 Hi, my name is Tracy Tokahama Espinosa, and this is a video on social contagion. You've all caught a cold, right? You know what it's like when somebody was contagious with their illness. Well, social contagion is a similar phenomenon, but it has to do with the infection of an emotional state of a group. This is what we mean when we talk about learning environments or work environments. Social contagion is really at the heart of that. So the key tenet here is that learning is social, and people like to be with other people. In general, most of us would choose to be with other people when we learn. I don't know if most of you saw this movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks. Do you guys remember who Wilson was? Wilson was that volleyball, right? That he like paints a face on and is his companion, because most of us, most humans would choose to live in social groups. So the brain is fundamentally social, even though different people have different levels of socialization that they prefer. So social contagion has been studied in multiple ways. If somebody begins to itch, somebody else will itch, and so that's contagious, right? Or yawning, right? Facial imitation, temperature. Oh, it's really hot in here, right? Everybody starts to feel hot. So we know that social contagion is real and that human beings are contagious. What is less known is this connection between social contagion and social cognition. Do we understand? Are we aware of how social contexts change our ability to learn things? So in a teaching and learning context, what's really interesting is there now are studies about how brains actually get in sync. You can look at electrical waves in the brain and how they become in sync based on different people's interactions with each other in group situations. We also know, just like the whole itching thing or whatever, that their body movement changes to get in sync with the other. And so basically, this is like one of the foundations of some psychology, right? When people imitate each other's moves. So if the patient is sitting there like this worried, then the therapist also sits there and looks in the same way or whatever, sort of this mimicry is supposed to invite a sense of cohesion within the group. One thing that's really interesting, if you study good classroom settings where students report that the teacher really understood me or things were great there, basically when queried on this, teachers will say, you know, oh, yeah, I really felt in sync with the group. I mean, there was flow, there was, we were, we actually matched and we were working together as a group or whatever. Very interesting because the perception of a teacher is not necessarily the same thing as what the students actually felt there. But the words that are used to describe it are very similar, being in synergy or being in sync with the other, which is actually the physiological phenomenon of how those brain waves are actually getting in sync. So these one-on-one interactions with students or the teacher with the group can both be interpreted as of creating both positive and negative dynamics within the classroom setting. So when we talk about this phenomenon of social tajin, what we're actually talking about is that interpersonal dynamic that occurs between individuals or the group and an individual within a classroom setting in this case. And Zoo found in a very, very funny experiment, basically, when teachers imitated the students' behaviors and their interactions, kind of like we were talking about with the therapist, right, the students reported significantly higher perceptions of rapport and more confidence and satisfaction with the learning outcomes. And because they felt better, they actually did better on quiz situations. Now that's kind of crazy, right? So we say does social contagion influence learning outcomes absolutely when it's done in a positive sense, right? So some years back we got super excited about this concept of mirror neurons because we had this idea, and Iqabani was the original founder of this general concept, is that the urge to imitate is greater than the urge to follow instructions. And so I don't know if you've ever played that game, Simon says, and you say, oh, Simon says, pat your stomach and you touch your nose. Well, most people will actually touch their nose rather than pat their stomach because pat their stomach is what you said, but what you did was different. So the urge to imitate is greater than the urge to follow instructions. Mirror neurons haven't completely panned out. They had a lot of promise at some point. Some people thought, oh, there even the explanation for autism. For example, a defective mirror neuron system, it leads to autism. None of that has really been proven. In fact, there's still a question whether or not mirror neurons are even different kinds of neurons or different functions of existing neurons. So all of that is still out for debate. And what is still on the table really interesting is whether or not mirror neurons are actually culturally bound. So cultural neuroscience is sort of creeping in here on a neurobiology to comment on the way we interact with each other in social contacts is really culturally bound. So as we pointed out in other videos, the role of faces and voices is really important in this whole idea of social contagion. So the way an individual teacher can change the entire mood of the classroom setting by their tone of voice or by the facial expressions that are used are too heavy influences in social contagion. And what's really so interesting is that social contagion does not have to be with a person sitting right next to you, you know, touchable. Social contagion occurs on the internet just as much as it does in face to face situations. That is an individual's emotional state can be conveyed even through the internet. We also know that social contagion is regulated by different types of chemistries and different types of networks in the brain. So different chemical exchanges, oxytocin and vasopressin are big players during social contagion. And