“Violent acts tend to cluster through social networks, and they spread like a contagious disease spreads from one person to another,” the study’s senior author Brad Bushman said in a phone interview.
A psychology and communications professor at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Bushman analyzed interviews from the 1990s with nearly 6,000 American students in grades seven through twelve.
Compared to students whose friends had never hurt anyone, kids with a friend who had badly hurt someone were themselves 183 percent more likely to report having badly hurt someone, too, the report in the American Journal of . . .
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