Unless youre in Business or First Class then flying is usually a stressful experience, but it seems like tempers have been running higher than usual over the past few months. <\/p>\n
While some have blamed airline cost-cutting for frayed tempers and in some cases all-out brawls, others are laying the blame at another door social media. <\/p>\n
A new article published by Quartz has linked the recent increase in fights on planes to the psychological phenomenon called behavior contagion. <\/p>\n
Behavior contagion was first coined in the late 1800s by the academic Gustave Le Bon, who used it to describe the bad behavior people displayed when they were in a crowd. <\/p>\n
The theory is that people behave worse once they have seen somebody else commit the same antisocial activity. <\/p>\n
By witnessing the first person doing it, it then seems less offensive to the second person and they follow suit. <\/p>\n
But thanks to smartphones and the internet, people no longer have to be in a crowd to get affected by behavior contagion. <\/p>\n
In a paper by Paul Marsden of Stanford University called Memetics & Social Contagion, the writer addresses the ease with which behavior contagion can travel. <\/p>\n
He said: Recent research has unequivocally established the fact of the social contagion phenomenon, and has identified its operation in a number of areas of social life. <\/p>\n
The implications of this social contagion research are radical: The evidence suggests that under certain circumstances, mere touch or contact with culture appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur. <\/p>\n
So every time footage of an airplane brawl is shared on social media, certain viewers becomes less offended by the actions and more likely to imitate them. <\/p>\n
For instance, last November a RyanAir flight, from Brussels to Malta, was forced to land in Pisa after a brawl broke out between a number of passengers that saw an elderly woman hit in the head and a stewardess slapped. <\/p>\n
Then in February, two passengers claiming to be lawyers became embroiled in a heated argument over an armreston a Monarch Airways flight from the UK to Malaga in Spain. <\/p>\n
And just this month, two men were filmed throwing punches at each other on a Japanese plane ending in the arrest of a boozed-up American traveler at Tokyos Narita Airport. <\/p>\n
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Read the original: <\/p>\n
Here's one reason why people are fighting on planes so much - New York Post<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unless youre in Business or First Class then flying is usually a stressful experience, but it seems like tempers have been running higher than usual over the past few months. While some have blamed airline cost-cutting for frayed tempers and in some cases all-out brawls, others are laying the blame at another door social media. A new article published by Quartz has linked the recent increase in fights on planes to the psychological phenomenon called behavior contagion Continue reading