APISC Exploration: Social Contagion and Psychic Epidemics

Looking at the Natural Phenomenon of Group Coherence, the Trans Explosion, and Understanding its Potential for Destructiveness

By Shannon Douglas Boschy - Executive Director, APISC Digital Research Foundation

We have no reason to take this threat lightly. Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population.

The mass crushes out the insights and reflections that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional state should succumb to a fit of weakness.

Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain degree. If the affective temperature rises about this level, the possibility of reason having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.

C.G. Jung - The Undiscovered Self - Chapter 1 - 1957

APISC Digital Research Foundation Inc. is a Canadian Non-Profit created to advance the understanding of known and unknown socially mediated harms to children and teenagers due to internet usage and online social media influence. APISC stands for Adolescent Peer Influence and Social Contagion. 

Our foundation is a response to serious questions and concerns about the startling rise in the number of children and teens identifying as transgender who are undertaking medical interventions that have unknown long-term medical risks and irreversible outcomes

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It is important to clearly define the terms at the beginning of any adventure so that objectives are clear and language is understood. This is particularly challenging within the postmodern environment where language-vandals play a deliberate word game known within progressive culture as queering, which is the deliberate undermining and deconstruction of language related to sex and gender.

To that end, it is important to clarify two questions for which our foundation is named: What is Peer Influence? and; What is Social Contagion? My argument is that both of these things are natural processes that are easily understood, and far more common that we even realize, but when we’re talking about the social contagion of transgenderism, or eating disorders, or suicide, or TikTok Tic’s, which are all destructive social contagions, we may find that they are insufficient to describe the current zeitgeist.

We might better use the term mass hysteria, mass psychogenic illness, or even mass psychosis to speak more clearly about this, though these description garner criticism and even dismissal. The mechanisms of pushback from institutions who defend the metaphysical ideology of transness with totalitarian fervor, are ironically systemic, instantiated in policies at all levels of government and corporate customs, and until recently the activists controlling these systems have been impervious to question, and aggressive in their responses to criticism.

In this light, I argue that the difference between a social contagion and a destructive mass movement is scale; like the difference between a seasonal flu that some people get, and a pandemic that is everywhere affecting everyone.

Abigail Shrier defined “Craze,” in her preface to Irreversible Damage as a type of trend or social fad. Hula-Hoops were a craze, and so was “The Floss” dance that all the kids did for a while, but this is insufficient to describe what’s happening. If the ultimate goal of our research is to inform public policy to protect children and teens from online harms, we must be prepared to speak words that accurately describe the issue backed by the hard data we aim to produce. The reality is that no-matter what we say as critics of trans ideology we will be attacked by activists, so we might as well speak plainly. We do this in the name of educating and protecting vulnerable children from undue influence and manipulation. As a society this is part of our family and community obligation to the wellbeing of the next generation and it is well within the mandate of our social institutions.

We have all heard the expression, “If someone told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” If you’re like me you heard it from your parents when you were a tween and I still remember the warnings in my high school years about not caving to peer pressure. This was once part of education and the function of public institutions, (like schools and media) to provide. Saturday morning cartoons and after school specials told us to resist things like the dares and the goadings others, in favor of developing character and heroic integrity. Our schools and public institutions once fostered a protective ethos and a vocabulary of simple narratives for us. They held us within a protective embrace, within a coherent linguistic field of myth-like mantras until we grew up. They provided boundaries, and drilled it into us: “Just Say No.”

We know commonly today that the last parts of our brains to develop, our frontal lobes, don’t fully mature until we’re in our mid, or even late twenties. These are the parts of our brains that provides us with executive function. It is not until we develop fully that we have true agency and the capacity to reason within the field of time; to understand how our actions have consequences and how our choices have power to shape our futures.

Our once-common institutional narratives were about resisting negative peer influence and coercion, but we were also educated to resist manipulation and predation by knowing that when an adult tells us to keep secrets, we should speak up, and when a someone we don’t know tries to lure us with flattery, or puppies or candies, we may be facing stranger-danger; but today the corporate world flatters the likes of Jeffrey Marsh with media contracts, while he tells children online that if their parents don’t love them, he will love them in his private digital spaces. Our common literacy in self-protection and resistance to dangerous social and peer influence was once much stronger than it is today, when Mr. Marsh is widely defended as an icon of inclusion.

