Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

Happiness is thus not merely a function of individual experience or choice; it is also a property of groups of people. Changes in individual happiness can ripple through social connections and create large-scale patterns in the network, giving rise to clusters of happy and unhappy individuals. Since our work was published, similar results on the spread of happiness have been observed in a sample of ten thousand rural Chinese villagers.

(#litres_trial_promo) Although we could not observe what causes happiness to spread, a variety of mechanisms are conceivable. Happy people may share their good fortune (e.g., by being pragmatically helpful or financially generous to others), change their behavior toward others (e.g., by being nicer or less hostile), or merely exude an emotion that is contagious. Being surrounded by happy people might have beneficial biological effects too. But whatever the mechanism, it seems clear that we need to change the way we think about happiness and other emotions.

Life on the Hedonic Treadmill

We all know people who are hedonists; they can never get enough of the good life. In fact, lasting happiness is difficult to achieve because people are on a “hedonic treadmill.” Although a change in a person’s circumstances may cause him to be happier (e.g., finding a partner, winning the lottery) or sadder (e.g., losing a job, becoming paralyzed), a broad body of research has shown that people tend to return to their previous level of happiness after such events.

(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, studies of lottery winners and spinal cord injury patients reveal that after a year or two, they are often no more happy or sad than the rest of us. Our surprise at this observation stems in part from our inability to anticipate that some things will not change. Lottery winners still have annoying relatives, and paralyzed patients can still fall in love. As psychologist Daniel Gilbert has shown, we tend to focus on only the most salient part of a situation when we are thinking about things that might befall us.

(#litres_trial_promo) Moreover, we overlook our ability to adapt to circumstances. So, a person trying to become happier is like someone walking up a downward-moving escalator. Although the effort to climb up and become happier is helpful, it is counteracted by the process of adaptation that forces one back to one’s original state.

Many people try to overcome this problem by intentionally engaging in activities to improve their happiness. We might change our behavior by exercising regularly or by trying to be kind to others or even by avoiding a long commute (which has been shown to be particularly deleterious to happiness). We might change our attitude by pausing to count our blessings or thinking about experiences in the most positive light (as Tibetan monks do). We might also devote effort to causes we find meaningful or strive to achieve important personal goals. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that a sustained effort to engage in such happiness-producing activities might help us progress up the downward-moving escalator.

But in spite of these efforts, each of us tends to stay put in a particular long-term disposition; we appear to have a set point for personal happiness that is not easy to change. In fact, like other personality traits, personal happiness appears to be strongly influenced by our genes. Studies of identical and fraternal twins show that identical twins are significantly more likely to exhibit the same level of happiness than are fraternal twins or other siblings. 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) What we experience in life can, of course, change our moods for a period of time, but in most cases these changes are transitory.

What about the network spread of happiness? Does it obey this constraint, only making us happy for a while? Does the effect of having a friend become happy tend to wear off? In our study, we found that a person is 45 percent more likely to be happy if a friend became happy in the previous six months. In contrast, the effect is only 35 percent for friends who became happy within the previous year, and it disappears after longer periods of time. So, our friends’ happiness does have an effect on us, but it only lasts for about a year. Just as lottery winners get used to their newfound wealth, we get used to our friends being happy. But if different friends get happy at different points in time, they might give us a periodic boost, helping us to stay above our natural level of happiness.

Alone in the Crowd

If happiness can spread, at least for a while, what about other emotions? One feeling that directly concerns our social network is loneliness. In some sense, loneliness is the opposite of connection—it is the feeling of being disconnected. Work by psychologist John Cacioppo has shown that loneliness is a complex set of feelings experienced by people whose core needs for intimacy and social connection are not met.

(#litres_trial_promo) This often motivates most (but not all) people to redress their situation, suggesting that the function of loneliness is to promote reconnection (we will discuss the evolutionary purpose of loneliness in chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)).

Psychologists have identified the way that feelings of loneliness fit in with a broad set of other feelings and states, including self-esteem, anxiety, anger, sadness, optimism, and shyness. Psychological research suggests that feelings of loneliness occur when there is a discrepancy between our desire for connection to others and the actual connections we have. This research has focused on the subjective perception of being alone, but feeling lonely is not the same thing. While studies have shown, unsurprisingly, that having a good friend can decrease loneliness, what has not previously been examined is the effect of the whole social network on our tendency to feel lonely even in a crowd.

Using the same network in which we studied happiness, we examined whether being alone was associated with feeling lonely and whether such feelings could spread.

