The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (14 page)

So which teenagers are able to resist the pressure to have unprotected sex early on? The ones who are deeply embedded in tightly woven face-to-face social networks, according to Regnerus. Those teenagers with close relationships to friends and family (who also have close relationships with each other) are more likely to get the social support they need to delay sex until they’re ready. As Margaret Talbot writes, “close-knit families make a difference. Teenagers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.”
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BEING THERE

As we’ve seen, the process of social contagion begins with mimicry: sensing what other people are doing in real time and unconsciously doing it too. Like the chimps who “aped” their tree-signaling buddies, you have to be in close proximity for synchrony to happen. Online networks can mobilize people’s votes and political protests can spread via Twitter and Facebook, as was the case during the astounding transformations of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. But even if the images and invitations to participate were transmitted electronically, the protests happened face-to-face. Anyone who saw the mobs, the tent cities, and the riot police knows that the expression “You had to be there” still holds. The tweets, digital photos, and messages inflamed people, invoking them to join in. But if the political activity had only taken place in the virtual world, those protest movements would have been emasculated.

The same is true for other types of behavioral contagion. Being there in person means you’re more likely to be so deeply affected
by someone’s emotional state that you’ll do something about it. And the closer your relationship to someone, the more infectious his happiness—and also his frustration and despair. Which is to say that not all social contagion is for the good. Nowhere is this more evident than when neurological symptoms spread from person to person within tightly knit social groups. When several close friends who have been in face-to-face contact with each other come down with mysterious symptoms—tics, fainting, nervous laughter, dizziness, headaches, nausea—that have no clear physiological causes, emotional contagion is usually the culprit.

Sometimes such events can seem almost comical. In January 1962, when three teenage girls near Lake Victoria, Tanzania, started laughing uncontrollably, it wasn’t taken very seriously. But within months their mirthless laughter had ignited an epidemic of giggling, spread via face-to-face contact with other students throughout the Lake Victoria district. Ultimately 217 teenagers were affected, most of them girls. Their infectious laughter closed down four schools in three different villages. “The epidemic was no laughing matter,” the social scientists James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis write in their book,
Connected
. Like other cases of mass hysteria, this one provoked paranoia about environmental toxins. But lab tests, medical exams, and environmental assays found nothing suspicious in the lake, the groundwater, the school, or the girls’ bodies.
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In October 2011, a seventeen-year-old cheerleader named Katie Krautwurst, from a small town in western New York, woke up with a violent facial tic; her muscle spasms were out of control. Katie was still being plagued by tics when her best friend, Thera Sanchez, captain of the girls’ cheerleading squad, woke from a nap stuttering and unable to keep her arms and head from jerking spasmodically. Throughout their ordeal, the two friends remained close. “They spoke in shorthand and overlapping sentences,” Susan Dominus wrote in the
New York Times
, noting this comment from Thera: “Katie told me that she wouldn’t wish tics on anyone, but if it had
to be someone, she was glad she was going through it with her best friend.” Two weeks later, another friend from the same high school, Lydia Parker, started humming and swinging her arms uncontrollably, once unintentionally bashing her face with her cellphone. By January 2012, eighteen students from a single small-town New England high school, seventeen of them girls, were twitching, humming, and jerking their limbs.

With understandable dismay, the members of this working-class community saw their teenagers’ strange behavior attract national attention.
Dr. Drew
and the
Today Show
featured live footage of the bruised faces of the flailing girls, whose symptoms worsened with all the media coverage. The frightened parents turned to concrete villains—environmental contamination from a now defunct Jell-O factory, or from natural gas wells near the school. But the real culprits turned out to be more subtle. In this formerly prosperous but now struggling community, most of the biological fathers were absent. An unusual number of families were headed by single mothers—more than the national average—and these mothers worked long hours, often leaving younger siblings in the teens’ care.

There were other stresses, too. Suffering from a painful chronic illness, Katie’s mother had yet another operation in a series of surgeries the week before her daughter’s tics appeared. Thera had epilepsy. Lydia’s father had been abusive. As with other epidemics of psychogenic illness, there was no evidence of environmental contamination or viral illness. Yet the girls were neither faking nor malingering. Instead, through a kind of instinctive empathy built through common experience and unconscious synchrony, they were expressing as a group what none of them was able to voice on her own.

Psychologists call such behavior “conversion disorder”—the involuntary conversion of psychological symptoms into physical ones—or the Victorian-sounding “mass hysteria.”
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While witch hunts, and worse, were the most common responses to mass hysteria in the seventeenth century, recently social scientists are
more likely to see these epidemics as one way in which tightly bonded groups transmit common feelings of anxiety and stress among their members. Like a flock of geese rising into the air at the sound of the first gunshot, panic can hit a group of closely connected people, binding their behavior together in alarming ways. It’s the village effect gone wild.

