The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (10 page)

In his book about the nun study, Snowdon concludes that, alongside their “deep spirituality,” the real reason these women lived so much longer was their powerful sense of belonging.

THE VILLAGE EFFECT

Clearly, it is not only what individuals do on their own steam that matters. Where they live is crucial, and not just because some neighborhoods are posher. Economists dub our connections to friends, neighbors, and co-workers “social capital,” which is the knowledge and mutual trust captured in our relationships. Unlike the tally of one’s Facebook friends, social capital is hardly noticeable to outsiders. Still, it brings real benefits. One evening in 2006, my mother and I were visiting my father in the hospital, where he had just been admitted for treatment of lymphoma. On our way out, we bumped into the mother of one of my son’s elementary school classmates. Ruth was a nurse on the ward, and after we exchanged greetings, she offered to check in on my father during her overnight shift. If something concerned her she would phone me during the night, she promised, tucking my phone number into the pocket of her nurse’s smock. This interaction took just a few seconds, but in an environment where medical errors cause more than 100,000 deaths a year, it could well have saved my father’s life. Happily, he survived his lymphoma, in no small measure due to a lifetime of social capital.

Surprisingly, face-to-face social capital in a neighborhood can predict who lives and who dies even more powerfully than whether the area is rich or poor. In 2003, when several Harvard epidemiologists put nearly 350 Chicago neighborhoods under the microscope, they discovered that social capital—as measured by reciprocity, trust,
and civic participation—was linked to a community’s death rates. The higher the levels of social capital, the lower its mortality rates, and not just from violent crime but from heart disease too.
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Clearly the
place
makes a difference to your health: some locales foster more trusting relationships.

But places can also foster hostility toward outsiders. In tightly knit villages such as Villagrande, the powerful sense of cohesion is counterbalanced by an equally powerful distrust of outsiders—including hostility toward residents of neighboring towns, say, two valleys over. Having spent the equivalent of two years in the 1990s researching daily life in Villagrande, McGill University anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman concluded that the Sardinians living in adjacent towns were always seen as “rivals and potential enemies.” Having trusted only themselves for centuries, even the arrival of local police stations in the nineties was seen as a form of meddling. The response, Salzman writes, was “social isolation of members of the Carabinieri [police officers] and the frequent and repeated shooting and bombings of Carabinieri stations, cars and homes, and even individuals, at least one of which happens every day.”
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Describing a similarly insular mining town in Ukraine, Russian-born American Keith Gessen writes that “when you leave the house in Donetsk, you bring a knife, in case you run into someone you know.”
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Just because you know him doesn’t mean that you’re from the same town, or that you trust him.

BEING THERE

Most of us wouldn’t choose to live as cloistered nuns or Sardinian villagers, even if their lifestyles do confer an extra decade or two. But it’s worth considering the social nature of these places for a moment. How do they compare to what happens in mainstream societies as people age? In the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, for example, life is closer to the vision of American comedian George Burns, who quipped that “happiness is having a large, loving, caring,
close-knit family … in another city.” There are advantages to this vision, of course. One of them is that geographic distance safeguards the much-vaunted value of independence at every stage of adult life and promotes a type of personal freedom that is so emblematic of the American dream. When Alex Perchov, the comic antihero of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel
Everything Is Illuminated
, strives to leave Ukraine for the United States, he’s trying to escape Soviet-era privations and provincialism, to be sure, but also his mother, who tells him, “One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”
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The no-strings-attached Western ideal creates gaps in intimacy that, despite the miracle of Skype, are not being bridged by technology. In the United States, more than sixty-two million people—equal to the entire population of the United Kingdom—say they are socially isolated and unhappy about it. More than half of them (thirty-two million) live alone, the highest proportion in the nation’s history. Indeed, the rate of Americans living alone has been rising every decade since the early twentieth century. Whereas 1 percent of the American population lived alone in 1920, over 10 percent did in 2010, according to American census data, which tracks an increase in solo living of more than 300 percent in the past forty years. Many of those living solo are divorced and widowed seniors. While a quarter of American men over seventy-five now live alone, fully half of all women that age do, many of them having outlived their spouses.
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This is not just an American phenomenon. In Britain, a third of all adults now live alone, and a record number of Canadians, especially those over sixty-five, are now on their own too.
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The uptick of solitary living means that in Canada, the United States, and every European Union country, greater swaths of the population are waking, eating, and sleeping without in-the-flesh human contact. And while living alone doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re lonely, it does mean that, like it or not, you have less physical
proximity to other human beings whom you care about and who have an interest in your survival—fewer impromptu conversations, fewer shared puns and jokes, and, of course, less physical contact.
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Just as people who are married have more sex than single people (proximity counts for something, after all), people who are solitary are deprived of the daily pats, hugs, and eye contact that primates have been communicating with for at least sixty million years.
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Reading people’s feelings and intentions from their faces and showing trust by touching them are crucial interactions that we humans and all group-living mammals crave. When Helen Boardman, a centenarian from Illinois, was interviewed by a Chicago public radio producer about the prerequisites for living a long, long life, she zeroed in on companionship and physical closeness. For her, this meant continuing to make new friends as she lost old ones, even falling in love again at age ninety. She married the man in question a few years later, telling the producer, “I enjoy having his arms around me, just as much as I did when I was twenty. You never get tired of that. And you miss it when you don’t have it.”
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Could it be that close physical contact with romantic partners, friends, and children fosters the physical resilience that helped keep Helen Boardman and Teresa Cabiddu alive for more than a hundred years? This is not as farfetched as it sounds. Oxytocin and vasopressin, two neuropeptides that are secreted into the bloodstream when we form and maintain meaningful relationships, help damp down stress and heal wounds. A number of animal experiments show that oxytocin boosts immunity and recovery, and as we saw in the previous chapter, evidence is emerging that this rule holds for humans too.