they're also looked at very carefully in social affect and social attachment and cortisol is also a big player there related to stress. And we know that social contagion relates to a whole lot of things. Valence to evaluation is as good or is as bad. Regulation, self-representation, nonverbal social perception and communication, experience sharing, mentalization. And these types of core systems result in very complex emotional phenomena related to empathy, prosocial motivation. You're doing good for the group, right? Social exclusion, keeping people out, bullying, stuff like that. Grief or romantic rejection, romantic love, attachment, moral judgment, all of these are being studied related to social contagion in the brain. And Pineda had a really interesting idea trying to look at this hierarchy of behavioral representations of social contagion. So maybe at this higher order level of social contagion, we have theory of mind. We have cognitive empathy. We think of the other. We reconsider our place in the world and we're altruistic. We care for others, right? So you have this kind of philosophical look at that. This is kind of the highest element or the highest way that you could experience social contagion. At the lowest level, it's kind of like primates and priming and when you clean each other or groom or whatever, or as we said before, when you make somebody feel hot or cold by just simply indicating that or when you reflect their physical actions as in motor empathy. So it's interesting to perceive of social contagion as not being a single thing or on a single continuum, but rather having a hierarchy. And he did match this with these ideas of elements of the limbic system versus elements of the prefrontal cortex as a major hub for decision making. And he compared and contrasted how some of these base elements seem to be triggered by the limbic system, whereas other higher order concept, altruism thinking of the other empathy involves much more complex networks in the cortex. And what's really vital to take into consideration, we talk about social contagion, is that there are multiple messages, right? It's not just the message that is sent. It's actually the message that's received, which can be different, right? So I think I did things in one way, but the way the other person takes it in can be different. And these have to do with everything, facial expression tone of voice, the way the information is conveyed, the enthusiasm or lack thereof that the information is shared with, right? So a center's expression will actually change the receiver's expression of the information. Then they may have some shared neuronal activity. The neural activity will then get in sync, as we say. And then there's an automated response to that. Basically, both will have a different type of automatic mimicry that would occur there. And based on that, there's an expression of certain chemicals that would create an emotional state, and eventually empathy in this particular case. Others have looked at this idea of social contagion and social cognition, and then understanding this global idea of social perception. So what happens between this individual and that individual? Well, they both have emotional states. They're aroused by certain types of things that happen in the environment or contact with each other. They express things, but based on how they express things, all of these things create a dynamic that it's not just what you did and what I feel by what you did. It's based on what you did that made me feel something. So I react in one way, so then you feel something different. So it's a dynamic process. The interaction between individuals is never unilateral and linear. It has more to do with a dynamic process of how individuals interact with one another and make each other feel. It's also important to realize that social contagion, we talk about it as if it was a single thing, but it's actually got multiple levels. So at one level you may have an expression of emotions, so chemical state. You might have also actions that you might do. You might have something you say. So all of these are slightly different neural mechanisms in the brain. And two of these networks that are really important to consider have to do with the face network as well as the mentalizing networks which have this huge overlaps, but they're very distinct. Understanding others' faces is really a unique network in the brain, but mirroring the facial expressions of others and then mentalizing or imagining these other possible states involves a real mishmash of different hubs in the brain and a very complex network. So while some people are studying how social contagion seems to be manifested in mimicry or the way that we respond or our faces reflect other people's faces, other researchers are looking at this idea of self versus the other. How is it that my understanding of myself is shaped by my understanding of you? How's the ventral media of prefrontal cortex and the ventral entrepreneurial frontal cortex and the insula, how are they all involved in this complex understanding of my need to know you in order to know myself better? So understanding the other helps me understand myself and this constant judgment that we have back and forth of people in our environment. Other research is looking at social perception, how the brain perceives social situations so that it can then have social cognition and social contagion based on those perceptions. And yet other people are now venturing into this really high ground of emotions and really interesting. How complex it is for the brain to understand empathy. It means understanding the other, it means understanding their intentions, it means memory systems, it means emotions, all of this working together. This is so much more complicated than studying for example fear because it was the easiest thing to study in the brain. It's a very precise, simple network. Fear in the brain is really easy. This also explains why people make quick and crazy decisions much faster when they feel fearful of something than when they feel attracted or empathetic