He links at the top of this article to another piece he wrote for Wired, so I thought I would include that article here as well.Social Determinism
Posted on: September 28, 2009 6:32 PM, by Jonah Lehrer
In my essay on social networks and research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, I describe a few of the striking medical effects produced by social networks:
By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a remarkable discovery: Obesity spread like a virus. Weight gain had a stunning infection rate. If one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 171 percent. (This means that the network is far more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition.)A similar pattern appears when the researchers looked at the spread of smoking, loneliness and happiness. In each instance, the social network appeared to be a major causal factor, determining whether or not someone was able to quite cigarettes or experience lasting happiness. The reality, then, appears straightforward: our friends strongly shape our behavior. We imagine ourselves as individuals, responsible for our own choices and emotions, but that sense of independence is a romantic myth. There is no wall between people.
At first glance, there is something very troubling about this data. It seems to undermine a central pillar of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which each of us is responsible for our own sins and blessings and behavior. (The criminal justice system, after all, doesn't judge the group or sentence the collective - it puts the individual on trial.) Given the power of social networks, shouldn't we just give up on all the self-improvement? After all, why diet when we still have overweight friends? Why try to quit smoking when our colleagues still light up? Why try to make ourselves happier when we're married to an unhappy person? Sometimes, it can seem like a slippery slope from social networks to nihilism.
But I think that attitude get's the real import of this research exactly backwards. Sure, our social network is important (although not so important that our will is irrelevant). What we all too easily forget, however, is that we're also part of a social network, which means that if we lose weight then it's easier for our neighbors to lose weight, and that if we quit smoking than everyone we know is also more likely to quit smoking. Being socially connected, in other words, makes us more responsible for our actions, not less. Here's how James Fowler put it during our interview:
Everyone always tells me that this research is so depressing and that it means we don't have free will. But I think they're forgetting to look at the flipside. Because of social networks, your actions aren't just having an impact on what you do, or on what your friends do, but on thousands of other people too. So if I go home and I make an effort to be in a good mood, I'm not just making my wife happy, or my children happy. I'm also making the friends of my children happy. My choices have a ripple effect.That reminds me of the wonderful story told by Desmund Tutu:
The biggest defining moment in my life was when I saw Trevor Huddleston (the former president of the anti-apartheid movement), and I was maybe nine or so. My mother at this time was working as a cook in a school for blind, black blind people. And she was cooking for the women in this institution, and I was standing with my mother on the veranda when a white man went past wearing a long black cassock - he was a priest - and as he strut past, he did something that I found striking. He doffed his hat to my mother. And I, I was just surprised that a white man should do that to a woman, black woman, who was a simple domestic worker.Because we're social animals, trapped in a dense web of relationships, even a mere tip of the hat can change a life.
The Buddy System: How Medical Data Revealed Secret to Health and Happiness
A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Started in 1948, the ongoing project has revealed many of the risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, including smoking and hypertension.
In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn't care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: The original Framingham researchers noted each participant's close friends, colleagues, and family members.
"They asked for follow-up purposes," Christakis says. "If someone moved away, the researchers would call their friends and try to track them down."
Christakis and Fowler realized that this obsolete list of references could be transformed into a detailed map of human relationships. Because two-thirds of all Framingham adults participated in the first phase of the study, and their children and children's children in subsequent phases, almost the entire social network of the community was chronicled on these handwritten sheets. It took almost five years to extract the data—the handwriting was often illegible—but the scientists eventually constructed a detailed atlas of associations in which every connection was quantified.
The two researchers thought the Framingham social network might demonstrate how relationships directly influence behavior and thus health and happiness. Since the study had tracked its subjects' weight for decades, Christakis and Fowler first analyzed obesity. Clicking through the years, they watched the condition spread to nearly 40 percent of the population. Fowler shows me an animation of their study—30 years of data reduced to 108 seconds of shifting circles and lines. Each circle represents an individual. Size is proportional to body mass index; yellow indicates obesity. "This woman is about to get big," Fowler says. "And look at this cluster. They all gain weight at about the same time."
Obesity: Fat By Association 
Smoking: Together We Quit, Divided We Fail 
Happiness: Joy Is Contagious, Offline and on the NetRead the rest of this article (includes cool graphics that won't reproduce here).
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