The other day I heard a public radio bit with someone considering murder in Newark as analyzed from an epidemiologic perspective: the behavior of murder as an infectious agent which spreads similarly to other infectious agents like germs.
Is it a metaphor or is it fair to consider behaviors as infectious agents themselves? There is nothing that says an infectious agent must be a germ. Is there?
Does the model fit the data? Does it make useful predictions? If so, it’s a good model. Who cares what specific form it takes?
Apparently it does. Here’s a link to the show.
The question came in the car when the guy on the radio said “It’s a metaphor but it is more than a metaphor.” My son reacting with a what the heck does that mean? It’s a metaphor, not more than one! But it made me think about what the definition of an infectious agent is, or should be.
I won’t go as far as taking a side on the definition part. But Mass Psychogenic Illness, or Mass Hysteria, or whatever you want to call it, seems to be spread as if behavior were an infection.
Sounds like a variant on “memes.” Yeah, to some small degree, ideas act kind of like living organisms, infecting us, transferring to other minds via vectors (speech, writing,) mutating, competing for resources…
It isn’t a total dead-end of a model. It just isn’t as useful as the standard model of sociological spread of ideas, information, and values. The phrase “copy-cat murder” is, I think, more accurate than the phrase “the murder germ.” We’re social animals by instinct; if one guy does something, that makes it more likely that people nearby, people in similar circumstances, people of similar mental character, might ape the act and do it also. As a real, formal, “scientific” explanation, it’s stronger.
“The murder germ” is only a metaphor. I don’t think it can fairly be said to be “more than a metaphor.”
(But, I’m literally talking through my hat. No, really. Literally. You’d have to be here to see, but, really.)