Both Sickness and Health, It Turns Out, Are Contagious (a post about signaling)

Just like viruses, health fads such as Peloton, Pilates and Zumba spread rapidly and then fade

By Josh Zumbrun of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Behind the 95% crash of Peloton’s stock there are two types of contagion.

The first, better-known type is of a highly infectious coronavirus spreading around the world, forcing us to stay home and sparking a massive, ultimately unsustainable boom in sales of the Internet-connected home exercise bicycles. The lesser known type that Peloton typifies is of a highly contagious fitness fad jumping from household to household before running out of newly susceptible households to “infect.”

The analogies between Covid-19 and Peloton aren’t glib. A growing body of research in recent years has suggested that many health behaviors—from obesity to exercise and weight loss, from smoking to quitting smoking—are fundamentally contagious phenomena. The findings, which haven’t gone uncontested, suggest exposure to norms and ideas through your social network could be a powerful predictor of your health, your weight and even the stock prices of companies linked to those things.

“Research suggests that contagion is certainly at play,” said Tricia Leahey, a University of Connecticut professor and co-director of the UConn Weight Management Research Group, who has run a number of experiments over years on the social transmission of weight management. Simply put, “seeing people engaging in a variety of other diets and activities—folks tend to pick it up and try it themselves,” Dr. Leahey said."

"Starting in 1948 researchers persuaded 5,209 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts—about two-thirds of the town—to undertake a battery of physicals, lab samples and questionnaires every two years to track their heart health."

"Having close friends become obese appeared to increase one’s own risk of obesity."

"the phenomenon genuinely reflected causation, not correlation, among acquaintances sharing certain behaviors—and not just harmful ones."

"One such experiment assigned people to different weight-loss programs with or without extra social components. The social contagion effects were fairly strong: being randomly assigned to socially influential teammates increased the odds of achieving significant weight loss by 20%."

"For many people, the way they exercise, not just the fact they exercise, is a way to signal virtue, said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a professor at the New School and author of “Fit Nation: the Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,” a forthcoming book that looks at the history of fitness culture in the U.S.

The signal isn’t exactly about just being healthy. What drives the contagious trends, she said, is people who are signaling “my participation in fitness culture shows I’m on the cutting edge of luxury and fashion and fitness.”

Related posts:

Are Your Friends Making You Fat? (2009)

Why do stores sometimes pay people to be fake shoppers? (2019)

A fake job reference can be just a few clicks away (2015).

Can A Product Work Just Because It's Expensive? (2008). (fake medicine)

Rent a White Guy: Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing (by Mitch Moxley in The Atlantic Monthly) (2010) Excerpts below

Can adding a phantom third story to their homes help families find a wife for their son? (2018)

Why do employers pay extra money to people who study a bunch of subjects in college that they don’t actually need you to know? Signaling (2018)

Mexicans buy fake cellphones to hand over in muggings (2019)
 
Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Virtue, Thorstein Veblen (and Adam Smith, too!) (2007)

How does a company selling used luxury goods spot fakes? (signalling and conspicuous consumption) (2019)

Excerpts from "Rent a White Guy"

"Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.

“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”

I was.

And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”

Six of us met at the Beijing airport, where Jake briefed us on the details. We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to my friend Ernie, who, in his late 30s, was the oldest of our group. His business cards had already been made."

"For the next few days, we sat in the office swatting flies and reading magazines, purportedly high-level employees of a U.S. company that, I later discovered, didn’t really exist."