I bet you’ve had at least one friend or coworker who never stays at home when they’re sick. The kind who will sit next to you and cough, sneeze, and hack their way through meetings, while you and everyone around them edge slowly away or glance around furtively in search of Purel. It’s not that you don’t like that person, but you understand that being in contact with germs will turn you into the next coughing sneezer who people will avoid like…..well, the plague.
But what if I told you that colds aren’t the only thing you can catch from your neighbor? We often think of happiness as something we experience within ourselves, but it turns out that happiness is as contagious as the common cold. And over time, we spread it to those around us.
When we look at social networks, we see clusters of happy people grouped together. At first, there might seem to be a simple explanation for this – after all, people are more likely to hang out with people who are like them, and it would make sense that happy people would want to spend time together. But as we track social networks over time, we see that the tendency to be happy will spread from person to person, rather than happy people simply tending to cluster together.
When we take the same methods that epidemiologists use to track illnesses, and use them to look at long-term emotions among groups of people, it becomes clear that happiness moves infectiously around a social network very much like a disease. Happiness spreads the fastest to those whom we live in close proximity to. Having a happy friend who lives within a mile of you increases the probability that you will be happy by a sizeable 25%, and a happy next-door neighbor increases the likelihood that you’ll be happy by 34%. Although the effects of happiness will decay with time and distance between people, we’re still significantly affected by the happiness of people even three degrees of separation away from us (that is, the happiness of friends of friends of friends).
This effect is not limited to short-term moods. While a friend’s cheerful greeting may put a smile on our face for a few seconds, spending time around happy people increases our tendency to be happy over time.
I could end this note with a dour, cautionary note about choosing your friends wisely, but in the spirit of spreading happiness, why not instead look at the way we affect those around us? If our happiness can increase the happiness of even friends of friends who we haven’t actually met, then it’s worth considering what kind of emotion we are spreading around the world every day. Unlike a bad cold, don’t cover your mouth when you smile.
References:
Fowler, J., & Christakis, N. (2008). Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study BMJ, 337 (dec04 2) DOI: 10.1136/bmj.a2338
Hill, A., Rand, D., Nowak, M., & Christakis, N. (2010). Emotions as infectious diseases in a large social network: the SISa model Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277 (1701), 3827-3835 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1217
This is a very interesting concept. I didn’t go back and read the original studies, but I’d be curious to know whether their analyses included any controls that would let us be able to tease apart some possible mechanisms behind this phenomenon. One obvious possibility that was focused on here is that the happiness itself is contagious. An alternative would be that people in the same areas and social networks are likely to experience similar life events, which could produce their similar emotions. These aren’t necessarily exclusive or exhaustive.
But what about those people that aren’t happy` I mean a happy person would naturally spread happiness It’s not goood to fake being happy if you aren’t because you aren’t being genuine* Let me know what you think about this
I enjoyed this article. I’m happy to have stumbled across it, too.
I was volunteering at an event to distribute items from a food bank and serve a hot meal. One man in wheelchair, who always scowled at everyone, snarled at me when I stopped by and smiled asking if he’d like me to clear his empty plate, “What are you smiling about?!” and I faltered for a moment before I stammered that my father always told me to “Smile, dammit”. I could remember being dragged out of a party when I was 13 and my father told me from clenched teeth that we were at a social event and whatever little drama had me upset that day was inappropriate. I can remember him telling me, “These people came together today to enjoy themselves, not pat you on the head and console you, so, SMILE DAMMIT!” and since that time, I typically do smile easily. Well the old guy grumbled some other disapproving remark. I said quietly, “Popi died two days ago. If I stop smiling I’ll just break down and cry and what good will that do any of us?” The man was surprised and expressed his sympathies, but, from that time on he always smiled for me when we saw each other. So it was a good exchange and, in the long run it made encountering him more pleasant. Sharing my story made him more tolerant of my persistent smile, but even better than that, it made him smile too.
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