Construct · 5 fields · 6 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
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Contagion in epidemiology is the passing of an infectious agent from host to host, and the rate at which an outbreak grows or fades. Kermack and McKendrick's 1927 compartmental model splits a population into susceptible, infectious, and removed groups and tracks how many people move between them over time; whether an epidemic takes off turns on a threshold later formalised as the basic reproduction number. The referent is a pathogen moving through a population and the unit is a case count over time. What marks this meaning is that the thing transmitted is a physical agent and the mechanism is biological infection, not imitation, sentiment, or a price signal.[1]
Emotional contagion is the tendency to automatically mimic another person's expressions, posture, and voice and, through that mimicry, to drift toward their emotional state. Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson described it in 1993 as a largely unconscious, moment-to-moment process that runs beneath deliberate empathy. The referent is one person's feeling shifting toward another's, and the unit is a change in affect, treated as a disposition by Doherty's Emotional Contagion Scale. Unlike the epidemiological meaning, nothing physical passes between people; what spreads is a mood, and the mechanism is mimicry rather than infection.[2][3]
Financial contagion is a rise in the transmission of shocks across countries or markets beyond what their ordinary linkages would predict. Forbes and Rigobon argued in 2002 that many claimed episodes were really interdependence: once correlation estimates are corrected for the higher volatility of a crisis period, the apparent jump in cross-market co-movement largely disappears, so contagion should mean a genuine increase in linkage rather than mere co-movement during a crash. The referent is a shock crossing between markets and the unit is a change in cross-market correlation. Here nothing is infected and no one catches a feeling; what moves is a price disturbance, and the dispute is a statistical one about how to measure it.[4]
Social contagion is the spread of a behaviour or state through a network of social ties, as if the behaviour itself were catching. Christakis and Fowler reported in 2007 that a person's chance of becoming obese rose when a friend became obese, and that the association reached across up to three degrees of separation in a long-running social network. The referent is a behaviour or trait travelling along friendship links, and the unit is a change in one person's outcome given a connected person's. It borrows the epidemiological metaphor, but the thing transmitted is not a pathogen; it is a norm or habit, and whether ties truly cause the spread, rather than homophily or shared surroundings, is contested.[5]
In anthropology of religion, contagion refers to contagious magic, Frazer's principle that things once in contact go on acting on each other after they are separated. This meaning comes from Frazer (1922) in The Golden Bough.[6]
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