Samurais and Emotional Contagion · Blog

Legend has it that Miyamoto Musashi killed one of his adversaries after carving a wooden sword. With the wood from the oar of the boat he sailed to the beach where the duel was taking place.

But Musashi's story begins many years before and his legacy remains to this day. Some of his teachings were 400 years ahead of discoveries in the fields of sociology and neurology.

Want to know how?

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Japan, year 1596, at the edge of the 17th century. In Hirafuku, a small rural village located west of Kyoto, life was peaceful and tranquil.

Until the arrival of a samurai named Arima Kihei.

Kihei was a master of the Shinto Ryu warrior school. He traveled throughout Japan seeking opponents to duel with, something very common in that era. For samurais it was a way to improve their sword skills... and gain fame.

After a few victories, Kihei was intoxicated by a thirst for power that he couldn't quench with sake. His body craved blood, that of an opponent, and his mind wealth, that of the shogun.

So he hangs a sign on the main street of the village, publicly challenging anyone who wanted to face him in a duel.

Meanwhile, a young martial arts student was walking home after his calligraphy class. Upon passing in front of Kihei's provocative sign, he doesn't hesitate to draw his brush. The ink, still fresh, slides firm but sinuous across the paper, and he writes:

"Miyamoto Musashi will fight you tomorrow."

Dawn comes quickly and the townspeople, eager to break from routine, begin gathering in the street with the first rays of sun.

The combat is about to begin.

Musashi, with a humble wooden sword on one side. Kihei with a short sword, a wakizashi, on the other.

But Musashi's uncle, named Dorin, enters the scene. Desperate to protect his young nephew, he asks them to stop the duel.

Faced with this, Kihei, haughty and arrogant, says the only way to recover his honor is for Musashi to kneel and apologize.

Dorin throws himself to the ground, pleading, but Musashi, unmoved, lunges at Kihei with his wooden sword, throwing him to the ground. The samurai desperately tries to defend himself with his wakizashi but receives a blow between the eyes. And another, and another, and another... until death.

The legend of Miyamoto Musashi, only 13 years old, was just beginning.

"I have trained in the way of strategy since my youth, and at the age of thirteen I fought a duel for the first time. My opponent was called Arima Kihei, a sword adept of the Shinto ryū, and I defeated him. At the age of sixteen I defeated a powerful adept by the name of Tadashima Akiyama, who came from Tajima Province. At the age of twenty-one I went up to Kyōtō and fought duels with several adepts of the sword from famous schools, but I never lost."

— Miyamoto Musashi, Go Rin No Sho

In total he would face about 60 warriors in duels, emerging victorious from all of them. He would also participate in numerous wars. Little by little he gains recognition and fame that would transcend the military. Over the years he would end up rubbing shoulders with intellectuals and artists, becoming one of them.

It's toward the end of his life when he decides to compile part of his knowledge in the Book of Five Rings (Go rin no sho). This way, once dead, his disciples could continue deepening their learning of what he calls The Way.

His teachings don't aim to forge a warrior specialized in one type of weapon, technique or style. He considered those to be limitations that only served to advertise fencing schools.

For him what was really important was becoming a relentless and multidisciplinary warrior with a single objective: to win in combat.

He leaves these thoughts in writing in the scrolls that form the book of the 5 rings: the manuscript of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind and Void.

Each deals with a specific topic, from the most practical like sword techniques to the most abstract like mental states:

"Water adapts to the form, whether angular or round, of its container, and can become a drop or a sea."

These words seem to have powerfully influenced Bruce Lee.

"Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like Water. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend."

Curiously, it's in the Fire Manuscript where he doesn't deal with sword techniques, but psychological ones...

and emotional ones.

"Attracting your adversary

Being attracted is something common to all things. Being sleepy is contagious, and yawns and similar things are too. And time is contagious. In large-scale martial situations, when your opponents appear nervous and agitated, you should give the appearance of not being affected at all by it, and move with even greater tranquility. Your opponents will then be influenced by your actions and then show signs of relaxation. When you believe they have fallen for this, attack them quickly and vigorously from the mind of emptiness and you will obtain victory.

Even in individual-scale martial situations, if you act slowly with your body and your mind, and then take advantage of the moment when your opponent has relaxed, you can take the initiative strongly and quickly, and defeat him. This point is important.

Furthermore, there is something that reflects this and is called 'intoxicating them.' Others are attitudes of boredom, nervousness and weakening. You should practice this assiduously."

Musashi understood that his opponents reflected his emotions: emotional contagion occurred through a process of mimesis.

Emotional contagion is part of what is currently called "social contagion": the spontaneous transmission of behaviors, emotions and even ideas. And this process doesn't only occur face-to-face in physical spaces, like a cinema. But it also happens in digital spaces, like a social network or a video conference.

The term "social contagion" was first used in 1939 by Herbert Blumer in a document about collective behavior where he cited as an example a medieval event: choreomania, popularly called, St. Vitus's dance. As its name indicates, it consists of many people dancing, non-stop. Until exhaustion.

