The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (44 page)

While any errors are mine alone, the following experts and friends read early drafts of chapters and generously provided comments that helped me aim for accuracy and style: Barbara Baker, John Cacioppo, Steve Cole, Alison Gopnik, Michael Kramer, Gianni Pes, Laura-Ann Petitto, Steve Pinker, Michel Poulain, Andrew Meltzoff, Harry Reis, Sherry Turkle, Linda Waite, Mark Warschauer, and Joel Yanofsky. Careful reading is an invaluable gift and I am very grateful for their help. On that score, Steve and I may well be the only siblings in the world who find discussions about the function of the passive voice and the amygdala equally compelling. These shared interests are a source of great pleasure and support.

A phalanx of scientists sent me their research and patiently answered my questions about the nature of the social mind. They include Roy Baumeister, Matthew Brashears, John Cacioppo, Sue Carter, Bernard Chapais, Dimitri Christakis, Steve Cole, Eli Finkel, Helen Fisher, James Fowler, Howard Friedman, Paolo Francalacci, David Geary, Keith Hampton, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Celeste Johnson, Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, Perri Klass, Andrew Meltzoff, Alan Mendelsohn, Carlo Morselli, Linda Pagani, Giovanni Pes, Michel Poulain, John P. Robinson, Niels Rosenquist, Robert Sapolsky, Alex Todorov, Tom Valente, Jacob Vigdor, Ben Waber, Barry Wellman, and Elizabeth Walcot.

Gratitude goes to a series of wonderful research and archival assistants who helped me in numerous ways, including Yanick
Charette, Carl Boodman, Beth Cruchley, Terri Foxman, Damon Hancoff, Gaëlle Hortop, Sara-Lynn Moore, and Roslyn Pinker. Gabrielle Jacobs and Beatrice Toner helped with interview transcriptions; Axel van den Berg, Joseph Helfer, Michelle Roper, and Julia Waks with image translations and tweaks. Deep appreciation goes to a short list of researchers who have been with me now for
years
, including the indefatiguable Terri Foxman and Gaëlle Hortop, as well as my immunology and primatology tutor, Carl Boodman, and Roslyn Pinker—clipper and reader extraordinaire, also known as Mom. Martin Boodman, my husband, heard about the minutiae of this book at every stage, and graciously offered feedback and encouragement all along.

By now it’s clear that
I couldn’t have done it without you
not only describes this book’s theme but the process of writing it. My friends and family, including my brothers and sisters-in-law, Steve and Rob Pinker, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Kristine Whitehead, along with their children, form the contours of my village. My parents, Roslyn and Harry Pinker—to whom this book is dedicated—cheered me on from behind the scenes, and were the first to to show me why face-to-face relationships really matter. This brings me to the reason I keep breathing and working. I deeply thank Martin, who is the love of my life, and my three children, Eva, Carl, and Eric, who light up my life.

INTRODUCTION: PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE

1.
  All American waiting list figures are gleaned from the US Department of Health and Human Services Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network,
http://www.optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/data/
. The number of Americans who died while waiting for a kidney was provided by E. Schlam, spokesperson for the National Kidney Foundation, September 12, 2010. Figures for the number of Canadians on the transplant list waiting for a kidney in 2009 are from the Kidney Foundation of Canada Fact Sheet,
http://www.kidney.ca/Document.Doc?id=102

2.
  In 2009 at least a dozen British people were advertising the sale of their kidneys on the Internet. One of them, a nurse with a two-year-old daughter, who was in dire financial straits, had advertised his kidney for $40,000, plus medical and travel expenses. He expected most of the offers to come from Americans, who at the time of writing this book could purchase sperm and ova for in vitro fertilization, as well as a surrogate to gestate their baby, but who were not permitted to offer incentives to spur the donation of healthy organs. This warning was appended to the bottom of the
Sunday Times
article titled “I’ve Got Debts, Please Buy My Kidney”: “Selling human organs in Britain or offering them for sale, is an offence under the Human Tissue Act 2004, punishable with up to three years in prison. Donors can give a kidney to a relative or close friend, but they must demonstrate a close relationship. They must also convince a panel of assessors that they have not been coerced into donating an organ and will not be paid.”

