American Arrested After Airplane Brawl in Tokyo – NEWS.com.au

An American flying out of Tokyo had a really bad day after he was arrested and kicked off a flight. Credit: Corey Hour via Storyful

Police intervene in an attack on board a taxiing plane in China. Picture: weibo.com/Doo-voo

FLYING can be a stressful experience but lately it seems that tempers have been running much higher than usual.

Brawls and spats between passengers seem to be happening more often than usual, and while some people have blamed cost-cutting at airlines for frayed tempers, others are laying blame at another door: social media.

A new article on Quartz has linked the increase in fights on planes to the psychological phenomenon called behaviour contagion, The Sun reports.

Behaviour contagion was first coined in the late 1800s by the academic Gustave Le Bon, who used it to describe the bad behaviour people displayed when they were in a crowd.

In-cabin brawls are frequently captured on camera and uploaded to social media.Source:Supplied

The theory goes that peoples behaviour worsens after seeing someone else display anti-social behaviour. By witnessing the first person doing it, the behaviour seems less offensive to the second person and they follow suit.

But thanks to smartphones and the internet, people no longer have to be in a crowd to be affected by behaviour contagion they can watch it all unfold on social media.

In a paper by Paul Marsden of Stanford University called Memetics & Social Contagion, the writer addresses the ease with which behaviour contagion can travel.

Recent research has unequivocally established the fact of the social contagion phenomenon, and has identified its operation in a number of areas of social life, he said.

An American traveller was charged with assault after an incident on an All Nippon Airways flight at Tokyos Narita Airport in May. Picture: Twitter/KeemSource:Supplied

The implications of this social contagion research are radical: the evidence suggests that under certain circumstances, mere touch or contact with culture appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur.

So every time footage of an aeroplane brawl is shared on social media, certain viewers become less offended by the actions and more likely to imitate them.

For instance, last November a Ryanair flight from Brussels to Malta was forced to land in Pisa, Italy, after a passenger brawl that saw an elderly woman hit in the head and a flight attendant slapped.

Then in February, two passengers claiming to be lawyers became embroiled in a heated argument over an armrest on a Monarch Airways flight from London Gatwick to Malaga in Spain.

Police intervene in an attack on board a taxiing plane in China. Picture: weibo.com/Doo-vooSource:Supplied

And just this month, two men were filmed throwing punches at each other on a Japanese plane ending in the arrest of a boozed-up American traveller at Tokyos Narita Airport.

The same week, two travellers brawled in the aisle of a Southwest Airlines flight after their plane touched down in California.

Whether social media is in part to blame has yet to be proven, but all of these incidents were widely shared on the internet.

So now theres yet another reason to lay off the social media on holiday: it could help curb the air rage on the way home.

This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission.

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American Arrested After Airplane Brawl in Tokyo - NEWS.com.au