Read The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier Online
Authors: Susan Pinker
13.
Iris Bohnet et al., “Betrayal Aversion: Evidence from Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States,”
American Economic Review
98, no. 1 (2008).
14.
William P. Barrett, “An Affinity for Fraud,”
Forbes
, June 1, 2007.
15.
Jen Cutts, “Hezbollah Embarrasssed by Fraudster,”
Maclean’s
, October 5, 2009.
16.
J. Willis and Alexander Todorov, “First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind after 100 ms Exposure to a Face,”
Psychological Science
17 (2006).
17.
Alexander Todorov et al., “Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes,”
Science
308 (2005).
18.
Daniel Kahneman,
Thinking Fast and Slow
(Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011).
19.
Alexander Todorov, “Evaluating Faces on Trustworthiness,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
1124 (2008); Andrew Engell, James Haxby, and Alexander Todorov, “Implicit Trustworthiness Decisions: Automatic Coding of Face Properties in the Human Amygdala,”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
19, no. 9 (2007).
20.
Willis and Todorov, “First Impressions”; Allan Mazur, Julie Mazur, and Caroline Keating, “Military Rank Attainment of a West Point Class: Effects of Cadets’ Physical Features,”
American Journal of Sociology
90, no. 1 (1984).
21.
Daniel S. Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle, “Beauty and the Labor Market,” NBER Working Paper 4518 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1993); Barry Harper, “Beauty, Stature and the Labour Market: A British Cohort Study,”
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics
62 (2008); Todorov, “Evaluating Faces”; Todorov et al., “Inferences of Competence.”
22.
Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov, “The Functional Basis of Face Evaluation,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
105, no. 32 (2008).
23.
R. Adolphs, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio, “The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment,”
Nature
393 (1998); Todorov, “Evaluating Faces.”
24.
Todorov, “Evaluating Faces”; C. F. Bond and M. Robinson, “The Evolution of Deception,”
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
12 (1988).
25.
Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Thin Slices of Expressive
Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences,”
Psychological Bulletin
111, no. 2 (1992).
26.
Robert B. Cialdini,
Influence: Science and Practice
(Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2001).
27.
Dan Ariely,
The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty
(New York: Harper Collins, 2012).
28.
Ibid.; Francesca Gino, Shahar Ayal, and Dan Ariely, “Contagion and Differentiation in Unethical Behavior: The Effect of One Bad Apple on the Barrel,”
Psychological Science
(2009).
29.
Rebecca Nash, Martin Bouchard, and Aili Malm, “ERON Mortgage Corporation: Diffusion of Fraud Through Social Networks,” paper presented at Third Annual Illicit Networks Workshop, Montreal, 2011.
30.
R. F. Baumeister,
Is There Anything Good About Men?
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Louann Brizendine,
The Female Brain
(New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006); S. E. Taylor, “Tend and Befriend: Biobehavioral Bases of Affiliation under Stress,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
15, no. 6 (2006); David C. Geary,
Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences
(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010); D. C. Geary et al., “Evolution and Development of Boys’ Social Behavior,”
Developmental Review
23 (2003); Susan Pinker,
The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women, and the Real Gender Gap
(Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008); Eleanor Maccoby, “Gender and Relationships: A Developmental Account,”
American Psychologist
45 (1990); Jeffrey Zaslow,
The Girls from Ames
(New York: Gotham Books, 2009).
31.
Deborah Tannen,
You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
(New York: Quill, 2001).
32.
Vasyl Palchykov et al., “Sex Differences in Intimate Relationships,”
Scientific Reports
2 (2012).
33.
David Geary, private communication, Heidelberg, 2010.
34.
Geary,
Male, Female
; Jonathan Haidt,
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
(New York: Pantheon, 2012).
35.
Historical statistics from R. I. M. Dunbar,
How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks
(London: Faber, 2010); Canadian Armed Forces statistics courtesy of Ethan Kraus; co-working sites: Diane Jermyn, “200 Office-Mates, One Copier: It’s All about Sharing,”
Globe and Mail
, November 3, 2010; Susan Pinker, “Social Links Essential for Good Work,”
Globe and Mail
, November 15, 2010; Masters swim team size: Jennifer Levett, personal communication, April 24, 2013.
36.
In his Connected Lives study, Canadian sociologist and pioneering network scientist Barry Wellman showed that there are no “close ties maintained solely via the internet; all meet in person at least once in a while.” While Wellman would not be likely to agree that there are biologically set limits to the number of relationships one can sustain in the Internet age, his notion of a relationship is very different than Dunbar’s. “People you never see or never really talk to” would not be included in your intimate social network, according to a lecture Dunbar gave at Oxford in 2011. Contrast that with Wellman’s view, that “it takes little work to keep large numbers of hardly known (or long-lost) ties on your ‘friend’ list. While many are weak ties at the moment, they can be called upon when needed.” Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman,
Networked: The New Social Operating System
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). My view is that those weak ties might provide the name of a good restaurant in their hometown if you’re visiting, and might return an email. But regular lifts to chemotherapy, or a hot meal at their house when you need it? Probably not.
37.
Sam G. B. Roberts and R. I. M. Dunbar, “The Costs of Family and Friends: An 18-Month Longitudinal Study of Relationship Maintenance and Decay,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
32 (2011).
