Social Machinery

It seems our social graph can influence are life in a much deeper way than we think. As social networks like Face book, Twitter and Myspace start reaching a massive audience researchers are discovering how powerful the influence that our digital connections can have over our lives.

Nicholas Christakis, a physician and Harvard University sociologist who is co-author of a new book, connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives found that social networks can influence our state of mind and moods.

In their latest study,  Christakis demonstrated that social networks are governed by what he call “three degrees of influence” — that is, your friend’s friend’s friend, most likely someone you don’t even know — who indirectly influences your actions and emotions. 

In the research,  they have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. They found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.

This might look low, but just as a comparison having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by just 2%.

In summary, happiness, is not just a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon.  As Christakis said “In many ways, human beings behave like flocks of birds or schools of fish”  

The study gives a very interesting perspective to social networking and to our digital life. Most of the time we think this is a very individualistic domain but in fact is a collective phenomenon that can influence important parts of our lives.