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Connected

The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler

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psychology

CHAPTER 1: In the Thick of It

CHAPTER 2: When You Smile, the World Smiles with You

  • We might consider another question first: Why aren’t emotions merely internal states? Why don’t we just have our own private feelings? Having feelings is surely evolutionarily advantageous to us. For example, the ability to feel startled is probably good for us in situations where we need to react quickly to survive. But we do not just feel startled, we show that we are startled. We jump or shriek or curse or clench, and these actions do not go unnoticed. They are copied by others.Sep 6 2022 10:04PM
  • The happiness effect for people at two degrees of separation (the friend of a friend) is percent, and for people at three degrees of separation (the friend of a friend of a friend), it is about percent. At four degrees of separation, the effect peters out. Here we have our first evidence of the Three Degrees of Influence Rule. Emotions (and, as we will see later, norms and behaviors) spread in social networks from person to person to person, but they do not spread to everyone. Just as a ripple in a pond eventually fades away, so too does the ripple of an individual’s happiness fade through the social network.Sep 6 2022 10:07PM
  • We found that each happy friend a person has increases that person’s probability of being happy by about percent. Each unhappy friend decreases it by percent.Sep 6 2022 10:07PM

Chapter 2

  • Behavior geneticists have used these studies to estimate just how much genes matter, and their best guess is that long-term happiness depends percent on a person’s genetic set point, 10 percent on their circumstances (e.g., where they live, how rich they are, how healthy they are), and percent on what they choose to think and doNov 18 2022 4:41PM
  • Since on average (in our data) people feel lonely forty-eight days per year, having a couple of extra friends makes you about percent less lonely than other people.Nov 18 2022 4:43PM

Chapter 3

  • Incidents like these provide opportunities for further social interaction, and possibly sex or marriage, because they require what sociologist Erving Goffman called “corrective” rituals: people have to undo the “damage,” and this in turn means that they have to get to know each otherNov 18 2022 7:30PM

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