(#litres_trial_promo) We found that real-world social connections do have an effect on how we feel. People with more friends are less likely to experience loneliness. Each extra friend reduces by about two days the number of days we feel lonely each year. 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. Interestingly, the number of family members has no effect at all. It is not clear why this is the case. Possibly, people in small families know they have a greater responsibility to spend time with one another since there are fewer people to take turns visiting. Or perhaps people in large families primarily feel close to a smaller core of their family, limiting the influence of additional connections. Regardless of the mechanism, it is clear that feelings of loneliness are much more closely tied to our networks of optional social connections than to those handed to us at birth.

Loneliness can actually shape the social network. People who feel lonely all the time will lose about 8 percent of their friends, on average, over two to four years. Lonely people tend to attract fewer friends, but they also tend to name fewer people as friends as well. What this means is that loneliness is both a cause and a consequence of becoming disconnected. Emotions and networks can reinforce each other and create a rich-get-richer cycle that rewards those with the most friends. People with few friends are more likely to become lonely, and this feeling then makes it less likely that they will attract or try to form new social ties.

Our study suggests that physical proximity matters as much for loneliness as it does for happiness. Friends and family who live nearby see each other more often, which should help decrease the likelihood that they feel lonely, but it also makes them more susceptible to one another’s feelings. For example, if a nearby friend has ten extra lonely days a year, it will increase the number of lonely days you experience by about three. If this person is a close friend, then the effect is stronger, and you’ll experience four extra days of loneliness. Loneliness also spreads between next-door neighbors, with ten extra days of loneliness leading to two extra days for the person on the other side of the fence. But neighbors and friends who live more than a mile away do not make each other lonely.

Spouses who live together can affect each other too, but the result is less dramatic. For every ten extra days a person is lonely, his or her spouse will be lonely for just one extra day. And siblings do not appear to affect one another at all (even the ones who live nearby); this provides additional evidence that loneliness is about our relationships to people with whom we choose to connect rather than the relationships we have inherited.

Looking beyond these direct connections, we found that loneliness spreads three degrees, just like happiness. A person’s loneliness depends not only on his friends’ loneliness, but also on his friends’ friends’ and his friends’ friends’ friends’ loneliness. The full network shows that you are about 52 percent more likely to be lonely if a person you are directly connected to (at one degree of separation) is lonely. The effect for people at two degrees of separation is 25 percent, and for people at three degrees of separation, it is about 15 percent. At four degrees of separation the effect disappears, in keeping with the Three Degrees of Influence Rule.

Finally, we observed an extraordinary pattern at the edge of the social network. At the periphery, people have fewer friends; this makes them lonely, but this also tends to drive them to cut the few ties that they have left. But before they do, they may infect their friends with the same feeling of loneliness, starting the cycle anew. These reinforcing effects mean that our social fabric can fray at the edges, like a strand of yarn that comes loose from the sleeve of a sweater. If we are concerned about combating the feeling of loneliness in our society, we should aggressively target the people at the periphery with interventions to repair their social networks. By helping them, we can create a protective barrier against loneliness that will keep the whole network from unraveling.

Feeling in Love

The psychology of emotions such as happiness and loneliness sheds light on the formation and dissolution of ties in social networks. In fact, human sensibilities such as anger, sadness, grief, and love all operate in the service of social ties. One can be angry at nature or saddened by a forest fire or love a pet, but these emotions have their origin and find their fullest expression in the anger, sadness, or love one feels in the setting of interpersonal relationships.

People the world over have different ideas, beliefs, and opinions—different thoughts—but they have very similar, if not identical, feelings. And they have similar responses to feelings in others, preferring happy friends to depressed ones, kind friends to mean ones, and loving friends to violent ones. A whole range of emotions can spread, from anger and hatred to anxiety and fear to happiness and loneliness. But there is one emotion central to human experience that we have not yet considered and that is key to understanding social connection: love.

The psychology of love and affection is obviously crucial to an understanding of the formation of social ties between people. As anthropologist Helen Fisher has argued, the sensibility of being in love may be broken down into lust, love, and attachment, all of which likely served evolutionary purposes.

(#litres_trial_promo) The feeling of lust has the obvious goal of driving reproduction—with almost any partner. The feeling of romantic love is something different, of course, and tends to be focused on a particular partner, or at least one partner at a time. From an evolutionary perspective, this allows the individual to conserve precious resources and not waste them in the pursuit of several objects of affection. The feeling of attachment, and the secure tie to another person that it represents, may have evolved to allow parents to jointly care for their young, which also has evolutionary advantages.

In chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo), we will discuss the role of natural selection in human social networks in more detail, but before we get there it is important to think about the implications of our deepest connections. Aside from the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages, feelings of lust, love, and attachment carry enormous implications for the way we connect to others. The object of one’s affection becomes the “center of one’s universe,” around which all else revolves. People experience intrusive thoughts about their beloved, aggrandize their beloved, are energized by their beloved, and are obviously deeply connected to their beloved. We usually experience such romantic love with just one person at a time. So romantic love does not determine the general organization of social networks. After all, we do not love everyone we know. And the love we have for our parents, children, siblings, and other relations is a different kind of feeling. Yet, as we will see in the next chapter, being in love is a key mechanism by which certain important social ties are formed, and it is therefore highly relevant to the origin—and function—of social networks.

