Our connections to others
affect our capacity for free will#942•
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.#943•
The happiness effect
for people at two degrees of separation (the friend of a friend) is 10 percent, and for people at three degrees of separation
(the friend of a friend of a friend), it is about 6 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.#951•
We found that each happy friend a person has increases that person's probability of being happy
by about 9 percent. Each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent.#945•
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 50 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 40 percent on what they choose to think and do#948•
Since on average
(in our data) people feel lonely forty-eight days per year, having a couple of extra friends makes you about 10 percent less
lonely than other people.#944•
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 other#946•