This major re-discovery is brought to our attention by two exciting scholars: Nicholas Christakis (Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, and Department of Sociology, Harvard University) and James Fowler (Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego).
In a longitudinal social network study published in the British Medical Journal on December 4th, 2008, and titled "Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study," the authors report that happiness is contagious and that it spreads dynamically within social networks.
The two authors had sought to "evaluate whether happiness can spread from person to person and whether niches of happiness form within social networks." The specific social network of interest to them was the pre-existing Framingham Heart Study social network, in the state of Massachusetts. The heart study social network has existed since 1948. The authors tracked data on 4,739 participants (or "egos") -- the "offspring cohort" of the participants of the original 1948 study -- for a twenty-year period, running from 1983 to 2003.
But "egos" alone do not a network make. To highlight the dimensions of the network the authors chose to deal with, let us quote them at length:
"Each ego in this cohort is connected to other people via friendship, family, spousal, neighbour, and coworker relationships. Each relationship is a "social tie." Each person who has a relationship with an ego was called an "alter." For example, one ego in the offspring cohort had 18 alters: a mother, a father, a sister, two brothers, three children, two friends, five neighbours, and three coworkers. We wanted to know how each of these alters influences an ego. Many of the alters also happened to be members of a studied cohort in Framingham, which means that we had access to detailed information about them as well. Overall, within the entire Framingham Heart Study social network, composed of both the egos and any detected alters in any Framingham Heart Study cohort, there were 12067 individuals who were connected at some point in 1971-2003."
The study yielded six major findings:
1. That "Clusters of happy and unhappy people" were "visible in the network" and that "the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends)."
2.That being surrounded by many happy people and being "central in the network" make one "more likely to become happy in the future."
3. That, moreover, "clusters of happiness" are precisely the consequence of "the spread of happiness", rather than the symptom of "a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals."
4. That living within a mile (some 1.6km) of a friend who becomes happy increases the probability that one is likewise happy by 25%. The probability increases by 8% among coresident spouses, 14% among siblings who live within 1.6 km of each other, and 34% among next-door neighbours.
5. That this happiness contagion is "not seen between coworkers."
6. That time and geographical separation have a weakening effect on this contagion.
The authors' main conclusion from the study is this:
"People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon."
If happiness is as contagious as that, is it really a stretch to infer that community life is likewise contagious? Might not all this "contagious" (this viral) thinking also lead us to the more fundamental conclusion that humans are social animals not because they are social (they live in social groups) -- that would be a tautology -- but because social life is itself contagious? But in what ways would this contagion be different from Durkheimian solidarity?
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