Here’s one reason why people are fighting on planes so much – New York Post

Unless youre in Business or First Class then flying is usually a stressful experience, but it seems like tempers have been running higher than usual over the past few months.

While some have blamed airline cost-cutting for frayed tempers and in some cases all-out brawls, others are laying the blame at another door social media.

A new article published by Quartz has linked the recent increase in fights on planes to the psychological phenomenon called behavior contagion.

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

The theory is that people behave worse once they have seen somebody else commit the same antisocial activity.

By witnessing the first person doing it, it then 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 get affected by behavior contagion.

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

He said: 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.

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 airplane brawl is shared on social media, certain viewers becomes 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 after a brawl broke out between a number of passengers that saw an elderly woman hit in the head and a stewardess slapped.

Then in February, two passengers claiming to be lawyers became embroiled in a heated argument over an armreston a Monarch Airways flight from the UK to Malaga in Spain.

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 traveler at Tokyos Narita Airport.

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Here's one reason why people are fighting on planes so much - New York Post