Contagious behavior

Musings over voluntary compliance

I was reading a very interesting article in a science magazine about some ideas a group of researches are trying to prove: To some extent, behavior can be contagious, and for some things, wild viral contagious. This is not a twenty first century re-imagination of that old conventional wisdom saying: tell me whom do you get along with and I will tell you who you are. This is a mathematical model that means a bunch of equations that will determine that the larger the number of friends and acquaintances you have that are overweight the higher the probability you will gain weight.

I was wondering: if that is true then taking someone to purposely catch a virus will also work? Our old grandmothers tended to do that with their small children to get them, for example, infected with a chickenpox virus to be sure they got it young when problems are rare. Could it be used in such a way that by just getting involved with healthy people that exercise frequently and stay away from bad habits and fast food, somehow let you loose a couple of pounds, buy a subscription to the best equipped gym in town and change the contents of your refrigerator: less yesterday’s pizza and more fresh broccoli? Well, according to these researches(1) it can.

Even more, the causality effect might be such that if a friend´s friend that you do not know is obese you might end up gaining a few pounds. Indeed, cooperative behavior seems to act in the same way. Kindness and good deeds could be as contagious as bad things. (2)Crossing over red lights at night might become very common in some cities. The causality effect in these things is disputed by other researches and my own reluctance to cross over red lights while I lived in Caracas might be better classified as stubbornness than immunity but I cannot avoid thinking on weather tax evasion, or voluntary tax-compliance for that matter, could be also as contagious and if so, how that can be used for Tax Administration purposes and the so-called Tax Mobilization.

A few readings might help, “Lifting the veil of ignorance:  An experiment on the contagiousness of norm violations”,  “Catching Happiness: Christakis and Fowler and the Social Contagion of Behaviors”, “You and Your Friend’s Friend’s Friends”, and certainly “Entendiendo la moral tributaria en Ecuador”  (3)a paper  by the Ecuadorean Tax Administration, (4) presented by Byron Vázconez in the 45^th General Assembly of CIAT in Quito Ecuador where a couple of questions regarding “contagious behavior” or how the compliance patterns of others affect your own.

Good day and good luck.