CHAPTER 3 Love the One You’re With (#ulink_3adb751f-50e4-54b8-a484-4991a82c60a6)

Nicholas and his wife, Erika, like to joke that they had an arranged marriage, South Asia style. Though they lived within four blocks of each other for two years and were both students at Harvard, their paths never crossed. Erika had to go all the way to Bangladesh so that Nicholas could find her. In the summer of 1987, he went to Washington, DC, where he had grown up and gone to high school, to care for his ailing mother. He was a medical student, single, and, he foolishly thought, not ready for a serious relationship. His old high-school friend, Nasi, was also home for the summer. Nasi’s girlfriend, Bemy, who had come to know Nicholas well enough that her gentle teasing was a source of amusement for all of them, was also there. She had, as it turned out, just returned from a year in rural Bangladesh, doing community development work.

In the waterlogged village where Bemy had spent her year abroad was a beautiful young American woman with whom she shared a burning desire to end poverty and a metal bucket to wash her hair. You probably know where this story is going. One afternoon, in the middle of the monsoon, while writing a postcard to Nasi, Bemy suddenly turned to her friend Erika and blurted out: “I just thought of the man you’re going to marry.” That man was Nicholas. Erika was incredulous. But months later, she agreed to meet him in DC, when the four of them had dinner at Nasi’s house. Nicholas was of course immediately smitten. Erika was “not unimpressed,” as she later put it. That night, after getting home, Erika woke up her sister to announce that she had, indeed, met the man she was going to marry. Three dates later, Nicholas told Erika he was in love. And that is how he came to marry a woman who was three degrees removed from him all along, who had practically lived next door, who had never known him before but who was just perfect for him.

Such stories—with varying degrees of complexity and romance—occur all the time in our society. In fact, a simple Google search for “how I met my wife” and “how I met my husband” turns up thousands of narratives, lovingly preserved on the Internet. They can be short, such as this one: “How did I meet my husband? At a bar. He was a friend of the scummy boyfriend, soon-to-be-husband of my best friend (yes, they’re divorced). I was introduced to him in a bar…hooked up…and we’re still together, and married…while my best friend isn’t!”

Or the stories can be more involved: “I drove into the valley of Yosemite National Park sometime after the sun went down with my two girlfriends and a pitbull. I had worked there the two summers before and was preparing for another season. When we stepped out of the car, it was freezing, and we had to trudge through a foot of snow up to our friend’s cabin. He wasn’t home but had left a note directing us to another cabin. We were wet up to our calves by the time we reached it, and I felt uncomfortable knocking on a stranger’s door. Luckily, our friend opened up and invited us in to his friend’s cabin. He made introductions, and I must’ve seemed rude because I ran to the heater and turned my back to the room. Somehow, the occupancy level diminished without me realizing it, and I ended up sitting on a bed opposite my future husband. He reminded me of a young Dave Matthews. His southern accent was charming, and those eyes…God, those eyes. We talked well into the night until my friend, who had settled into a bed near me, sighed and begged for us to leave. I thanked him for having us, and he said, ‘Well, now you know where I live so drop in anytime.’ Back in the cold Sierra night, we giggled all the way down to the parking lot where I turned to my girlfriends and said those fateful words, ‘I’m going to marry that man!’ Two years and five months later, I did.”

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How I Met My Partner

The romantic essence of these stories is that they seem to involve both luck and destiny. But, if you think about it, these meetings aren’t so chancy. What these stories really have in common is that the future partners started out with two or three degrees of separation between them before the gap was inexorably closed.

The romantic ideal of finding a partner often also involves the sense that you have the right “chemistry” with your intended or that the two of you fall in love for mysterious, inexplicable reasons. We think of falling in love as something deeply personal and hard to explain. Indeed, most Americans believe that their choice of a partner is really no one else’s business. Some people select their partners impulsively and spontaneously; others quite deliberately. Either way, partner choice is typically seen as a personal decision. This view of relationships is consistent with our general tendency to see major life decisions as individual choices. We like to believe that we are at the helm of our ship, charting an entirely new course, no matter how choppy the seas. It’s surprising and maybe even disappointing to discover that we are in fact sailing through well-traveled shipping lanes using universal navigational tools.

Because we are so sure of our individual power to make decisions, we lose sight of the extraordinary degree to which our choice of a partner is determined by our surroundings and, in particular, by our social network. This also helps to explain the romantic appeal of stories involving putatively chance encounters, for they seem to suggest that forces larger than ourselves are at work, and that romance with a particular, unknown person is predestined and magical. Now, we are not suggesting there isn’t something amazing about meeting the love of your life after trudging through the snow at Yosemite or washing your hair in a bucket in Bangladesh. It’s just that those magical moments are not as random as we might think.

