Slashdot Mirror
Happiness May Be Catching
chrb writes "The NY Times Magazine has an interesting article about research, based on the long-running Framingham Heart Study, modeling real world social networks. It seems that tendencies to be happy, not to smoke, and not to become obese are passed between nodes in a directed graph in a way that suggests such concepts are 'contagious.' Well-connected nodes in the graph (i.e., people with more friends) are more likely to be happier than less-connected nodes, even when the edges represent more distant friendships. Individuals quitting smoking, or becoming obese, influence not only their immediately connected friends but also friends of friends, with the effect sometimes skipping the intermediary node. The contagion effect is most noticeable when a tendency is passed from one person to another of the same sex — friends of the opposite sex, including spouses, are not as influential."
This is like that $8m study that found out men think differently than women.
Your mom drilled it into your head, when she asked if you'd jump off a bridge if all of your friends are. Yet more ridiculous waste of scarce research funding. Also, being far less connected is better than being connected to lots of *idiots*.
but it's quite important to be able through research and testgroups to actually show that it's true. Not only on this subject but on almost all subjects. Most of us know this for a fact, but sometimes it's nice to know the reason why a certain feeling like happiness suddenly shows for no apparent reason more then that your friends are happy. I have a friend who just got out of a mental institution whom I have been worried about for quite some time, now that she is out in the real world and feels better I can honestly say that my days have improved a lot. Not having to worry and this has affected people around me because I'm a happier person again. Rant ends here..
So...monkey see, monkey do?
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Are you saying that if I have sex with my girlfriend's friend she'll have more sex with me? Seems like a fairly interesting notion.
What if I have sex with a bunch of my girlfriend's friends, will that make my girlfriend's whole social circle all want to have sex with me at the same time? 'Cause I could totally live with that.
slashdot is an infection free zone
People who NEED to have more friends are more likely to lie about being happy to maintain their image.
Peer pressure isn't a new phenomenon. Groups mutually conform, as part of their group identity. Which can be mutually positive, and can be mutually destructive. Particularly drinking/drug use tends to increase in much the same way.
I've also run into the 'domino wave' of couples getting married as well - you seem to get several over the course of about a year, and the same with dropping sproglets.
"Well-connected nodes in the graph (i.e., people with more friends) are more likely to be happier than less-connected nodes"
/. must be saddest place on earth.
So
839*929
I told you. Stupidity is not only deadly but also contagious through any information transmission capable medium.
That's why the extra terrestrial visitors fly so fast and with their radio turned off.
They're playing chicken.
"Did you hear? GX-3-ThBlarg just did a low fly at merely three fongs per chronocycle! And he turned the wave receivers on for FIVE SECONDS!"
"No way! He'll end up idiotized, like his big brother. He must already be getting fatter and sad."
haha! I knew it was a disease!
Sounds pretty fluffy to me. I know a lot of people quitting smoking... because the price has doubled in the last year where I live, not because it's cool.
We well-informed teetotallers have known this for years about alcohol. Attitudes aren't made in a vacuum. If the drug/alcohol use of your kids, or even the use in society, bothers you, the first thing you should do is cut back (or better yet, cut out) yourself.
It was the French demographer Sully Ledermann who first suggested that alcohol consumption appears to follow a log-normal distribution - he didn't provide much evidence for it, but it turned out later he was completely right. In principle, a single variable is enough to describe the variation in total alcohol consumption across cultures: The average amount consumed. As the number of moderate drinkers increase, the number of heavy drinkers increases with about the square.
I'll quote (and translate) a piece of an article from the journal of the Norwegian physician's association:
"The stable traits and connections that have been found in this are are not natural laws, they could all in principle have been different. The suprising thing, however, is that the connections are as stable as they are.
These connections and regularities were at the outset pure statistical descriptions of reality, without any understanding of the social mechanisms that generated them. Through the 1980s there came some studies where one tried to explain how these regularities appear and are kept stable (9, 11, 13). The original hypotheses were one that drinking habits are explained by a series of factors that appear to combine multiplicatively, and another that alcohol users are strongly influenced by the drinking habits in their social networks.
Both hypotheses have good empirical support. The first one can, by the so-called central limit theorem in statistical theory, explain that the distribution becomes approximately log-normal. The second hypothesis can, from theories of interaction and spread in social networks, explain why there is such a strong connection between average consumption and the prevalence of high consumers."
