In our slideshow this fall of social factors that make you fat, DISCOVER mentioned research from 2007 that gathered data from the famous Framingham Heart Study, which has been tracking people in the Massachusetts town since 1948, to show that having overweight friends made people more likely to put on the pounds. Now, another study, this time published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, uses the same Framingham data to suggest that loneliness is actually contagious.

But how could the feeling of social isolation be socially contagious? The federally funded analysis of data collected from more than 4,000 people over 10 years found that lonely people increase the chances that someone they know will start to feel alone, and that the solitary feeling can spread one more degree of separation, causing a friend of a friend or even the sibling of a friend to feel desolate [Washington Post]. Friends of lonely people were 52 percent more likely to develop lonely feelings, the researchers say, and a friend of that person was 25 percent more likely.

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Yawning is contagious. So too, it seems, are being fat, being sad, and a host of other things that we social creatures tend to pick up from each other. In a study published this week in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, scientists picked out one more trait that could be contagious among connected people: making bad business decisions.

Researchers had already confirmed that people have a hard time letting go of their own bad investments. For example, someone who buys a lemon of a car or a dilapidated house will, instead of owning up that it was a mistake and cutting their losses, continue to commit to the project and pour more money, effort and emotions into it [Los Angeles Times]. The key finding in this study, however, was that this bad business psychology can spread to others.

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