Abstract: Studies have been made as to how to influence people during a conflict as well as trying to identify the shift in popular opinion with time. Using research in emotional contagion, this paper shows how allegiances in a population can be predicted over time including the changes of allegiances in response to different stimuli. For phenomena that involve a spreading process in which both the contact process and the change of state equations are extant and can be expressed mathematically the equations for the probability of occurrence of each of the possible states are presented. These equations demonstrate the occurrence of terminal states and how phenomena take off or die out unexpectedly. This approach is distinct from current processes in fields such as epidemiology which focus on the expected (average) behaviour with which to make predictions of the emergent behaviour but do not account for unexpected behaviours of relevant phenomena or predict the evolution of each of the possible population states. We apply this to a situation of two hostile forces competing for the sympathies of a local population, considering an evolving stratagem of one side as the factors affecting the outcome of a meeting of two individuals are altered.