Dan’s View

In an article by Michael Bond from New Scientist(Issue 2689 – Jan 03 2009) he has discussed the affects that our social circle has upon various aspects of our health, emotions and decisions we make within our lives. The research comes from Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. This idea fascinates me.

Nicholas and his team studied the network of several thousand friends, relatives, neighbors and work colleagues from Framingham Heart Study, which is an ongoing, multi-generation survey that has tracked risk factors in cardiovascular disease among residents of Framingham.

They noticed that there were clusters of happy people, not due to them gravitating together but due to how happiness spreads within the network. There are various weighting that take effect on one; be they a friend, friend of a friend, spouse even someone you do not know personally but by proxy. Of course no one would be surprised that a person with more friends is more likely to be happy, but there is more effect from having happier links. So just because you have 100′s of friends, if they are not very happy then a smaller group of happier people will mean one is happier.

The weighting of how much effect it has upon you is not as you would expect at first thought, the amount of susceptibility you have to someone else’s happiness varies. If the following person becomes happy they have these chances of affecting ones happiness: a good friend whom lives a mile away – 60%, a next-door neighbor – 30%, a sibling who lives nearby – 15% and surprisingly a cohabiting partner affects one less than 10%.

So how does this take effect? Barbara Wild and her team at the University of Tübingen, Germany, found that the strength of facial expressions affects the strength of the emotion that is felt. Others discuss the idea of mimicking could be in effect, but does the mimicking cause the neurons to fire? Or the neurons cause the mimicking? Could this be empathy when you discuss an issue with a friend?

From the study of the Framingham group they were able to also observe the social affect on obesity, not to the same percentages as before, but the effect was apparent. It was appearing to be caused by how socially acceptable it was to become obese in a gender specific manner, we compare body sizes on a gender basis, so the appearance of groups of girls having eating disorders might occur from this effect. The same affect can be noted for smoking, but probably in a more severe manner. If most of a group quit smoking and one remains a smoker they will end up on the edge of the group. If a spouse quits smoking you are 67% more likely to quit as well.

Peter Bearman at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University uncovered a link between suicidal behavior and certain friendship patterns is now looking into the rise of autism could be socially affected(American Journal of Public Health, vol. 94 – 2004). He stated recently, “It is likely that if you have an autistic child in your community the probability of your child being diagnosed with autism is significantly higher.” – This statement is quite a strong once, and I suspect could be applied to other illnesses, if we have an illness in mind due to someone we know of, if even not directly we are probably going to query it specifically with our doctor. I think I have seen this in affect in the past by my mothers worry about illnesses, not that the illness was there but she was more likely to ask because it was on her mind.

Why does this occur within three degrees of separation? Most likely is how the social group’s edges drop and change more frequently. Next year the friends of friends of friends of friends will probably be completely different.

Therefore is it possibly to affect your own happiness by changing your friends? It would be a bit drastic to drop your friends if they are the lazy unhappy ones, although you could adjust the amount of time that you spend with them. If you wanted to loose weight there is the possibility you could improve your scenario by joining a running club and most importantly socialising with the members of the club. If we take the idea of the mimicking then reducing how much you mimic someone with a trait you are trying not to be influenced by, but this would have a negative effect on the relationship that you have as mimicking is a sign of being on the same wavelength as your peer.

Overall we are affected by those around us, so watch out!