We all know this is dangerous social influence sponsored by a Fortune 500 company that seems to be normalizing in the name of Equity and the gender religion, which brings us to the question about the nature of social contagion and what, if any connections are there to the rising numbers of children claiming to be born in the wrong body and seeking medicalization.

The difference between Peer Influence and Social Contagion is the difference between conscious and unconscious influences. Conscious influence is the act of one person or a group attempting to change the behavior of others, along with a conscious choice to participate. Unconscious influences, what we call Social Contagions, travel by less obvious mechanisms, engaging perhaps instinct-level functions including social mirroring, mimicry and imitation. Infants mirror facial expressions and language. Young children naturally imitate the behavior those around them; they commonly repeat words obsessively to themselves or out loud (Echolalia) in key phases of language acquisition. We naturally pick up language, behavior and even emotions around us unconsciously through social influence and through a predisposition to acquire culture as we grow. We are hard-wired and biologically predisposed to this.

Yawning is a social contagion that is well studied in psychology but the big questions in this area are not whether social contagion exists; they are, “who is susceptible to social contagions?” and, “What makes them so?” Researchers are actively looking at human capacity for empathy as a significant factor in understanding what makes people susceptible to simple contagions, like yawning so that we can understand more about complex harmful contagions like cutting and suicide.

Increasingly we hear about what is called the mirror neuron system. Researchers have found a hand-in-glove relationship between psychological theories about empathy and contagion, with measurable physical responses in our brains discovered in neuroscience experiments and FMRI studies. We know that we unconsciously mimic the states and feelings others. We know that we respond to the emotions around us at a neurological level, at the level of our brain chemistry; and we know that some of us have more active mirror-neuron systems than others. In simple terms, empathy has biological and physiological components and like in theories of hypnosis, which operates with the same theory if influence, that some people are simply more suggestible than others.

We can think about this mirror neuron phenomenon of contagious yawning as part of a process of collective or group settling, where everyone in a family (or even in a pack of animals) settles to a resting state, mirroring each other’s states in a complex dance. I used to put my children to sleep like this, consciously slowing my breathing, lowering my voice, slowing my pace and state and the allowing myself to yawn naturally; and we can also see mirror-neuron contagion as part of a contagious process of waking up that researchers call arousal.

When we read the word arousal we might immediately think of sexual arousal, but what we refer to more broadly is the elevation of physiological and emotional state. Joy, awe, excitement and outrage are all highly contagious. We know this from research not done specifically in neuroscience and medicine, but in the marketing and advertising industry. A quick Google reveals that the global ad spend in 2021 in the marketing and advertising industries was nearly $800 billion dollars, but the real total is likely several trillion.  There is a tremendous amount at stake in the business world and the billion-dollar question in marketing industry is, “how do we MAKE things contagious?”

Author Jonah Berger was already writing about what drives viral sharing online in his 2013 book, “Contagious, Why Things Catch On.” He tells us that evolving research on what I’ll call the infectiousness of online contagion, showed them that content that generated awe, deep curiosity and wonder were highly shared. Many of us know that puzzles can be addictive and so are questions about mysterious things. Awe, he says, is “the experience of confronting something greater than yourself, it expands one’s frame of reference and drives self-transcendence, it encompasses admiration and inspiration and can be evoked by everything from great works of art or music to religious transformations, from breathtaking natural landscapes to human feats of daring and discovery.” (p.102 paperback edition)

A few pages later Berger says something even more interesting, “Sharing emotions also helps us connect… if I share an awe-inspiring video with a friend, he’s likely to feel similarly inspired,” which means that when we consider the impacts of social contagion, it appears that there are emotional payoffs to engaging with contagious, mysterious, awesome content to both the person who is the sharer of the emotion, and the recipient.

Originally, since Berger and his team found that posts invoking awe were widely shared, they wondered if virality was driven specifically by positive or negative emotions, but as it turns out, they discovered that it was the intensity of the emotion that determined how contagious it was, and not whether the emotion was positive or negative and the most contagious types of negative emotion include outrage, anger & resentment. These emotions are referred to by the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche (resentitment), Eric Hoffer, (disaffected frustration) and Jordan Peterson’s theories of disgust sensitivity.   