3.
  Giving a kidney to a stranger has become possible in recent years, a phenomenon facilitated by donors and recipients finding each other on
websites such as
matchingdonors.com
, and by changing attitudes on transplant boards, which until recently discouraged the practice. Altruistic donations—when someone donates an organ to a person they have never met—tend to make headlines, giving the impression that they are becoming common. Not so. Though the incidence of anonymous organ donation is increasing, it is still very rare. In Britain, altruistic donations became legal in 2007, but in 2009–10 the probability of someone with end-stage renal disease receiving a kidney from a living donor with whom they’d had no face-to-face contact ranged from 0.02% to 0.006%, according to the Human Tissue Authority—so hardly a fad. The situation is similar in the United States. According to figures released by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network for that period, less than 0.02%—two out of ten thousand—of living kidney donors were anonymous donors found on the Internet (National Health and Nutrition Evaluation Survey, 2009).

4.
  This is an average, computed on February 8, 2013, from kidney transplant waiting lists in the United States: 0.03% of the population, according to the government census,
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
; Canada: 0.0068% of the population, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information; the United Kingdom: 0.0098%, according to the UK Office of National Statistics; Germany: 0.0014%, according to German government statistics,
http://www.statistik-portal.de/Statistik-Portal/en/en_zs01_bund.asp
; and France: 0.0019%, according to the Agence de la biomedicine.

5.
  This is not hyperbole. MRI scanners, which became commercially available in the early 1980s, while I was in graduate school, cost $1.5 million to more than $2 million at the time, as did a basic Learjet. Michael Bates, “Bill Lear’s ‘Baby Jet’ Celebrates 20 Years in Aviation,”
The Dispatch
, October 8, 1983; Martin Stuart-Harle, “Hospitals Seeking Magnetic Imagers Agonize over Choice of Costly Devices,”
Globe and Mail
, October 13, 1985.

6.
  Bureau of Labor Statistics, “American Time Use Survey, 2011 Annual Averages” (Washington, DC: BLS, 2012). The ATUS web page states:
“a primary activity refers to an individual’s main activity. Other activities done simultaneously are not included,” which would explain why Americans apparently spend a total of 23 minutes a day eating. Whatever goes down the hatch while they’re watching TV, at their computers, or in their cars isn’t counted. Thanks are due to sociologist John P. Robinson, who clued me in to the ATUS and talked to me frankly about measuring how Americans spend their time.

7.
  NM Incite, “The Social Media Report” (New York: Nielsen McKinsey, 2012).

8.
  Bill Bryson, A
Short History of Nearly Everything
(Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003).

9.
  J. Cacioppo, L. C. Hawkley, G. J. Norman, and G. G. Berntson, “Social Isolation,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
1231 (2011): 17–22.

10.
This research is fully documented in the following chapters.

11.
L. F. Berkman et al., “Social Integration and Mortality: A Prospective Study of French Employees of Electricity of France–Gas of France: The
GAZEL
Cohort,”
American Journal of Epidemiology
159, no. 2 (2004); L. Fratiglioni et al., “An Active and Socially Integrated Lifestyle in Late Life Might Protect Against Dementia,”
Lancet Neurology
(2004); S. W. Cole et al., “Social Regulation of Gene Expression in Human Leukocytes,”
Genome Biology
8, no. 9 (2007); Candyce H. Kroenke, Laura D. Kubzansky, Eva S. Schernhammer, Michelle D. Holmes, and Ichiro Kawachi, “Social Networks, Social Support, and Survival after Breast Cancer Diagnosis,”
Journal of Clinical Oncology
24, no. 7 (2006).

12.
K. Hampton, F. Lauren Sessions, and Eun Ja Her, “Core Networks, Social Isolation, and New Media,”
Information, Communication and Society
14, no. 1 (2011); J. S. House, K. R. Landis, and D. Umberson, “Social Relationships and Health,”
Science
241, no. 4865 (1988); Fratiglioni et al., “Active and Socially Integrated Lifestyle”; M. E. Brashears, “Small Networks and High Isolation? A Reexamination of American Discussion Networks,”
Social Networks
33 (2011); M.
McPherson, L. Smith-Lovin, and M. E. Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,”
American Sociological Review
71, no. 3 (2006); Miller McPherson, L. Smith-Lovin, and M. E. Brashears, “Models and Marginals: Using Survey Evidence to Study Social Networks,”
American Sociological Review
74 (2009); American Association of Retired People,
Loneliness among Older Adults: A National Survey of Adults 45+
(Washington: AARP, 2010); Christina R. Victor and Kemang Yang, “The Prevalence of Loneliness among Adults: A Case Study of the United Kingdom,”
Journal of Psychology
146, no. 1/2 (2012).

