Malcolm Gladwell talks about this phenomenon in his book: "The Tipping Point". He calls it the 'stickiness factor'. He analyzes the phenomenon where children

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this phenomenon in his book: "The Tipping Point". He calls it the 'stickiness factor'. He analyzes the phenomenon where children begin taking drugs even when they fully understand that it greatly harms them. Teenagers are inherently, perhaps even genetically predisposed to imitate others and try on new behaviors and attitudes during adolescence. Second, the types of the people who are more likely to engage in dramatic, easily romanticized behavior such as early cigarette smoking or suicide are also more likely to be those that others tend to gravitate toward and seek to emulate. When Portugal legalized all drugs, they greatly lowered the 'Stickiness Factor' for those drugs. http://www.wikisummaries.org/The_Tipping_Point#Chapter_7:_Case_Study:_Suicide.2C_Smoking.2C_and_the_Search_for_the_Unsticky_Cigarette http://www.wikisummaries.org/The_Tipping_Point#Chapter_7:_Ca...