Would you believe it if someone told you that divorce is contagious? According to researchers, couples are much more likely to get a divorce if their friends split up.
The study, led by James Fowler of University of California, San Diego, Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University, and Rose McDermott of Brown University, revealed staggering numbers in terms of divorce and its contagious aspects.
PsychologyToday.com has more on the study:
These researchers determined that that when close friends break-up, the odds of a marital split increase by 75%. They also found that people who have divorced friends in their larger social circles are 147% more likely to get a divorce than people who have friends still married. People with divorced siblings are 22% more likely to divorce. The study even revealed the contagion of divorce among co-workers could be as much as 55% in small companies.
The technical term they coined to describe this phenomenon is called, "divorce clustering."Taken at face value, these statistics certainly vie on the worst fears of many in this culture who suspected that divorce may be much like the flu with germs that are easily transmitted.
However, Susan Pease Gadoua of PsychologyToday.com doesn't buy into the idea that divorce can be contagious. Gadoua calls that the idea of divorce being contagious "is insulting."