13.
Jo Griffin,
The Lonely Society?
(London: Mental Health Foundation, 2010).

14.
Robert D. Putnam,
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Jennifer Senior, “Alone Together,”
New York Magazine
, November 23, 2008.

15.
Kemang Yang and Christina Victor, “Age and Loneliness in 25 European Nations,”
Ageing and Society
31 (2011).

16.
Canadian Community Health Survey, “Prevalence of Positive Self-Perceived Health, Loneliness and Life Dissatisfaction, by Selected Characteristics, Household Population Aged 65 or Older, Canada Excluding Territories 2008–2009” (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2012).

17.
Eric Klinenberg,
Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Rebecca Solnit,
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
(New York: Penguin, 2009); Shankar Vedantam,
The Key to Disaster Survival? Friends and Neighbors
(National Public Radio, 2011).

18.
Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace
(New York: Vintage Reprint, 2008); William Deresiewicz, “Faux Friendship,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, December 6, 2009.

19.
Anthony Storrs,
Solitude
(New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Susan Cain,
Quiet
(New York: Broadway, 2012).

20.
Ye Luo et al., “Loneliness, Health, and Mortality in Old Age: A National Longitudinal Study,”
Social Science and Medicine
74 (2012).

21.
A. Steptoe et al., “Loneliness and Neuroendocrine, Cardiovascular, and Inflammatory Stress Responses in Middle-Aged Men and Women,”
Psychoneuroendocrinology
29, no. 5 (2004); Ruth Hackett et al., “Loneliness and Stress-Related Inflammatory and Neuroendocrine Responses in Older Men and Women,”
Psychoneuroendocrinology
37, no. 1801–9 (2012).

22.
M. Iwasaki et al., “Social Networks and Mortality Based on the Komo-Ise Cohort Study in Japan,”
International Journal of Epidemiology
31, no. 6 (2002).

23.
J. Cacioppo, James Fowler, and Nicholas A. Christakis, “Alone in the Crowd: The Structure and Spread of Loneliness in a Large Social Network,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
97, no. 6 (2009).

24.
L. C. Hawkley et al., “Loneliness in Everyday Life: Cardiovascular Activity, Psychosocial Context, and Health Behaviors,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
85, no. 1 (2003); J. Cacioppo et al., “Social Isolation,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
1231 (2011); J. Cacioppo and William Patrick,
Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
(New York: Norton, 2008).

25.
Sarah Hampson, “Get Over Your Loner Phobia,”
Globe and Mail
, January 18, 2013.

26.
Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman,
Networked: The New Social Operating System
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

27.
Ibid.

28.
Ellen Goodman, “Friendless in America,”
Boston Globe
, June 30, 2006.

29.
Rainie and Wellman,
Networked
; Hampton, Sessions, and Her, “Core Networks.”

30.
K. Hampton, C. U. Lee, and Eun Ja Her, “How New Media Affords Network Diversity: Direct and Mediated Access to Social Capital Through Participation in Local Social Settings,”
New Media and Society
13, no. 7 (2011); K. Hampton et al.,
Social Isolation and New Technology
(Washington, DC: Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2009). Keith Hampton speculates that avid users of social networking sites may have used them
because
they were not socially integrated;
their use of electronic networks may be the source of increased network diversity. A subsequent study of social network users—when the technology was more widespread—did not reveal a connection between social media use and disconnection from neighbors (email correspondence with Keith Hampton, July 7, 2013).

31.
Claude S. Fischer,
Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

32.
“Dinner for One: Solo Britons Send Sales of Single-Serve Cookware Soaring by 140%,”
Daily Mail
, July 22, 2010; United Kingdom Office for National Statistics,
U.K. Labour Force Survey
(London: ONS, 2011).