Like the Mevlevi or Whirling Dervishes in the Sama ceremony.

In 1993 psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson theorize about emotional contagion as a two-step process:

First, we unconsciously imitate the other person. If someone smiles at you, you return a smile, if someone claps in an auditorium, other people will join that applause.

Then, our emotional memory makes us adapt to the non-verbal signals we have replicated. For example, smiling makes us relax the muscles in our face, so when we do it, our brain understands that we're having a moment of joy and interprets that emotion as something real.

As Don Norman says in his book Emotional Design:

"Emotions are judgmental, and prepare the body accordingly."

This mimesis process makes us end up emotionally synchronizing.

And perhaps neurology has the explanation.

It was in the 80s and 90s, when a group of neurologists at the University of Parma discovered in monkeys and birds the existence of a specific type of neurons: mirror neurons. Which are activated when these animals copy the behavior they see in others of their species. However, the role that mirror neurons play in human behavior is still not clear. They are believed to be fundamental in understanding other people's intentions, that they function as facilitators of learning and language comprehension... and that empathy also resides in them.

These studies seem to confirm what philosopher David Hume already intuited about empathy in the 18th century:

"The minds of men are mirrors to one another."

Social contagion has several ways of spreading.

There's the disinhibitory type, like what occurs when a person is predisposed to join an emotion, behavior or idea but hadn't done so before to avoid transgressing social norms. Like when someone lights a cigarette in a nightclub after seeing several people smoking.

Other times it works like an echo: the person spontaneously imitates someone or a group to converge. Someone who claps at an event after seeing others do it.

There's also hysterical contagion, which is what occurs when we let ourselves be carried away by an emotion that we don't find desirable or attractive, but we find ourselves inevitably dragged into it. In the business environment this type is especially harmful. Who doesn't know the case of a toxic person who drags down the rest of their colleagues?

Within these types it's also important to distinguish the level of exposure the subject needs to become infected. There are more spontaneous and direct emotions and others that require habit or repetition to anchor themselves in the person.

In a way it's like radio format: you get listeners to like a song by repeating it over and over again.

But social contagion isn't limited only to apparently basic emotions or behaviors, but its reach is much broader.

Richard Dawkins, publishes The Selfish Gene in 1976, in which he mentions the word meme for the first time.

Dawkins proposes that a meme is an idea or behavior that spreads by mimesis between individuals, reaching to extend between populations and even countries. The meme becomes a fundamental piece in spreading the culture of a population. And, the more infectious the meme is, the greater the cultural influence exerted on other populations.

Therefore, social contagion isn't limited to something as simple as replicating a smile or applause. But it's a fundamental component of our cultural evolution.

And another fundamental component of our cultural evolution is the Internet, which has become the heart of much of our social interactions. How does contagion occur in the digital realm?

Nathan Hodas and Kristina Lerman from the California Institute of Information Sciences study these processes the same way as a physical disease:

"Each exposure of a healthy person to an infected friend creates a possibility that information will be transmitted. Therefore, the probability that a healthy individual becomes infected increases with the number of exposures they experience, causing a global pandemic involving a substantial fraction of the population."

"However, surprisingly, when measuring how people respond to their friends' use of certain memes or news article recommendations, repeated exposure initially increases the probability of infection, but eventually the high level of reiteration ends up having an inhibitory effect."

"In a complex form of contagion, the probability of adopting a behavior, or an idea, varies with the degree of exposure, suggesting that social phenomena can drive response and interact non-trivially with network structure."

They then propose that, logically, the greater the exposure, the more possibility of becoming infected. Therefore, users who are connected the longest will become infected first, becoming the main transmission vectors. As long as the saturation point isn't reached, where a kind of emotional antibodies would be generated.

Similar to when the news repeats a story constantly and we end up becoming anesthetized and insensitive to it.

Hodas and Lerman also propose important and surprising differences between disease transmission and social contagion in virtual environments.

In the physical world, people with more contacts are more likely to contract a disease. However, in the virtual world, a person is exposed to an enormous amount of information from multiple sources (friends, Instagram profiles, TikTok, etc.). In this context of information overload, users who connect the most are less likely to focus their attention on specific information and, therefore, need stronger signals to become infected.

That is, in a user with information overdose, an idea will need many more repetitions for contagion to occur.

Hodas and Lerman also suggest that actions like browsing a website or reading tweets consume energy and attention capacity. This reduces our cognitive capabilities, so we tend to prioritize what produces a social response.

Therefore, cognitive load limits the way we exchange ideas and emotions in digital environments.

In their own words:

"Social contagion will depend largely on explicit social feedback and user interface."

That is, by designing an interface with lower cognitive load and controlled social feedback we will allow the user to dedicate more energy to becoming infected with the information received.

As Miyamoto Musashi would say:

"This must be investigated carefully."

References:

Don Norman – Emotional Design (Amazon)

The Book of the 5 Rings (Amazon)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_contagion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contagion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Blumer

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreoman%C3%ADa