The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (42 page)

As in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon—where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average—there may be some truth to this list, but also some wishful thinking. True introverts amount to roughly 25 percent of us, and the evidence shows that they too, need face-to-face contact to be healthy and happy. Though Cain argues that gregariousness should be optional for introverts, the evidence tells us that introverts have a greater risk of dying from cancer, and even an increased susceptibility to catching colds, if they hunker down alone. For example, expressive social activities—talking about your inner world with other people (exactly the kind of thing that introverts often avoid)—are associated with longer survival time in cancer patients. Meanwhile, the more homogeneous social groups that introverts often cultivate are linked to a higher risk of viral infection.
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Being human, introverts still need people. Though they may find it harder to initiate and cultivate relationships, they should consider attending social events with the option of slipping out when they’ve had enough. An introvert I know prefers large gatherings to small ones for precisely this reason. Bob Fynn chose to buy a townhouse in Pleasant Hill because he sees himself as an introvert. “At some point someone did some personality tests [of cohousing residents], “he told me, “and discovered that the overwhelming majority of us are introverts. Extroverts make friends anywhere. But introverts need the help of structure.”

Still, even though we all need face-to-face contact, one size does not fit all when it comes to sociability. Those who tend toward
introversion need a way to control the time, place, and duration of their social contact. With this principle in mind, university administrators should plan for enough single rooms to accommodate introverted college students, for example, instead of assuming that all undergrads want the company of strangers every minute. (This would be a more thoughtful approach not only for the introverts but for their roommates.)

Some people say they feel more competent online than off.
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This is especially true for those on the autistic spectrum. Intuiting others’ internal states from eye contact and context is not their strong suit, which can make social interaction a minefield. As digital forms of expression afford better predictability and control, many people on the autistic spectrum prefer emoticons, social media, and online gaming over the often overwhelming world of face-to-face interaction. Digital technology has proven to be a huge boon to this community, providing hours of entertainment, an outlet for their talents, and new forms of treatment.

But a question remains. Can screen activities attenuate the loneliness that is a byproduct of their social deficits? Or does it increase their sense of social isolation by reducing their opportunities for face-to-face contact? The evidence in this area is just starting to emerge, but we do know from research led by American psychologist Micah Mazurek that adults on the autistic spectrum who use social networking sites are more likely to cultivate online friendships. “I can connect with others while maintaining a level of detachment,” wrote one of Mazurek’s study subjects, when asked why he uses social networking sites. “I can communicate with people in a format I am comfortable with—limited emotion and no dumb small talk,” wrote another. With no need to process body language and facial expressions, these autistic adults were able to make new friends online. But here’s the kicker: There was no connection between their social media use and their ability to make
offline friendships, nor did their online social activity reduce their loneliness. Only face-to-face relationships did that.
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4
Everyone needs close human contact. Adjust the ratio of your face-to-face to screen communication according to your temperament, just as you adjust how much and what you eat according to your appetite.

UNHOOKED

My home province of Quebec has one of the highest high-school dropout rates in the country—indeed one of the highest in the industrialized world. Nearly 40 percent of teenage boys drop out of high school here (the national average for boys is just under 10 percent, while the OECD average is 20 percent).
¹⁶
Called
décrochage
in French, which literally means “unhooking,” the issue is so politically charged that when the school year ended in 2012, the provincial education minister explained that the pass rate in more than 250 high schools would be kept under wraps. “If we made the data public, one would realize that many institutions have a 100 percent dropout rate,” Line Beauchamp told the press. “It would have a significant impact on the students’ self-esteem and staff morale.”
¹⁷

Without a high-school diploma, the majority of these teenagers are consigning themselves and their children to a life of poverty. There is also the shadow that deprivation casts on their long-term health and cognitive ability, as we saw in
Chapter 5
. Yet instead of intervening, politicians tried to conceal the bad news. It’s a complex issue, to be sure. Still, policymakers and educators would have a far greater impact on these vulnerable kids if they were to apply what we now know about the value of face-to-face contact. A fairly simple act—reaching out to make a personal connection with a struggling student—can reverse what seems inevitable to a discouraged sixteen-year-old.

In August 2012, four retired teachers and guidance counselors in Toronto used a $12,000 provincial grant to do just that. For two weeks solid they called each high-school student who had disappeared at the end of the school year and hadn’t re-registered, and then called again, abandoning the more common administrative approach of dispatching emails and robocalls. The team refused to settle for leaving a message on voicemail; they wanted to speak to the student personally, to find out what had gone wrong and how they could help. This low-tech approach brought 864 out of 1,800 prospective dropouts back to the classroom—a success rate of nearly 50 percent.

One of them was Davia Jackson, whose family had moved during eleventh grade. She didn’t want to switch schools for her final year, but when she tried to register at her old school, she became entangled in a bureaucracy that she just couldn’t figure out. She was about to give up when the team made contact. “That one call made a difference,” she said. “It gave me that push when I was beginning to get hopeless.” Another student, Ashley, who has a learning disability and a hearing impairment, was about to fail her senior year because of a single missing course credit. When she received a call from a retired teacher asking her to return to school, she had not only given up, she was shocked that anyone had even noticed she was gone. “I’d been out of school for almost two months, so it made me feel taken aback,” she said. “I was like, ‘Someone cares.’ ” The reengagement team helped her register for night school to earn the missing credit. She graduated a few months later, and several months after that registered in a public relations program at a community college.
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It’s hard to believe that such a simple intervention could work. But social contact is like a vaccine: a little can go a long way when it comes to preventing pain and loss of opportunity, while saving billions in health and social service costs. “We were reaching out and saying basically, we miss you, come back,” said Christopher Usih, director of the project.