THE TERMITES

In 1921 a controversial California psychologist, Lewis Terman, began following the life trajectories of 1,528 eleven-year-olds born near San Francisco and Los Angeles, who were soon dubbed “the Termites.” He and subsequent researchers tracked their lives from
late childhood until death. Born around 1910, they intrigued me because their birthdates roughly matched those of the Sardinian centenarians I’d studied. Far fewer of the Termites lived to the age of one hundred than the Blue Zone Sardinians (0.3 percent of the Termites lived to that age, compared to more than 4 percent of the Sardinians).
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Still, the lessons drawn from their life stories echo the Sardinian picture.

Since he was mainly interested in top classroom performers, Terman didn’t survey typical Americans. Instead, he chose to study exceptionally bright kids. More than two-thirds of his research sample were middle-class
WASPS
—one reason why his work has been controversial.
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He tested their IQs and followed their school progress closely. But he and a tag team of successors also shone the spotlight on the kids’ family backgrounds, their physical and mental health as they grew up, their stress levels, and ultimately their sex and marital lives, career choices, and political and religious beliefs. The researchers kept up this intrusive level of inquiry for the next eighty-odd years, accumulating a treasure trove of correlations (the project is still going, having been handed off to the next generation of researchers). Not all of what was revealed was pretty, bringing to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aphorism “Sorrow makes us all children again—destroys all differences of intellect.” Slightly fewer of these bright students survived to the age of one hundred than other Americans born in 1910, and the ones who did were more likely to be women.
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Still, in this teeming mountain of data, Terman’s first concern was giftedness, and he was able to show that these talented kids didn’t conform to the stereotype of the era: the super-smart kid as the neurotic, bespectacled, antisocial nerd. In fact, his subjects were as healthy and sociable as their peers. This wasn’t the only myth shattered by the Termites. In their 2011 book
The Longevity Project
, University of California psychologists Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin use the Termites’ life stories to destroy some of our most
cherished old wives’ tales about what it takes to live a long, long time. They summarized some of their findings as follows:

So what
does
promote health and longevity, according to Friedman and Martin? Conscientiousness and hard work, combined with a large, active network of family, friends, and community ties—people whom you help and who help you. If you want to live a long, healthy life, worrying and working hard won’t kill you.
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But doing it alone just might.

HISTORY OF AN IDEA

As long ago as 1979, Lisa Berkman and Leonard Syme, epidemiologists in Berkeley, California, discovered that a community’s social bonds accurately predicted its mortality rates. By analyzing the results of a standard survey they devised, they could tell someone’s fortune based on how many times the person purposely met up with other people face-to-face. Among the nearly seven thousand residents from Alameda County who participated in the study, the people most likely to survive to old age were those with solid face-to-face relationships: they were married, they got together frequently with friends and family, they belonged to a religious group, or they had a regular social commitment such as choir practice, a hiking group, or a bridge club.
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Each of these factors individually predicted mortality, independently of how healthy, well-to-do, or
physically fit these Californians were. Interestingly, the protective effect of one social bond could pinch-hit for another. If you weren’t happily married but had lots of close buddies, your prognosis might still be good. And if you were happily married but didn’t see your friends all that much, that close relationship with your spouse could also protect you. The life-threatening risks surfaced in people who were disconnected on multiple fronts—people who were lonely.

Fast-forward thirty-one years to 2010, when Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University in Utah, along with two colleagues, examined 148 longitudinal studies about relationships and mortality—which was like summarizing the diaries of about 309,000 people over seven and a half years. That’s a lot of data, and when the researchers crunched it all, they were astonished to learn that those who were integrated into their communities had half the risk of dying over the course of the seven years as those who led more solitary lives. Similar to Berkman and Syme’s first study, those who experienced various kinds of social contact increased their odds of survival—not just by a little, but by 91 percent, nearly doubling their odds of dodging the ultimate bullet for a long while. It wasn’t simply a question of living alone, or being married or single. What was important was being a part of a community in more ways than one—not just by being happily married, not only by belonging to clubs and groups, but by being involved in several of these activities and relationships at the same time. That feeling of belonging had to come from interacting with people you really know, in what the researchers called “naturally occurring” social relationships. The longevity-inducing contact didn’t come from support groups, hired minions, or non-human sources, whether digital devices, a higher power, or pets.
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Among those 309,000 subjects, a person who sustained different kinds of relationships was more likely to live a long life than one who had lost a lot of weight, had flu shots, quit smoking, or breathed unpolluted air.