https://faunalytics.org/what-vegan-advocates-can-learn-from-the-social-spread-of-quitting-smoking/

Anyone who has been vegan for a while has likely seen how their diet and lifestyle can influence or spread to those around them. Yet if each vegan was able to create two new vegans, we would have likely seen more significant shifts in the rates of veganism (Our World In Data, 2022) in recent decades. This illustrates the difficulties of understanding social contagion—the process of information (including attitudes or behaviors) spreading throughout a group—especially in relation to veganism. By understanding social contagion better, advocates can improve their diet change outreach, possibly by mastering the art of “vegan contagion.” The spread of veg*nism hasn’t been formally studied as of yet, but this study reflects on a similar behavior change that has been commonly studied: quitting smoking. With this literature review, we examined peer influences on quitting smoking with the goal of generating hypotheses about peer-to-peer influence on veg*nism. We believe these findings will be beneficial for both advocates working on diet change or animal product reduction as well as researchers looking to study the social contagion of veg*nism.