Is Divorce Contagious?
Divorce may be a social contagion that can spread through friends, family and even coworkers, according to a recent study by James Fowler, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, that was posted on CNN.com.
The preliminary findings of the study, which had fellow researchers from Harvard and Brown Universities, indicates that your decision to divorce can sway your friends into divorce as well.
Fowler describes divorce as similar to the flu: “You get a virus and you’re more likely to spread the symptoms to someone else. This is not just true for a virus. This is true for a lot of social behaviors.”
As evidence, Fowler cites a statistic that states that people who had a divorced friend were 147 percent more likely to divorce than people who didn’t have any divorced friends. Even just having a co-worker who divorced increases a person’s likelihood by 55 percent.
Children were capable of making people less susceptible to being influenced into divorcing, according to Fowler’s study.
Fowler follows his disease analogy by saying that “some people can be a carrier of the disease without actually exhibiting the symptoms. They can carry a virus, but they might not get a fever or a cough.”
Fowler illustrated how this divorce “disease carrying” might work by describing how it could work in real life. The article describes this process with an example: “a divorcing person confides in a married friend. The married friend doesn’t opt for divorce, but relays details of the divorce discussion to a third person, influencing that third person in the chain to get a divorce.”
Fowler does caution that the study is not very large, containing only 5,000 data points.
The article uses Fowler’s research to seek insight into the marital difficulties that are plaguing the Gore family.
Recently, former Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper announced, much to the nations surprise, that their marriage of 40 years was ending in divorce.
Shortly after this announcement, Karenna Gore Schiff, the couples eldest daughter, announced that she is separating from her husband after 13 years of marriage.
Gore Schiff is a graduate of Harvard and Columbia Law School has three children with Dr. Andrew Schiff. The children would seemingly dilute the effect of the divorce contagion, according to Fowler’s research.
Whether or not the separation of Karenna Gore Schiff and Dr. Andrew Schiff was in any way related to the divorce of Al and Tipper Gore is too difficult to conclude. Fowler has additional research to do in order to solidify his theory. The implications of Fowler’s research are not immediately apparent, but the idea of divorce catching like a cold is a frightening notion. As more research is done, it will be interesting to watch and see what comes out of it.
