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."
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
I find it amazing that you call the study a waste because everybody already knew what the results would be, yet then immediately contradict the results of the study.
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."
Yeah, yeah, yeah... the knee jerk correlation is not causation. And I am sure you read the study to see how they accounted for this, right? You looked at their methodolgy and made sure that they were not looking at how habits changed over time (for example in the article: At the time, her cigarette habit didn't seem like a problem; most of her friends also smoked socially. But in the late 1980s, a few of them began to quit, and pretty soon Eileen felt awkward holding a cigarette off to one side when out at a restaurant. She quit, too, and within a few years nobody she knew smoked anymore.
) , and other factors that could explain this. And I am sure that at the end of your research you found that a grad student just plunked some nmbers into an Excel spreasheet and used the built in statistical function.
Yup, a long-term study spends significant time and resources researching something to come to a conclusion. But with your keen perception and research skills, you have totally debunked it. And the slashtards mod it up to +5.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Interesting response. Not trying to troll here. My wife is a scientist, so she has partially warped my mind to think like this. You realize that you yourself have made a generalization that on the surface seems quite plausible. Do you have any direct proof in support of your hypothesis, which I will assume is "Essentially man is a social animal and has an inbuilt desire to fit in with the society that surrounds him/her" Have you found any quotable research showing that your hypothesis has already been proven?
My point here is that until you actually do the research, you can generalize all you want, but that doesn't make it right. Everyone has some sort of anecdotal evidence which could seem to invalidate some research, but does that evidence fall outside of 3 standard deviations for example? Does your anecdotal evidence even have any relation to the original experiment
I am reminded of a recent Daily Show where John Oliver interviewed two different scientists about which primates humans most resemble. (I would link to this, but I am at work and can't get to comedy central). One scientist was arguing that humans were more closely related to Orangutans whereas the other scientist was going with the generally accepted Chimpanzee relationship. John Oliver was trying to get the 'Chimp' scientist to put down the other scientist's research with a 'yo momma' joke. John Oliver Gave the lead in "Yo research is so whack...". The 'Chimp' scientist said, "that it fails to verify the hypothesis".
This is a long way of saying that science is done to find things that seem possibly painfully obvious, and to validate it through experimentation.
No, dipshit. I am making fun of your research skills. You didn't even bother reading the article, much less the original research, yet you see yourself fit to "debunk" it.
You can't even read the criticism against you correctly. How do you think you are fit to judge this study.
Go read this comment that was pointed out by another reader: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1306647&cid=28734109
It does a better job than I did of why your post is intellectually void.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year