towards something else. Then on top of the whole idea of social contagion and social cognition, understanding how outside social perceptions of my world then change how I think and make me interact with another person in a different way. Well here on top of all of this then we have cognitive reappraisal. We think we know something about the other. It makes us act in one way but then when we see their reaction to our action then we think about it again. Did I do the right thing or should I do something different the next time? This is a very different neural mechanism in the brain than that initial social perception. There's also a look at other regions of the brain looking at prefrontal cortex and executive function at work and its interaction with social cognition and others that are looking again at the cerebellum again as a medium for this consciousness understanding and this higher mentalizing about our social contagion and the interaction with others. And then there are other researchers who are trying to figure out, okay, let's do meta-analysis of what is everybody figuring out about social cognitive regions of the brain? How does the brain understand its social context? And so you get tons of these different types of presumptions and areas of the brain. And so when I actually tried to plot all of that out myself I had a big challenge because one study would say it would be as complex as each one of these things, right? And then I was trying to overlay each of these. This was social cognition, theory of mind kind of studies. This is cognition, also another one's theory of mind, another one that was theory of mind. So all of these different regions were being considered in different people's studies as being activated during an understanding of social cognition. And so this is what my final drawing looked like. No, I'm joking, no. But it is very complex, understanding the other, understanding and negotiating our world is a much more complex process than it might first appear because it seems natural we're social beings when you should know how to manage these contexts but your brain is constantly reevaluating the context it's in and reassessing how it should react accordingly. Another way to look at this is related to John Hattie's educational research that I use as a basis for recommendations about things that we know work in the classroom but which are substantiated with evidence from neuroscience. And so several of these areas have to do with social cognition and social contagion. Understanding student self-efficacy, understanding and knowing the other, the relationships between students and teachers, all of these have to do with elements of social cognition. So bottom line recommendation is teachers should take advantage of social contagion. Many teachers do not even know the power that they have over the group. And oftentimes they'll let others in the group lead. This can be a downward spiral because if I walk in and I see a bunch of sad and distracted and lazy students and then I allow them to be contagious to me and then I become lethargic, then it just perpetuates the negative downward spiral towards an unenthusiastic reply to my class. But if I go in and I know the power that I have and I know how to leverage that, that actually changes the whole group's mood. That is what it means to change a learning environment. As I've mentioned before, Hattie's work is pretty powerful because it talks about the influences on student learning outcomes and how these work was important because he put this on a comparative scale. So we now could compare quantitative and qualitative studies on a single scale to see their general effect size. So hitting a general effect size of having a good teacher for one year is a 0.4 kind of a scale. So what we'd like to be is anywhere higher than that, but what we don't wanna be is in the negative. And so we also know that doing things in social context where we group kids by abilities is also a pretty dumb idea because we know that it's far better to have mixed ability groupings because peer teaching occurs there and everybody grows with that. But I show you the scale mainly to make the point that that social contagion, that the student-teacher relationships have one of the highest impacts on student learning outcomes. So the role of social contagion is huge in this respect when we know that it has a result on their learning. It's not just the feel-good element to the learning atmosphere, it's actually that they have better learning outcomes. But actually even more powerful than just having that good teacher-student relationship is if that student gets the same message from all the teachers. If the student gets the, hey, I see you're working really hard and you seem to have achieved here and there or you seem to be doing a great job or we believe in you, when that collective teacher efficacy is shared, that is the bigger, broader school environment. That is the bigger, broader learning environment. That's the bigger, broader company environment. For example, some of you who are in business might feel that you have one heck of a manager and he does a great job and his team seems to be thriving. But when you have multiple managers motivating large groups of employees, you know that the system is working better. It's a more healthy system. The social contagion has been leveraged to its maximum when it's not just limited to the one-on-one. Although one-on-one is super important, the group and how it affects itself and all of the other members that contagion is even more powerful. And finally, at last point, all social contagion really hinges on the idea of understanding and appreciating the relationship between emotion and cognition. There is no learning without in a mode of state. So we know that emotion influences what people are able to learn. How you feel about something influences what you can and do learn from it. Additionally, this means that kids who are highly stressed, for example, will not learn. We've talked about that before. And the last element of social contagion that I think is