, but may in turn be affecting others.
“We’ve found that when you analyze large social networks, entire pockets of people who might not know each other all quit smoking at once,” says Nicholas Christakis, a professor in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy, who, along with U.C. San Diego researcher James Fowler, authored the study. “So if there’s a change in the zeitgeist of this social network, like a cultural shift, a whole group of people who are connected but who might not know each other all quit together.”
The phenomenon is an interesting one from an epidemiological and sociological standpoint, but the question of how to apply it to the smoking populace is a tricky one. It would seem that the factors playing into smokers’ higher likelihood of quitting in high-cessation areas or in families with quitters (even if the family members are geographically separated) are subconscious, not conscious, in nature.
The study results appear in today’s New England Journal of Medicine (abstract).
kemibe
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#1 by phishstyx on May 22, 2008 - 8:03 pm
Interesting study… Not to be nit-picky, but it is the Framingham Heart Study. The Nurses’ Health Study is a Harvard.
#2 by sailor on May 23, 2008 - 6:59 am
Consious/unconsious, who cares, half conscious may be more to the point. We are very suseptible to group pressure. You smoke and everyone else smokes, the cowboy on the poster smokes (at least he did before he died of cancer), great! Suddenly you notice at some level that what the hell, no one but you is smoking. You are a tiny minority. Smoking is then not quite so mjuch fun.
#3 by Oran Kelley on May 24, 2008 - 11:24 am
In order to answer you title question, we’d have to ahve a working definition for “meme.” The one I’m currently working with is “bulls**t.” Do you have a better one?
The phenomenon this seemingly revolutionary study is observing actually has been noted before. It’s known as “culture.”
In fact, it may surprise you to know that people have been studying various aspects of this phenomenon for quite some time. Thousands of years, actually.
The particular manifestation of culture most important to this study, subconscious influence, has been discussed for quite some time in what is known as the “Western intellectual tradition.” (I am not familiar some of the other traditions around the world–they may well have noticed the existence and influence of cultural, as well.) It is also an important area of inquiry among politicians and show business people more generally. Many different arguments have been put forward to help explain this phenomenon and how it is put to use.
But, now that scientists have discovered culture, perhaps we can expect they’ll make a little us of the learning that it has accumulated over the millennia.