I
n the first two chapters we saw how face-to-face social contact prompts some of the good things in life, such as health, happiness, and longevity. In the previous chapter it was a mixed bag; if gait, teen pregnancy, and tics can be contagious, then social contact is not always a force for good. The latest evidence on that score is as intriguing as it is controversial. In 2007, two academics living on opposite American coasts, physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis, in Boston, and political scientist James Fowler, in San Diego, published a study in the
New England Journal of Medicine
that rocked the research world. Already interested in the social transmission of longevity (Christakis) and of political leanings (Fowler), they happened on a rich source of data: the Framingham Heart Study, which had been tracking the health status and habits of all the residents of a Boston suburb since the late 1940s. Intended to be an investigation of cardiovascular health, the study had gone on so long that the grandchildren of the original subjects were now taking part, providing priceless data about the genetic blueprint of the disease.

But what was most valuable to Fowler and Christakis was that each research subject had named one social contact. If, in the future, the study’s organizers needed to track a subject down, that person would be the one to call. The nomination had to be a good
indicator of social intimacy, Christakis and Fowler thought. Already armed with knowledge about their subjects’ spouses and family members, they realized they could plumb how people’s social networks had evolved over several decades and draw parallels to any changes in their health. Obesity, smoking, alcoholism, depression, and happiness were just some of the behaviors and traits they thought might be socially transmissible.

How did Christakis and Fowler get hooked on this idea of contagion in the first place? Both men were deeply curious about the way trends spread through human networks. They were lucky in happening on the Framingham data. They also spent many hours on Skype talking to each other and to other colleagues. Plus … did I mention that a matchmaker was involved? Christakis, a scholarly George Clooney lookalike, was introduced to the sunny, boyish Fowler by the latter’s doctoral supervisor. The supervisor didn’t know what to do with Fowler’s thesis on how social networks influenced political beliefs. When he heard Christakis give a talk about how social networks were implicated in the widowhood effect (when husbands die soon after their wives do), he put the two researchers together. At least a dozen scientific articles and a book later, they are still collaborating, and have been referred to as the Batman and Robin of social science.

As the Framingham data set predated popular use of the Internet, there were no wireless networks, Facebook friends, texts, or tweets to track. But the data did include 5,124 offspring of the original Framingham subjects, who had been assessed every four years, from 1971 to 2003. Like the residents of Villagrande, many of them were connected to one another in multiple ways—as relatives, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. To investigate the impact of their relationships, Christakis and Fowler plumbed the nature of their overlapping social contacts, which added up to 12,067 subjects with 38,600 ties linking them together. It wasn’t just the size of a small town, it
was
a small town. Most of these people had been
checking in with their doctors for decades, getting weighed and measured and reporting on what they ate and drank, on the status of their marriage, and their moods—all the while providing the name of that one important Framingham-based social contact (the nominated person had to live in Framingham), even switching that person for someone else as relationships changed.

It was a new approach to an old idea. When John Donne wrote, “No man is an island” in the early 1600s, the field of social neuroscience didn’t exist. Nor had scientists come up with a way to measure the effect of human bonds 230 years later, when Reverend Henry Melvill wrote the lines I’ve used as the epigraph for this book: “A thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men.” One hundred and fifty years later, the researchers hoped those fibers could be made visible.

With a little help from a few Intel processors, not to mention a legion of research assistants entering and analyzing data, the contents of dozens of dusty file boxes confirmed the researchers’ hunches: behaviors related to health and happiness can sweep through populations the way epidemics do. Over time, health
problems such as obesity and alcoholism seemed to travel from person to person within identifiable cliques. In other words, becoming dangerously overweight could be contagious within real social networks, much the way a bad cold gets passed along with the bean salad at a potluck supper.

John McColgan’s second-degree sociogram, which includes his friends, as well as the friends of his friends
. (Image and Figure Credits
4.1
)

Here, then, was a paradox. On the one hand, socializing with friends can help you fight off loneliness and chronic illness. But on the other, close relationships, especially to certain people, can trash your self-control, making you fatter than you would have been if you’d been left to your own devices.

ARE YOUR FRIENDS MAKING YOU FAT?

Christakis and Fowler’s findings came as a surprise to experts who thought that unbridled appetites, supersized portions, “fat genes,” and sedentary habits were the main causes of our ballooning midriffs. By 2012 two-thirds of Americans were overweight and a third of them were obese—73 million adults and 13 million kids—as were a quarter of all Canadian and British citizens. Apparently this wasn’t just because there was a fast-food joint on every corner and not enough time, money, or motivation to exercise and prepare healthy meals. According to this new research, it was also because obesity is contagious. If your best friend or sister, or even your best friend’s sister packed on the pounds, you’d be more likely to put on weight too.
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