Emphasis mine. Original article with references here: http://www.tidsskriftet.no/?seks_id=649944
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Essentially man is a social animal and has an inbuilt desire to fit in with the society that surrounds him/her. I'm not quite sure why an expensive and pointless scientific paper needed to be written about what is essentially a psychological and societal issue. Take DubLi, for example - it's growing because those who have used it are reporting positively to friends, collegues etc positively. It's not exactly rocket science, just my 2 cents worth.
"I have a very wide circle, I have 212 friends on myspace." (Sheldon Cooper)
I've always noted the point mentioned towards the end, discussing how a 'social hub' kind of person can leave their element (place of living, workplace) go somewhere and within a few short weeks become a social hub again, these people fascinate me (and probably most of us) often interesting, social, active and often fun.
I'm by far not one of them sadly - infact I'm the loner in the article likely to die fat and speaking to no one however doesn't change that I mostly agree with what the article says, despite being difficult to proove it of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(Red_Dwarf) for the unenlightened. Mr Flibble agrees with me, don't you Mr Flibble?
This is not a sig
Catching, I mean.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
"Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around"
- Calvin
Come on, we've known this for years.
tendencies to be happy, not to smoke, and not to become obese are passed between nodes in a directed graph
Wouldn't it be more likely that these people that are happy, athletic, and don't smoke tend to make friends with other people like them, as opposed to this suggestion of viral happiness? I mean it seems pretty obvious that people who don't smoke are going to have a higher percentage of friends that don't smoke than those who do smoke. It's called a "lifestyle."
They also studied drinking: When it came to drinking, Christakis and Fowler found a different kind of gender effect. Framingham women were considerably more influential than Framingham men. A woman who began drinking heavily increased the heavy-drinking risk of those around her, whereas heavy-drinking men had less effect on other people. Why? In the age of frat-party binge drinking, you might imagine that hard-partying men are the most risky people to be around. But Fowler says he suspects women are more influential precisely because they tend to drink less. When a woman starts drinking heavily, he says, it sends a strong signal to those around her that it's O.K. to start boozing too.
Repeat after me. Correlation is not Causation
Congratulations! You just proved correlation. Now the real work begins: to prove causation! Aww FSCK it.
So witch is it happy people have more friends or people with friends tend to be happy? Depressed people tend to have fewer friends as they pull away from people they care about. This could lend credence to the contagious theory, or it could just be that people don't like downers.
Like I said, now the real work begins.
See BMJ 2008;337:a2533
So basically lonely people are more likely to go down to the local store, buy too many cakes and eat them while watching drivel about happy people on the "toob", thus making themselves more miserable!
Well hold the front page! We have a new Pullitzer! FFS, they spent how much deducing that lonely people are more likely to miserable due to lonelines than people with lots of good friends? It's another win for academia!
If there's ever a case for the statement "Correlation does not equal Causation", this is it.
As a non-smoker, why would I hang around with smokers? I quit; I hate that smell, and don't want to be near it.
As a fitness buff, why would I hang around with obese people? It's not like I meet them at the gym!
As a happy person, why would I hang around with Debbie Downer? Life's too short!
I don't understand this.
If I were to become obese all I would have to think of to be happy is all eats and treats that got me there. The closest I ever got was 1 point under Obese on the WiiFit.
Attempting to quit smoking has never made me a happier person. The closest I got was a couple days but I was preaty happy when I started back up :)
It is worth recognizing that the major breakthrough in this work in finding the long-running Framingham Heart Study data. This database had been collected for a different purpose. If this data has been anonymized; if they had destroyed the forrns naming a friend when a new form had been completed; or had destroyed the entire database when the original study aims had been met to preserve the privicy of the individuals, then this work would not have been possible.
This is not to say that all databases are good. We have seen recently how many of our personal details are available of we fly or book a hotel. There are people in the UK who want to make a national register of all children, in the belief that the entire database won't make it out of the building on a memory stick in the first week. But there are details I do not mind contributing to the common good. I would not post my medical details, but I would not mind my medical records being transferred when I move or change doctors, and I would certainly wish people to wring any good that could be wrung from such data. No man is an island, yerknow?
Maybe I am naive and idealistic. Maybe I should be guided by all the grumpy, mean, and suspicious people that seem to fill all London some days. But then again, no - they are all going to get fat and die, aren't they? Hah! Yess!! Roll on the day!!!
I disagree. My theory is theres a finite amout of happiness in the world:
Case examples:
- We feel good when we win at sport, the other team feels bad
- we feel get jealous when someone buys a nice new TV, and they are happy
- we laugh at other peoples misfortune
- Kids tease each other
- we're annoyed when we don't win employee of the year
- In the west we're rich, well off and not unhappy, in other countries they're poor, lacking basic necessities and generally less happy (okay that's a bit of a leap but you get the idea). Our SUVs, and by association happiness, are funded by other countries.