Consider some systematic data about how people meet their partners. The National Survey of Health and Social Life, also quaintly known as the Chicago Sex Survey, studied a national sample of 3,432 people aged eighteen to fifty-nine in 1992 and provides one of the most complete and accurate descriptions of romantic and sexual behavior in the United States.

(#litres_trial_promo) It contains detailed information about partner choice, sexual practices, psychological traits, health measures, and so on. It also includes a type of data that is surprisingly very rare, namely, how and where people actually met their current sexual partners. The table shows who introduced couples in different kinds of relationships.

Who introduced the couple?

The introducers here did not necessarily intend for the two people they introduced to become partners, but the introduction nevertheless had this effect. Roughly 68 percent of the people in the study met their spouses after being introduced by someone they knew, while only 32 percent met via “self-introduction.” Even for short-term sexual partners like one-night stands, 53 percent were introduced by someone else. So while chance encounters between strangers do happen, and while people sometimes find their partners without assistance, the majority of people find spouses and partners by meeting friends of friends and other people to whom they are loosely connected.

While friends were a source of introduction for all kinds of sexual partnerships at roughly the same rate (35–40%), family members were much more likely to introduce people to their future spouses than to future one-night stands. And how people meet is also relevant to how quickly they have sex. In the Chicago study, those who met their partners through their friends were slightly more likely to have sex within a month of meeting than those who met through family members. A similar study conducted in France found that couples who met at a nightclub were much more likely to have sex within a month (45 percent) than those who met at, say, a family gathering (24 percent), which is not surprising since one typically does not have sex in mind at family events.

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These data suggest that people might use different strategies to find partners for different kinds of relationships. Maybe people ask family members for introductions to possible marriage partners and rely on their own resources to meet short-term partners. This makes intuitive sense: most drunken college students are not texting their mothers to see if they should invite that cute stranger at the bar home for the night. So, what you get when searching your network depends in part on where you are looking and what you are looking for.

However, it is clear that people rely heavily on friends and family for all kinds of relationships. When you meet a new person on your own, you only have information about yourself. In contrast, when others introduce you to someone new, they have information about both you and your potential partner, and sometimes they play the role of matchmaker (consciously or not) by encouraging meetings between people they think will get along. Friends and family are likely to know your personalities, social backgrounds, and job histories, and they also know important details such as your tendency to leave underwear on the floor or to send roses. The socially brokered introduction is less risky and more informative than going it alone, which is one reason people have relied on introductions for thousands of years.

Yet in most modern societies, we generally have a negative view of arranged marriages, and we cannot possibly imagine what it would be like to marry a stranger. Well-meaning friends and relatives who nosily interfere in our lives to help us find partners are seen as comic figures, like Yente in Fiddler on the Roof. But, in fact, our friends, relatives, and coworkers typically take on a matchmaking role only when they think we are having trouble finding a partner on our own. And as it turns out, our social network functions quite efficiently as matchmaker, even when we insist we are acting out our own private destiny.

The structure of naturally occurring social networks is perfectly suited to generate lots of leads. In networks such as bucket brigades and phone trees, there are only a limited number of people within a few degrees of separation from any one person. But in most natural social networks, there are thousands. As we discussed in chapter 1 (#u3bfc2f77-1cce-5f27-adf5-ae189eb589b0), if you know twenty people (well enough that they would invite you to a party), and each of them knows twenty other people, and so on, then you are connected to eight thousand people who are three degrees away. If you are single, one of all these people is likely to be your future spouse.

Of course, random encounters can sometimes bring strangers together, especially when incidental physical contact is involved. These happy accidents are frequently used as plot devices in romantic stories, whether it’s two people grabbing the same pair of gloves in Serendipity, an umbrella taken by mistake after a concert in Howard’s End, or dogs getting their leashes entangled in 101 Dalmatians. 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. Good flirts are able to turn such happenstance into real opportunities. And the best flirts may even be able to contrive an “accident” in order to meet someone: they make their own luck. But these are the exceptions more than the rule. And it is noteworthy that even these meetings of strangers involve some degree of shared interest, whether in clothing, music, or pets, for instance.

Even when people meet on their own, without help from mutual contacts, there is a social preselection process that influences the kinds of people they are likely to run into in the first place. For example, the Chicago Sex Survey also collected data on where Americans met their partners. Sixty percent of the people in the study met their spouses at places like school, work, a private party, church, or a social club—all of which tend to involve people who share characteristics. Ten percent met their spouses at a bar, through a personal ad, or at a vacation spot, where there is more diversity but still a limited range of types of people who might be available to become future spouses.

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