THE POWER OF PROXIMITY

In the Western world, it is mostly boys who have trouble staying in school. In the rest of the world it’s girls. Despite the UN’s goal of universal primary education by 2015, it is a few months into 2013 as I write this and more than ninety-three million children are still not in school, the majority of them girls from developing economies.
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Even when there are schools in the district, sometimes they’re far from home and parents believe that it’s unsafe for girls to travel. Or they expect their girls to stay home to do chores. There are plenty of other reasons why girls aren’t in the classrooms of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, including assumptions about the purpose and outcome of an education. When fifteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai, an activist for girls’ education in Pakistan, was shot in the face by the Taliban in 2012, it seemed like universal education might be an intractable problem. The jubilant international response to Malala’s recovery and her continued activism haven’t altered the dire facts on the ground: Pakistan has the second highest number of unschooled children and, at fifty million people, one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world.

Laptop programs haven’t solved the problem of access to education, as we discovered in
Chapter 6
. But a teacher’s proximity to students provides a hint at what works, for school attendance in general and for girls’ achievement in particular. In the province of Ghor, in northwestern Afghanistan, only 28 percent of children live within five kilometers of a school, one reason why two-thirds of the area’s children don’t go. In a 2012 study, two American economists, Dana Burde and Leigh Linden, looked at what happened when small schools were built right in their villages. In 2008, schools were built in thirteen out of thirty-one randomly selected rural villages in the province; students living in the other eighteen villages were assigned to traditional district-based schools. (Attended by 95 percent of the school-going population, the latter were long thought to offer a superior education due to economies
of scale and better resources.) The attendance and performance of the roughly 1,500 children in the different types of schools was then compared after a full academic year.

It turned out that the village schools increased girls’ attendance by 52 percent and their academic achievement by 1.3 standard deviations, compared to the more distant district schools. All the students benefited from village-based schools (boys’ enrollment increased by 34 percent), but girls’ attendance and learning benefited the most. Close proximity to the school and its teachers “virtually eliminated the gender disparity in enrollment and improved the disparity in test scores by a third in a single year,” Burde and Linden write.
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Cutting the geographic distance between students and teachers increased enrollment at the rate of more than 16 percent per mile.

This is a literal example of the village effect—the transformative power of proximity. Another example is the reading program I described in
Chapter 6
, which helps low-income parents (whose kids are at the highest risk of school failure) feel good about yakking with their toddlers and small children while turning the pages of a book. Ongoing close contact with parents really ramped up their kids’ language and reading skills later on.
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In fact, programs that promote face-to-face conversations and interactive reading between parent and child have had
more than twice
the impact on the language and literacy skills of kids from impoverished backgrounds than laptop programs have had. Meanwhile, research shows that face-to-face contact with a skilled teacher for even one year of a child’s life has more impact on the child’s learning than any laptop program has had so far.
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If policymakers want to use resources wisely, it is clear that you get a lot more from parent and teacher training programs than you do from investing in expensive—and highly perishable—classroom technology.
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To be sure, there are wonderful pieces of educational software on the market, and well-trained teachers who know how to use them to advantage—mostly to target specific skills.
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But among the most
vulnerable kids, the ones who most need a leg-up to succeed—primarily lower-income children, those with ADHD, and impulsive boys—what boosts achievement the most are initiatives that help them develop self-discipline and what psychologists call executive function, namely the ability to plan, to hold key bits of information in memory, and to be cognitively flexible, all while inhibiting their impulses. So, what helps school-age kids master those skills?

Adele Diamond and Kathleen Lee, two Canadian psychologists, asked that question in a recent meta-analysis published in
Science
. They discovered that even the best computer programs, which build in increasing challenges as the child gains competence, succeeded at training kids one skill at a time. But that one skill didn’t transfer well to other areas. In other words, a program that trained kids on short-term memory didn’t help them with other types of tasks, including ones that included memory skills. A computer program that trained kids to practice a particular type of nonverbal problem-solving improved their skills on
that type of task
but no other. As the authors put it, “those trained on reasoning did not improve on speed, and those trained on speed did not improve on reasoning.” In contrast, they found that any program that combined social interaction with a trained teacher and aerobic exercise, music lessons, martial arts training, or mindfulness programs improved different types of executive function in school-aged kids.
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Even without expensive equipment, kids can learn to plan, wait their turn, control their emotions, solve problems, and rein in their impulses—as long as their teachers are given evidence-based training and support.

There are a few leaders who get this. Barack Obama is one of them. “The need for good teachers deserves emphasis,” he wrote about the American educational system in
The Audacity of Hope
. “Recent studies show that the single most important factor in determining a student’s achievement isn’t the color of his skin or where she comes from, but who the child’s teacher is.”
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He wrote this at
least five years before some of the most persuasive evidence on the impact of face-to-face interaction surfaced. Still, Obama was on to something. According to a 2011 study of 2.5 million American children, students taught by a
great
(rather than an average) teacher for just one year