The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (47 page)

30.
U.K. Office for National Statistics,
Population Trends 123
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006),
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/article.asp?ID=2665
; Statistics Canada,
http://www41.statcan.gc.ca/2009/40000/cybac40000_000-eng.htm
.

31.
Fischer,
Made in America
.

32.
Cognitive psychologist Robin Dunbar, at the University of Oxford, and biological anthropologist Bernard Chapais, at the University of Montreal, are just two evolutionary scientists who pin the development of humans’ supercharged neocortex on the need and desire to communicate with each other and to read others’ intentions from observations of their behavior at close range.

33.
Neenah Ellis, “The Centenarians Show,” Third Coast International Audio Festival, 2011,
http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/library/981-re-sound-143-the-centenarians-show
.

34.
Also, fewer Termites lived to one hundred compared to other Americans born around 1910. According to the U.S. Social Security Administration, 0.817% (nearly 1%) of Americans born in 1910 lived until their hundredth birthday; the figure for the Termites was closer to 0.3%.

35.
Joel N. Shurkin,
Terman’s Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up
(New York: Little, Brown, 1992).

36.
Howard S. Friedman, whose book
The Longevity Project
, written with his colleague Leslie Martin, is the source of much of this information. What wasn’t found in their book came from details generously provided by Friedman in email exchanges in May 2011 and December 2012, for which I am grateful. The life expectancy statistics for Americans born in 1910 derive from Social Security Administration data released in April 2011.

37.
Working hard won’t kill you, but working extremely long hours might well bring on a heart attack in the middle-aged (that is, people from thirty-nine to sixty-two), according to research by University College London epidemiologist Mika Kivimaki and colleagues. Those who
worked eleven hours or more a day were 66% more likely to have a heart attack, and some of those coronary events were fatal. Interestingly, those who worked ten hours or less a day were not at greater risk than those who worked far lighter schedules. Mika Kivimaki et al., “Using Additional Information on Working Hours to Predict Coronary Heart Disease,”
Annals of Internal Medicine
154, no. 7 (2011).

38.
Interestingly, the 14% of Alameda County residents who didn’t respond were most likely to be old, white, and male. L. F. Berkman and S. L. Syme, “Social Networks, Host Resistance, and Mortality: A Nine-Year Follow-up Study of Alameda County Residents,”
American Journal of Epidemiology
109, no. 2 (1979).

39.
J. Holt-Lunstad, T. Smith, and J. B. Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-anyalytic Review,”
PLoS Medicine
7, no. 7 (2010). A reminder: longitudinal studies monitor what happens to large numbers of people as time progresses, in this case to see whether, subtracting things such as cigarette smoking, income, and education, people’s social lives could predict how long they would live.

CHAPTER 3: A THOUSAND INVISIBLE THREADS

1.
  Michael Inzlicht, Alexa Tullett, and Marie Good, “The Need to Believe: A Neuroscience Account of Religion as a Motivated Process,”
Religion, Brain and Behavior
1, no. 3 (2011); M. McCullough et al., “Does Devoutness Delay Death? Psychological Investment in Religion and Its Association with Longevity in the Terman Sample,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
97, no. 5 (2009); D. E. Hall, “Religious Attendance: More Cost-Effective than Lipitor?”
Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine
19 (2006); L. H. Powell, L. Shahabi, and C. E. Thoresen, “Religion and Spirituality: Linkages to Physical Health,”
American Psychologist
58 (2003); Arthur Brooks,
Gross National Happiness
(New York: Basic Books, 2008).

2.
  Elizabeth Corsentino et al., “Religious Attendance Reduces Cognitive Decline among Older Women with High Levels of Depressive Symptoms,”
Journal of Gerontology
64A, no. 12 (2009).

3.
  
Zev Chafets, “Is There a Right Way to Pray?”
New York Times Magazine
, September 20, 2009.

4.
  Arlie Russell Hochschild,
The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012).

5.
  Brooks,
Gross National Happiness
; Paul Bloom, “Does Religion Make You Nice? Does Atheism Make You Mean?”
Slate
, November 7, 2008,
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2008/11/does_religion_make_you_nice.html
.

6.
  Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan, “God Is Watching You: Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game,”
Psychological Science
18, no. 9 (2007); Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff, “The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality,”
Science
322 (2008).

7.
  Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, and Gilbert Roberts, “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting,”
Biology Letters
2 (2006); Terence C. Burnham and Brian Hare, “Engineering Human Cooperation,”
Human Nature
18, no. 2 (2007).

8.
  Jingzhi Tan and Brian Hare, “Bonobos Share with Strangers,”
PLOS One
8, no. 1 (2013).

9.
  Norenzayan and Shariff, “Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality.”

10.
Lionel Tiger and Michael McGuire,
God’s Brain
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2010).

11.
Robert E. Miller, “Role of Facial Expression in ‘Cooperative Avoidance Conditioning’ in monkeys,”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
67, no. 1 (1963); Frans de Waal,
The Age of Empathy
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), 76.

12.
Nicholas Wade, “Scientist at Work—Edward O. Wilson: From Ants to Ethics: A Biologist Dreams of Unity of Knowledge,”
New York Times
, May 12, 1998; Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson,
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
(New York: Norton, 2009).

On the subject of driving on auto-pilot, I remember watching my father at the wheel of his wood-paneled station wagon as he drove along
the highway on summer cross-country driving trips. His mornings began with a cigarette in one hand, an electric razor in the other; the steering wheel was controlled with the inside of his forearms. When my mother poured a cup of scalding coffee from a Thermos and handed it across the armrest, he would take it with the cigarette hand and then hold it steady between his thighs, without spilling it. Then he sipped coffee, shaved, smoked and drove a car, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

13.
With similarly wired though smaller brains than ours, the macaques acted as human stand-ins in this study. Though animal rights activists might object, electrodes are also often implanted in humans to treat epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. There may be other therapeutic applications to such basic research, including promoting mobility in amputees or those with spinal cord injuries.

