Don’t forget your friends’ friends.
I found a great article on New Scientist the other day by Michael Bond, How Your Friends’ Friend Affect YOur Mood
Here are some excerpts:
“Christakis … found that a person’s happiness is dependent not only on the happiness of an immediate friend but - to a lesser degree - on the happiness of their friend’s friend, and their friend’s friend’s friend. Furthermore, someone’s chances of being happy increase the better connected they are to happy people, and for that matter the better connected their friends and family.”
“Two factors appear crucial: the frequency of social contact, and the strength of the relationship. This is not too surprising: we know that emotional contagion requires physical proximity. It is also likely that the closer we feel to someone, the more empathetic we are towards them, and the more likely we are to catch their emotional state. However, how these two factors play out in day-to-day interactions is uncertain. What is also unclear - because it has never been properly tested - is the extent to which emotions can propagate through virtual networks, where the opportunity for physiological mimicry is much reduced.”
Networks of Influence: New Scientist
“All this poses a key question: how can something like happiness be contagious? Some researchers think one of the most likely mechanisms is empathetic mimicry. Psychologists have shown that people unconsciously copy the facial expressions, manner of speech, posture, body language and other behaviours of those around them, often with remarkable speed and accuracy. This then causes them, through a kind of neural feedback, to actually experience the emotions associated with the particular behaviour they are mimicking.”
“However, neighbours have no influence, and how far away you live from a friend counts for little, which implies that obesity spreads via a different mechanism to happiness. Rather than behavioural mimicry, the key appears to be the adoption of social norms. … One similarity with happiness is that friends and relatives have a far greater influence if they are of the same gender.”
“Christakis has found that with happiness, obesity and smoking habits, the effect of other people’s behaviour carries to three degrees of separation and no further. He speculates that this could be the case with most or perhaps all transmissible traits. Why three degrees? One theory is that friendship networks are inherently unstable because peripheral friends tend to drop away. “While your friends are likely to be the same a year from now, your friends of friends of friends of friends are likely to be entirely different people,” says Christakis.”
“This poses the question: what shapes the architecture of our social networks and our position in them? Clearly, many factors contribute: where we live, where we work, family size, education, religion, income, our interests, and our tendency to gravitate towards people similar to us.
The study compared the social networks of identical and fraternal twins, and found that identical twins had significantly more similar social networks than fraternal twins, suggesting the structure of your social network is influenced by your genes.
…” That’s mysterious: how could our genes determine our actual location in this socio-topological space?”
Duncan Watts at Columbia University has shown that seeding localised social groups with certain ideas or behaviours can lead to the ideas cascading across entire global networks. This contradicts the notion - promoted by the author Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and others - that social epidemics depend on a few key influential individuals from whom everyone else takes their cue. It doesn’t ring true, argues Watts, because such “influentials” typically interact with only a few people. The key for the spread of anything, he says, from happiness to the preference for a particular song, is a critical mass of interconnected individuals who influence one another.”
My mind wanders to wondering:
When will social networks take on more real life/physical attributes?
Could this contagion be used for ambient learning/therapy for mood disorders?
Will technology ever play on my empathetic mimicry? Will my computer “screen” learn to smile at me to create a happy workplace?
Will search results foresee which way a critical mass of individuals are swaying and predict a trend before the collective can?
Will ads/news reporters “look at” my mimicry to see whether I am affected and alter their message? Will the ad/reporter switch gender to match mine to hold more sway over me?
How will this effect social media marketing? Will we ever be able to watch an emotion spread in real time and buy ad space based on that tracking?
or maybe I’ve been watching too much Minority Report/Blade Runner/(a million other movies…)
oh future. I can haz now? I can haz precog?
Tags: articles, Mindblossom, social networks
April 12th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Guys I ve heard that Inet Bizness booming right now! With all the Newspapers and Radio chanel bancrupt advertisement shifted online! Are you making cash of this web now!
April 14th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
This is very up-to-date information. I think I’ll share it on Facebook.
April 14th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
What’s included in my membership?