In my current work to educate Meili, the custom Artificial Intelligence we are training to spot patterns and give us insights into online contagions, human intelligence already tells us that there is something peculiar about self-harming transgenderism.  It appears that it is highly correlated with social justice activism and a complete rejection of one’s body, and also a rejection of the individual self, and a pessimistic, even nihilistic sense of the future. With natal females, it appears to include an acceptance of a revolutionary anti-social, anti-biology movement that seems to capture the gender-specific type of natural self-consciousness and self-loathing to which teenage girls are predisposed.

In his book, “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell speaks to a phenomenon he calls stickiness, which is another way of describing an influential idea or pattern of behaviour and so we see that the idea of psychic or cultural contagions has numerous different ways of being understood - but whether it’s the feedback hit of sharing information with others that Berger describes, or the stickiness of a concept or idea that Gladwell describes, or the psychological/neurological concepts of transmission mechanisms, the virus model of contagion ads something; one that not only describes the contagion process, but that describes the types of defence mechanisms that these psychic contagions appear to have.

There are widespread narratives in the trans-information bubble, that there is a genocide happening against trans people, that trans people are murdered with impunity.

The shared belief in this bubble is that hatred is evident in every disagreement, every policy debate in public institutions, every ethical boundary in medicine and every question of sincere concern from loving family. In the summer of 2022, several trans and non-binary influencers claimed that their lives were in imminent danger and this week, Rolling Stone Magazine headlines amplified claims of a trans genocide. This belief in self, and tribe as unique victim of injustice, and the need to separate oneself from family and culture is a potent combination that has fueled revolutions, social collapse and even actual genocides in history. These are examples of defence mechanisms at play that accelerate and scale social contagions scale into pathological mass movements. This happens when the the contagion is virulent, and the defence mechanisms of the mind virus are resistant to outside influence. One of these defence mechanisms, reminiscent of the fairy-tale warning about being led away to join the circus, is the tactic of alienation from other influences, the same type of alienation tactics that cults use to separate their indoctrinated members from people who might help them effectively reality-test false beliefs.

Eric Hoffer, in his 1951 book, “True Believers, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” which he wrote at a time when many were asking themselves, “how could the atrocities of Europe have happened?” noted:

It is obvious that a proselytizing mass movement must break down all existing group ties if it is to win a considerable following. The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no (other) collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask his (feelings of) the pettiness and shabbiness of his individual existence. (Setion 31)

In the case of the trans movement, ideologues exploit these feelings of alienation and victimization, to the point that public institutions insist on affirming not only a vulnerable person’s rejection of one’s own body, they support children severing their ties to their families and to healthy religious traditions.  These are the very public institutions, like public schools, which once provided structure to allay these feelings of alienation, but which today support severing psychic ties to the body itself in favor of dissociated fantasies of having a different one.

With deference to the scientists and researchers who advise APISC Digital Research, This educated conjecture belongs more at this point in the softer domains of philosophy and theories of psychology and sociology than in hard science.

Science and academic research exist to help us make sense of the world with measurable outcomes, numbers, percentages and quantifiable patterns of facts. This is why we created Meili, and why we have deployed him in digital spaces where these influences are proliferating. We want to understand the mechanisms that are sweeping up the vulnerable into a digital mass.  

Perhaps the best way to look at the contagion phenomenon though, coming back to the simple processes of interpersonal unconscious influence, is by looking at the contagious nature of yawns as an example of something I’ll call Physiological Entrainment; or a collective shared state I’ll call Group Coherence.

We can all see examples of entrainment by looking to the environment and to the animal kingdom. Even in the simple nature documentaries I grew up on, like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and “Those Amazing Animals,” packs, prides, flocks, flight animals and troops all cohere in states to respond to their environments in unison. Murders of crows settle together or enter states of anger or fear at the same time. Chimps fly into frenzies together or settle into nurture and murmur as they groom each other. Violent mobs in humans (mostly male) cohere into riots that have lives of their own. Mass movements, mass formations and mass psychosis are well-documented examples or more pervasive toxic mass coherence, but we also entrain together in aroused states of awe and excitement that involve powerfully charged emotions.

