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How Other People’s Happiness Affects Our Own

The human mind

It seems like common sense to think of other people’s happiness as separate from our own happiness, but even on the most practical level, it turns out that this isn’t entirely accurate. The authors of the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, sociologist Nicholas Christakis and political scientist James Fowler, offer an interesting insight into how sharing happiness works, which comes down to this: what goes around, comes around.

Without going into the details here of the research methodology or exactly how they’re describing and measuring happiness, which are described in the book itself, what Christakis and Fowler find in their own and others’ research is that making people around us happy tends to automatically increase our own happiness.

As a broad generalization, if a friend, family member, coworker, or anyone we associate with on a regular basis (for shorthand, let’s call this person a “friend,” although they don’t literally need to be one) is happy, our own chances of being happy are increased by 15%. That may not seem like much, but if we think about how many people we associate with directly on a regular basis, it becomes clear that we have a lot of opportunities to get happy.

What’s more, happiness doesn’t even need to spread directly: it can spread indirectly through social networks, so that if a friend of a friend (or your brother-in-law’s co-worker, or your friend’s teacher) is happy, that friend of a friend increases our own chances of being happy by 10%, even though we may not associate directly with that person. Even a friend of a friend of a friend‘s happiness gives us a 6% better chance of being happy ourselves. The effect vanishes into statistical insignificance after that third step, but the strange and wonderful truth is that if your co-worker’s daughter’s hairdresser is happy, you yourself have better than a 1 in 20 chance of being happy yourself. The effect is especially strong with people we interact with daily: the more interaction, the stronger the effect (within limits).

To some extent bad moods can flow through social networks just like good moods, though, so having one happy friend and half a dozen miserable ones is likely to make happiness difficult to attain–which is all the more reason for caring about the happiness of other people in our lives.

So helping those around us with their goals, health, happiness, etc. can have a profound effect on our moods.  And while the effects of helping others are limited, according to research, the effects of really making a difference in someone’s life can sometimes affect their level of happiness for up to two years. Repeated attempts to help others can contribute to their happiness (and therefore often to our own happiness) over and over, throughout a lifetime. It also tends to make our social networks larger and stronger, which itself makes significant contributions to our well-being.

For more on related subjects, see “Can We Expect Other People to Help Us?” and “The Best 40 Percent of Happiness.”

Photo by Swamibu

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Useful Book on Social Networks: Connected

Resources

In my recent article “Can We Expect Other People to Help Us?” I mention the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by sociologist Nicholas Christakis and political scientist James Fowler. Connected is a fascinating work that examines social networks widely enough to provide a broad understanding and specifically enough to provide practical insights.

The questions Christakis and Fowler ask cover a lot of ground. How do social networks form and change? Why do we have them? What’s the difference between looking at the individual behavior of a number of people and looking at their social network? How is a network different from just a group or class of people? What does it mean to be closer to the center or the edge of a network, and why does that matter?

Christakis and Fowler show us a variety of networks and a variety of things that pass through them: money, illness, recovery, weight loss, smoking behavior, ideas, suicide, happiness, altruism, delusion, sexual behavior, and a lot more. They describe how we influence and are influenced not just by the people we know, but by the people they know, and even by the people those friends-of-friends know, our friends-of-friends-of-friends. (Interestingly, they offer substantial evidence that the influence more or less stops after those three degrees.)

The book has some limitations that are worth knowing about. Notably, they sometimes describe the impact of social networks as determining behavior instead of influencing it–for instance, saying that if a friend of a friend of yours gains weight, you will gain weight yourself (instead of saying, as is more accurate, that you will be more likely to gain weight). In some cases it sounds as though they feel that individual behavior has no impact on anything at all, though I don’t think that’s their intention.

Regardless, the book is often fascinating and offers a lot of meaning and food for thought. If you’re interested social networks, whether out of curiosity about how they affect you or out of interest in understanding human systems, it’s well worth a read.

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Can We Expect Other People to Help Us?

The human mind

In their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, sociologist Nicholas Christakis and political scientist James Fowler look at what it means to be a human being in terms of our interpersonal networks. One of the topics they take up is an examination of how selfishness, cooperation, and altruism interact, which helps answer the question in the title: can we expect others to help us?

Christakis and Fowler take results from experiments around the world with three games. In the “Ultimatum Game,” two people are given an amount of money (for instance, ten dollars). Person 1 makes an offer to split it with the other, offering anything from a penny to a 50/50 split to handing over the whole amount. Person 2 decides to reject or accept the offer. If Person 2 rejects the offer, neither person gets anything.

The “Dictator Game” is similar, except that any offer is automatically accepted. All the power lies with Person 1.

In the “Trust Game,” Person 1 can give any amount to Person 2, and that amount triples, at which point Person 2 can give any amount back. If both cooperate completely, they each get more than the original amount. If they don’t, someone gets screwed.

I won’t go into the experimental findings in detail, but instead will head straight for the conclusions Christakis, Fowler, and others draw from the results. Based on the mixture of selfishness, cooperation, trust, mistrust, and other attitudes demonstrated by subjects in these experiments, they identify three types of people: cooperators, loners, and free riders.

Cooperators tend to trust more, are more helpful to others, and are dependent on other people trusting and helping in return. Loners tend not to trust and try not to depend on anyone else. Free riders take advantage of cooperators to get whatever they can for themselves without offering anything in return.

A cooperator in the midst of other cooperators thrives. A cooperator who runs into too many free riders gets screwed. A loner is less successful than others if everyone else is successfully cooperating, but isn’t in danger of being taken advantage of by free riders. A free rider thrives when cooperators let things go, but runs into trouble with a sort of cooperator sub-type that Christakis and Fowler dub “Punishers.” Punishers are willing to exert some effort to penalize people for not cooperating or for taking advantage of the system.

In the ultimatum or dictator game, a cooperator might offer half or close to half of the money to the other person. A loner in the trust game will assume the other person is going to take advantage and act defensively. A free rider will take the most money available regardless of consequences to the other player. A punisher in the ultimatum game will refuse an offer that seems too low even though this would mean both players lose out.

What’s fascinating to me is that according to Christakis and Fowler, a society is made up of all of these types, but the proportions of each are constantly shifting. There appear to be times and places where cooperators spread, which might eventually attract free riders, which in turn will attract punishers and perhaps turn some of the cooperators into loners. If loners are everywhere, then some might band together and be more successful by cooperation, starting the cycle over. During each separate phase of this cycle, which might last for some time, there are different opportunities and dangers, and the question of whether help is likely to be available is answered differently.

So when looking for help in our lives, there are questions we can ask ourselves. Are we given to cooperation, or do we tend to do things on our own? What about the people around us? And whether or not a person tends to help in one area suggests a lot about whether that person is likely to help in another. For instance, a person who gives money to public radio is also more likely to volunteer to help you move or to give you directions if you’re lost. A person who works in a kind of job that emphasizes getting as much as you can, like a stockbroker or auto salesperson, is less likely to trust and offer help to others–though of course it’s inaccurate to make blanket statements about people on this matter; these are just general observations that are often true.

Regardless, making these kinds of observations about yourself and the people you’re connected with can help provide insight both about what you’re contributing and what you can expect from others.

I’ll post a full article on the book Connected some time in the next couple of weeks.

Photo by Michael Kalus

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