Few movies end with both the good and bad guy mutually winning and walking off with respective hot girls as that would feel wrong and offend this universal law that we all know but don't articulate as we're all too politically correct
Many things are examples of this process.
The lottery distributes a tiny sum of happiness from many players to one.
Religions often have a concept of hell. Its not enough being part of an institution that goes to heaven, everyone else has to go to hell. And as members of that institution we feel gleeful about the rewards we'll reap later on.
I think I've managed to cover most the hot topics: movies, geo politics, religion, capitalism etc.
I sometimes find that being happy makes others resentful. I even smiled at a person once on the train and they came up to me and said "I didn't want that seat anyway" as if I was being smug about getting a seat!
So perhaps the more happy people there are the more resentful some people get.
Leon Festinger developed the theory of Cognitive Dissonance half a century ago from naturalistic observations very much like the conclusions and implications put forward by TFA. He didn't require a model of information spread, as it was already based on observations of behaviors resulting from people talking to each other. Such a model is hardly useful when existing evidence already supports and goes beyond the model's predictions. In any case the models served to provide the means to correctly explain behaviors. It's just that TFA is replication of results via another design, not any discovery.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Not
Instead of calling your friends 'friends' you call them 'nodes'.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
then I'm immune.
are scientists looking for a cure?
I'll happily stay infected, thanks! ;)
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Actually, this is the opposite of obvious research: it's research that totally misses the obvious point.
People who are happy generally work to get through all the bad shit internally, without passing it on to others, and to pass the good shit on to others, and to gratefully accept the good shit from others, without accepting their issues and baggage. Likewise, people who are unhappy have usually started focusing on negativity, rejecting friendships and help, etc., until they're lonely and depressed.
The article seems to be suggesting that somehow, people just get magically happy by being around each other, and that those who aren't happy are just not well enough connected. Yet more stupid research guided by step-by-step research instructions instead of wisdom and life experience.
If people were individuals it wouldn't matter what dumb behaviors their friends adopt. People need to learn to be responsible for their own health and their own happiness and their own happiness.
Based on my own behavior, I have an alternative explanation, somewhat between real contagion of social habits, and auto-clustering of people when they are more alike...
I think that we have to consider how the habit/behavior/new event would affect the main activities of the group of friends. For example, if you gain weight, it may means you have reduced your sport practice and changed your diet, i.e. some kind of lifestyle change. Then, the friend which stick around you will change their lifestyle and suffer the same effects, or just drift out of friendship just because of lack of common interrest/time spend together. People which were not going to be friend because they had zero desire to spend weekends running around a track suddenly may drift in your circle of friend because they shared your new interrest in home-made cookies...
All of those effect will have strong effect on apparent contagion of habits, but will not be based on change in what you consider "socially acceptable" or change your scales for evaluating body images (like the interpretation for obesity that was given in the article). It is not really contagious behavior either, but only linked to the fact the friendships are often linked to some shared lifestyle and shared activities.
It is a slight twist to the interpretations given in the article, but it may be interresting to look at the contagious effect in this way. For example, the fact that contagion is higher in same-sex friends is normal: identical lifestyle and shared activities are more important between same-sex friends than opposite sex friends of sexual partners. So is the difference between coworker and personal friends.
Under this interpretation, I would expect some behavior to be highly anti-correlated: the tendency to organise things for example (leadership). A group sharing an activity would be more enjoyable for everybody if one good organiser take responsability for organising stuffs while the other are happy following. So I guess that "tendency of organizing stuff" or "leadership" (it would have to be carefully worded to avoid positive/negative bias for lack of the characteristic) would not be contageous, while it should be if the explanantion was mainly through behavioral mimicking...
I'm no expert, but I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe, just maybe, rather than catching it from your friends through some kind of wierd emotional virus, it's having friends that makes you happy.
...and from my experience people with a lot of "friends" are very ignorant.
So umm, are they essentially saying that happiness is like an STD?
I think they have it backwards - more friends don't make you happier, happy people just tend to have more friends. My reasoning is twofold: people prefer being around happy people, and often when you are not happy it is more difficult to do things - thus less social interaction.
thats catching for sure. Look around.
*yawn*
The importance of this study is that these connections often _are_ causal. Smokers who hang out with the anti-smoking brigade stop smoking.
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