14.
Marco Iacoboni,
Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others
(New York: Picador, 2008).

15.
Ibid.

16.
In
The Age of Empathy
, Frans de Waal points out that, remarkably, children on the autistic spectrum are immune to the yawns of others, which is just one sign that they don’t perceive social signals the same way as “neurotypicals.” De Waal,
Age of Empathy
.

17.
Iacoboni,
Mirroring People
; Seymour M. Berger and Suzanne W. Hadley, “Some Effects of a Model’s Performance on an Observer’s Electromyographic Activity,”
American Journal of Psychology
88, no. 2 (1975).

18.
Jared Curhan and Alex Pentland, “Thin Slices of Negotiation: Predicting Outcomes from Conversational Dynamics Within the First Five Minutes,”
Journal of Applied Psychology
92, no. 3 (2007); Alex Pentland,
Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

19.
Shankar Vedantam,
The Hidden Brain
(New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010).

20.
I am indebted to
Philadelphia Enquirer
columnist and bird enthusiast Scott Weidensaul for the evocative phrase “silent signal of alarm,” and
to my nineteen-year-old son Eric, who pointed out this book to me and knows more than I ever will about sandpipers, godwits, shanks, and phalaropes, and many other things to boot. Scott Weidensaul,
Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds
(New York: North Point Press, 1999), 7.

21.
Michael Kesterton, “A Choir of Whales,”
Globe and Mail
, August 12, 2010; Michael D. Hoffman, Newell Garfield, and Roger W. Bland, “Frequency Synchronization of Blue Whale Calls near Pioneer Seamount,”
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
128, no. 1 (2010).

22.
John Cassidy, “Rational Irrationality: The Real Reason that Capitalism Is So Crash-Prone,”
New Yorker
, October 5, 2009.

23.
Jamaica Kincaid,
Annie John
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983).

24.
Leonard Weller and Aron Weller, “Human Menstrual Synchrony: A Critical Assessment,”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
17 (1993); Deborah Blum, “The Scent of Your Thoughts,”
Scientific American
, October 2011; Martha K. McClintock, “Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression,”
Nature
229 (1971).

25.
Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, and Brent D. Jordan, “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
28 (2007).

26.
Daniel S. Hamermesh,
Beauty Pays
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Daniel S. Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle, “Beauty and the Labor Market,” NBER Working Paper 4518 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1993); Susan Pinker,
The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women, and the Real Gender Gap
(Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008); John Marshall Townsend,
What Women Want—What Men Want
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

27.
Ilyana Kuziemko, “Is Having Babies Contagious? Estimating Fertility Peer Effects between Siblings,” Harvard University, 2006.

28.
Margaret Talbot, “Red Sex, Blue Sex: Why Do So Many Evangelical Teen-agers Become Pregnant?”
New Yorker
, November 3, 2008.

29.
Ibid.; Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker,
Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

30.
Mark Regnerus,
Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner, “The Relationship between Virginity Pledges in Adolescence and STD Acquisition in Young Adulthood,” paper presented at the National STD Conference, Philadelphia, March 8–11, 2004.

31.
Talbot, “Red Sex, Blue Sex”; Regnerus,
Forbidden Fruit
.

32.
Nicholas A. Christakis and James Fowler,
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
(New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

33.
Robert E. Bartholomew, “Ethnocentricity and the Social Construction of ‘Mass Hysteria,’ ”
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
14, no. 4 (1990); Halley Faust and Lawrence Brilliant, “Is the Diagnosis of ‘Mass Hysteria’ an Excuse for Incomplete Investigation of Low-Level Environmental Contamination?”
Journal of Occupational Medicine
23, no. 1 (1981).

CHAPTER 4: WHO’S COMING TO DINNER?

1.
  N. A. Christakis and J. H. Fowler, “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years,”
New England Journal of Medicine
357, no. 4 (2007); Nicholas A. Christakis and James Fowler,
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
(New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

2.
  With this finding, the Colbert-meme tester had himself become a meme. James H. Fowler, “The Colbert Bump in Campaign Donations: More Truthful than Truthy,”
Political Science and Politics
41, no. 3 (2008); Food Research and Action Center, “Overweight and Obesity in the U.S.,” 2012,
http://frac.org/initiatives/hunger-and-obesity/obesity-in-the-us/
.

3.
  James H. Fowler, Jaime E. Settle, and Nicholas A. Christakis, “Correlated Genotypes in Friendship Networks,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
108, no. 5 (2011).

4.
  Christakis and Fowler,
Connected
.

5.
  
Justin G. Trogdon, James Nonnemaker, and Joanne Pais, “Peer Effects in Adolescent Overweight,”
Journal of Health Economics
27 (2008); Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason M. Fletcher, “Is Obesity Contagious? Social Networks vs. Environmental Factors in the Obesity Epidemic,”
Journal of Health Economics
27 (2008); Russell Lyons, “The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social Network Analysis,”
Statisics, Politics and Policy
2, no. 1 (2011).

6.
  S. J. Salvy et al., “Effects of Social Influence on Eating in Couples, Friends and Strangers,”
Appetite
49, no. 1 (2007); S. J. Salvy et al., “The Presence of Friends Increases Food Intake in Youth,”
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
90, no. 2 (2009).

7.
  Natalie Munro and Leore Grosman, “Early Evidence (ca. 12,000 B.P.) for Feasting at a Burial Cave in Israel,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
107, no. 35 (2010).