really important, especially for the teachers in the room or the people who are leaders in any context and have to work with others, is that we often mistake the common denominator as the goal. When I'm trying to shoot, and this is getting to this conversation we've had sometimes about the myth of average, there is no average, right? People respond to the level of expectations placed on them, high or low. So if I don't have very high expectations of you, I don't think you're gonna do that well. And I let you know that. There's a lot of research out there that shows that conveying lower expectations, consciously or not, reduces the probability of success or higher learning outcomes. But when you hold people to a higher standard, when you say, you know what? I know this is hard, but I know you can do it. There's a social contagion there that lifts up the individual learners as well as the group. So social contagion has some of its best outcomes related to the expectations that are conveyed, either through explicit expression of those things or through our general interactions with learners. But as we've spoken about before, can't push too far, right? I can have high expectations, but they better be on that scale that is actually accessible. Everybody loves a good challenge. Nobody loves to feel threatened. This is this York Studson curve where we want people to have all that good use stress, but we don't wanna tip them over into distress because we wanna push them, but we wanna push them at the right level so that they can achieve their maximum potential. We've spoken a lot about how teachers communicate their emotions through body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, but it's worth repeating that clarity and immediacy, telling people, you know, save your questions to the end or something like that is actually not very conducive to good learning. And it sends a message that your needs are not my needs. And so, you know, let me get my stuff done and then we'll get to you. That is a negative message that can be sent in a socially contagious way. We all have to remember that clarity is not only in the tone of voice, although that is important. We've looked at that before, but fluency, precision, the structure, the equity, the time that is spent, there's a lot to structure the social contagion or the environment in which students are learning. And in other contexts, we've talked about evaluating people and their work on product, process, progress. Well, another way to convey this is just through simple caring and clarity. I hear you, I understand what you need. This is what I need. Making sure that that's transmitted in a way that is sincere goes a long way to corralling maybe those difficult learners into the group. Again, going back to the emotions. The very first thing you wanna do when somebody yells at you is run. So being chastised or threatened is not really the way to get people to do what you want them to do. They may comply, but they won't learn. Another element of having those high expectations is reinforcement and effort and providing recognition. Although sometimes we as leaders in companies or teachers in the classroom, we presume everybody knows what they need to be doing or we presume that they understand the criteria that we're measuring in success. And that's not fair. It's really good every once in a while to reiterate, hey, thanks for making the effort of getting that in. Well, of course they had to get it in. It was an assignment or that was what their job is. But you know that small thank you goes a long way in recognizing the energy that it took for them to get to that place. Now that has to be really sincere. We can't get into this space where you're giving stickers for not trashing the house or for taking care of your workspace or whatever because those are things that we expected people. But recognizing the effort that sometimes takes for people to get things done is really important. And when it comes to things like innovation, we want our students to be creative, but then if we only celebrate when they get things right, that's a problem. So part of the idea is celebrating their ability to dare to air, to do something slightly different, to do something a little bit out of the box. Celebrating that might not mean that they're getting the right answer, but it means that they have the right attitude and how to approach those problems in the future. So bottom line lesson of social contagion, and this is also something that Hadi has spoken about at length, the passion with which you share your enthusiasm for the learning objectives, for what people need to be doing in the workplace, for what we want our students to do is contagious. If you love what you're doing and you convey that to other people, they will think, well, there's gotta be something to that, right? If you come in and you're not enthusiastic and you don't really care about what's going on, how are you gonna get the learner to be enthusiastic and care? You can't, it's contagious. That negative mood is contagious just as the positive. So where possible, be passionate. Hadi has said, the passion with which a teacher approaches the profession is more important than all of those other influencing factors and student learning outcomes. So try to remember that in your interaction with other people. So I don't wanna end without having a word about peer contagion. We've been talking a lot about how a leader in a company or a teacher might be able to be contagious to a group. What's really important to understand is that anybody can lead contagion and it's very clear that it's quite common that people are led by peer groups more than they are by traditional authority figures. So many of the examples we gave have to do with maybe classroom settings or work environments, but it's very important to realize that this is life. Your peers, my peers, the way we interact with each other are all driven by social contagion as well. Okay, I hope that brings up a whole lot of questions then. And that you come to class excited to talk. See you soon. Thanks.