What it takes to make courage contagious

Boston Globe

25-04-2025

In the next few days, what looked like a solitary stand became a galvanizing one, a boulder shift that started a landslide.
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One by one, other schools announced their intent to follow Harvard's lead. 'Princeton stands with Harvard,' university president Christopher Eisgruber declared on social media. Several Big Ten schools were working together to form a '
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Harvard's audacity, it appears, triggered an epidemic of courage that continues to spread. 'You can think of that as high-level social contagion,' says Ronald Riggio, an organizational psychologist and leadership scholar at Claremont McKenna College. What happened in Cambridge, Riggio explains, led other school leaders to think:
Harvard's done it, so it's OK for us to follow suit
.
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Social contagion has plenty of negative associations, some of which are deserved. It's hard to forget how the
But the dynamics of social contagion are actually more complex than that, and they run in positive directions as well as negative ones.
Emotional contagion — say, laughing along with hundreds of other audience members or tearing up alongside a devastated friend — is a largely unconscious response, arising in part from primitive regions of the brain.
Behavioral contagion tends to involve more conscious thought, Riggio says, because it requires a deliberate choice to emulate what someone else is doing. The degree of conscious thought varies; teens who popped detergent pods down their throats weren't spending much time weighing the merits. Decisions widely understood as costly, like taking a moral stand, generate more conscious wrestling as people weigh the potential fallout of their actions.
Social influence plays a crucial role at these fraught decision points. After Cambridge-based whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers — which showed that US officials hid Vietnam War operations from the public — he said that encounters with war resisters, including fellow Harvard alum Randy Kehler, helped convince him to release the papers. Ellsberg
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In moments like this, emotional contagion helps drive behavioral uptake. Moved by what Kehler was putting on the line, Ellsberg realized he, too, was willing to risk prison — and resolved to tell Americans what he knew.
This kind of thoughtful contagion is now taking hold not just at universities but in the halls of Congress. When Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland traveled to El Salvador last week to check on the welfare of his wrongfully imprisoned constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he supplied a permission structure and a practical road map for other lawmakers. 'In ambiguous situations,' Riggio says, 'we look to the behavior of others to guide us.'
After Van Hollen's trip, Senator Cory Booker and
'When one person helps in a situation, others follow,' says Ervin Staub, an emeritus psychology professor and altruism scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 'Not always, but often.'
Prominent figures who step up first, like Van Hollen and Kehler, have outsized power to ignite courageous social contagion. In the infamous Milgram experiments, when leaders told 'teacher' participants to electrically shock 'learners' who got questions wrong, teachers were
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A kind of
For those looking to deploy social contagion to virtuous effect — whether college presidents, lawmakers, or activists — recent research offers some tactical counsel. In social simulations, some behaviors that seem uncomfortable must be
In addition, when you take a courageous stand, it pays to be clear about what actions you'd like others to take. It's important, in other words, to 'not only look at the problematic things,' Staub says, 'but look at how we can address these problematic things.' If you've just paid a visit to an innocent person in detention, describe a specific step others can take to support their own threatened neighbors. The more clear-cut your suggested action, the more it may invite mimicry, as in the
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Though courage is prone to spread overnight under the right conditions, personal and collective bravery require stubborn long-term commitment. The Trump administration has already
But even an initial stand has lasting behavioral resonance. As a courageous stance spreads to others, it also tends to stick to the initiator. 'If you publicly declare your intention,' Riggio says, 'it's more likely that you're going to follow through,' since backing out would feel like a public betrayal. Social obligation, then, not only drives the contagion of courage — it steadies and sustains those who got the transmission going.