Unsurprising science news strikes again — your happiness depends on the happiness of the people who surround you, especially your friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. But is that the whole story?
Political scientist James Fowler and sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, of UCSD and Harvard, analyzed a social network of 4,739 people whose happiness, along with other factors, had been tracked for 20 years. The report their findings in the British Medical Journal:
While there are many determinants of happiness, whether an individual is happy also depends on whether others in the individual’s social network are happy. Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of other happy people. The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network.
So even the happiness of a friend of a friend’s friend can make you happier, they say.
Although Fowler and Christakis are getting a lot of media attention with this story (over 490 online news stories at last check), a related BMJ article is getting less coverage. Reporting in the same issue, economist Ethan Cohen-Cole and assistant professor of public health Jason Fletcher, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Yale University, assessed the value of a different social network and concluded that “Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends to social network effects, especially when environmental confounders are not adequately controlled for in the analysis.”
Props go to Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and TopNews for at least mentioning both stories.
Also, no need to despair if you are unhappy — happy people shouldn’t ditch their unhappy friends just yet, writes population health scientist Peter Sainsbury in an associated commentary in the BMJ. “…Happiness is not everything; unhappy acquaintances may contribute something other than happiness to our lives,” he writes.
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