I recently went to a hockey game and our team is in a narrow contention for the play-offs. The crowd was more intense than at any game I’ve seen in years. I’m not specifically a sports fan, but I know that it is accurate to say that intense fans live vicariously through the players on the ice, or the football pitch. If you’ve ever seen a kid play video games, (or maybe you have had this experience) they will physically bob and weave while playing even though the controller in their hands is the only thing moving their avatar on the screen. Sports fan will do the same, mirroring the emotional tension of the play on the ice or the field as their player comes in to score a goal. The crowd roars or groans in unison in one coherent field of emotion.

You may have heard about a religious revival happening at a Kentucky university in the last month drawing people from all over the US to a religious entrainment of awe and wonder. These events have been documented for centuries, and perhaps sports gives us a simple outlet to allow us all to experience these shared states in mostly healthy ways, though as many people recall from the 80s and 90s, crowds of football (soccer) fans frequently erupted into riots following games, and cities where championship games of many are played in many sports now routinely prepare for crowd control. 

In nature, forests are predisposed to burn, but this only happens when there is an intersection of conditions: time of year, age of timber, moisture in the brush and a stretch of weather adding stress. All that is needed is a lightning strike, or a match, or even a simple spark.

We know from the recent global phenomenon of TikTik Tics, connected to high rates of pandemic-related anxiety and internet use where thousands of girls presented to therapists and psychiatrists with Tourette-like symptoms, and from thousands of documented cases of bizarre and destructive hysterias affecting mostly teen girls, that teen girls are tinderbox for strange contagions and mass psychosis. There are those that argue that teenage girls are especially vulnerable to social contagions, but it may be fairer to say that teenage girls are vulnerable to more peculiar contagions than others. Groups of men in some instances suddenly riot in the streets; girls in groups succumb to laughing sickness, dancing hysterias, and collective urges to cut, to binge, to purge and to starve.

In the case of our children, who appear to be possessed with the idea that they are born in the wrong body, who are rejecting their fertility and womanhood in a self-loathing that leads them to the conclusion that they don’t want to be, or they can’t possibly be women, we would like to understand the social influences and signals within the new digital social ecology, that has led to the explosion of transgenderism.

We already know from studies that our girls are experiencing higher rates of anxiety, depression and mental health issues since the birth of the smartphone than at any time we can remember; and that all these dynamics, like the combined factors that lead to forest fires or football riots influence destructive social contagions. What we don’t understand are the contours of this environment in digital space, the communication signals within it, and to what degree the influences leading girls to these self-destructive states of coherence with others are consciously or unconsciously spread. We don’t even really understand whether the locus of influence is rooted in the digital domain at all, or if this is a combination of multi-dimensional influences in education, medicine, with friends and in online forums.

Social Contagions and shared states can be calm, and they can be frenzied, neurotic, violent and destructive, but we are not helpless when confronted with toxic contagions. We know that there are things that can make them better, and things that can make them worse, which is part of the reason hospitals and clinics never bunk anorexics in the same room. Modern understanding in the sciences of human communication tells us that when people are in a state of trust with each other they can influence each other positively and have truly transformative impacts. This can happen when we slow our own breathing and lower our voices when putting our kids to sleep, and it can happen when our institutions are informed with policies that help to check the natural impulse of teen boys to take risks, and the natural impulse of girls to obsess in self-consciousness, which according to psychologist Jordan Peterson, backed by established and accepted literature, is indistinguishable from anxiety and depression.

It’s possible we may be able to use the science of influence to change the state of what appears to be a mass movement that is connected, cohering and mediated in digital space. Understanding this destructive entrainment affecting so many is the first step to giving our children the tools and the messages to protect them. We need to inform policies, people and the public institutions that may in fact be fueling this natural disaster with good intentions.

My hope, consistent with the thoughts of Eric Hoffer in his postwar analysis, is that like the example in nature of the forest fire, that we are germinating the seeds of the new forest in the midst of the whirling fire itself.