Two articles published in Slate this month talk about the number of studies on the recent outbreak of social contagion studies.
"In SAs Fowler told Stephen Colbert in a January interview, the research suggests that people don't really make individual decisions at all but, instead, function as part of a "human superorganism"—like a herd of buffalo or a flock of birds.
... Yet the social contagionists appear to have statistical problems of their own. Russell Lyons says he has identified numerous logical flaws in each of the Framingham studies on contagious obesity, smoking, happiness, and loneliness—flaws that appear to undermine seriously the authors' arguments for contagious transmission. He has compiled his criticisms in a new paper, now under review, entitled, "The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social-Network Analysis."
Worth a read!
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