New studies have shown that good behaviours — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.
“People are connected, and so their health is connected,”
Christakis and Fowler concluded when they summarised
their findings in a July 2007 article in The New England Journal of Medicine.
They had collected information about their willing neighbours in Framingham,
Massachusetts.
The Framingham participants, the data suggested,
influenced one another’s health just by socialising.
And the same was true of
bad behaviours — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with
obesity, unhappiness and smoking.
Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people.
When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends
were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Different-sexed friends
didn’t transmit any obesity to one another at all. If a man became fat, his
female friends were completely unaffected, and vice versa.
With happiness, the two argue that the contagion may
be even more deeply subconscious,
the spread of good or bad feelings, they say,
might be driven partly by “mirror neurons” in the brain that automatically
mimic what we see in the faces of those around us — which is why looking at
photographs of smiling people can itself often lift your mood.
Christakis and Fowler say their findings show that the
gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason:
Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness.
In essence, Christakis and Fowler’s work suggests a
new way to think about public health.
It’s tempting to think, confronted by Christakis and Fowler’s work,
that the best way to improve your life is to simply cut your ties to people
with bad behaviour.
Obviously this is possible; people change their friends
often, sometimes abruptly. But reshaping your social network may be more
challenging than altering your behaviour.
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