38.
R. I. M. Dunbar, “You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends,”
New York Times
, December 25, 2010.
39.
R. I. M. Dunbar, “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates,”
Journal of Human Evolution
20 (1992).
40.
Dunbar,
How Many Friends
.
41.
Thomas Pollet, Sam G. B. Roberts, and R. I. M. Dunbar, “Use of Social Network Sites and Instant Messaging Does Not Lead to Increased Offline Social Network Size, or to Emotionally Closer Relationships with Offline Network Members,”
CyberPsychology, Behavior and Social Networking
14, no. 4 (2011).
42.
Roberts and Dunbar, “The Costs of Family and Friends”; Gerald Mollenhorst, “Networks in Context: How Meeting Opportunities Affect Personal Relationships,” unpublished paper, University of Utrecht, 2009); Gerald Mollenhorst, Beate Volker, and Henk Flap, “Social Contexts and Personal Relationships: The Effect of Meeting Opportunities on Similarity for Relationships of Different Strength,”
Social Networks
30, no. 1 (2008).
43.
William Taylor, “Your Call Should Be Important to Us, But It’s Not,”
New York Times
, February 26, 2006.
44.
Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,”
Science
306, no. 5702 (2004).
45.
Kahneman,
Thinking Fast and Slow
.
46.
Tony Hsieh,
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose
(New York: Grand Central, 2010).
47.
Alexandra Jacobs, “Happy Feet,”
New Yorker
, September 14, 2009.
48.
Zeynep Ton, “Why ‘Good Jobs’ Are Good for Retailers,”
Harvard Business Review
90, no. 1/2 (2012).
49.
James Surowiecki, “The More the Merrier,”
New Yorker
, March 26, 2012.
50.
Charles Duhigg, “What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know about You?”
New York Times Magazine
, May 17, 2009.
51.
Alex Pentland, “To Signal Is Human: Real-Time Data Mining Unmasks the Power of Imitation, Kith and Charisma in Our Face to Face Social Networks,”
American Scientist
98 (2010).
52.
Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, and M. Van Alstyne, “Productivity Effects of Information Diffusion in Networks,”
Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Information Systems
, Montreal,
2007; Sinan Aral and M. Van Alstyne, “Networks, Information and Social Capital,” paper presented at the International Conference on Network Science, New York, 2007.
53.
Lynn Wu et al., “Mining Face-to-Face Interaction Networks Using Sociometric Badges: Predicting Productivity in an IT Configuration Task,”
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Information Systems, Paris, 2008
(ICIS: 2009); Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,”
Sociological Theory
1 (1983).
54.
Daniel Olguín Olguín, Peter A. Gloor, and Alex Pentland, “Capturing Individual and Group Behavior with Wearable Sensors,” paper presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium, Palo Alto, CA, March 2009; Pentland, “To Signal Is Human”; Alex Pentland,
Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
55.
Alex Pentland, “The New Science of Building Teams,”
Harvard Business Review
90, no. 4 (2012).
56.
Michael Kosfeld et al., “Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans,”
Nature
435, no. 2 (2005).
57.
Gert-Jan Pepping and Erik Timmermans, “Oxytocin and the Biopsychology of Performance,”
Scientific World Journal
(2012); M. W. Kraus, C. Huang, and D. Keltner, “Tactile Communication, Cooperation, and Performance: An Ethological Study of the NBA,”
Emotion
10, no. 5 (2010).
58.
Susan Pinker, “The Chemical that Fosters Team Loyalty,”
Globe and Mail
, January 24, 2011; Carsten K. W. De Dreu, Lindred L. Greer, and et al., “The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict among Humans,”
Science
328, no. 5984 (2010).
CONCLUSION: CREATING THE VILLAGE EFFECT
1.
Mayberry R.F.D
. was an American television series about an idealized, fictional rural community that aired in the early seventies. R.F.D. stands for “Rural Free Delivery,” which is a quaint reference to the mail
delivery system in American rural communities during the early-to-mid twentieth century.
2.
Cohousing residents own their own houses or condos and don’t pool their income.
3.
Diane Margolis and David Entin, “Report on Survey of Cohousing Communities 2011,” Cohousing Association of the United States, 2011,
http://www.cohousing.org/
.
4.
Matt Ridley, “Human Evolution Isn’t What It Used to Be,”
Wall Street Journal
, May 26, 2012.
5.
Christopher Lasch,
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(New York: Norton, 1991).
6.
D. G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, “Well-being over Time in Britain and the USA,”
Journal of Public Economics
88 (2004); Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,”
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
1, no. 2 (2009); Cari Nierenberg, “Happiness Declining among Twitter Users: A Review of Billions of Tweets Shows a Drop in Global Happiness,” WebMD, 2011,
http://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20111222/study-happiness-has-declined-among-twitter-users-recent-years
.
7.
Michael Argyle, “Causes and Correlates of Happiness,” in
Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology
, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003); R. F. Baumeister and M.R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,”
Psychological Bulletin
117 (1995); David G. Myers, “Close Relationships and Quality of Life,” in
Well-being
, ed. Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz.
8.
For more about the characteristics of “third places,” see Ray Oldenburg,
The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day
(New York: Paragon, 1989); Ray Oldenburg,
Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities
(New York: Marlowe, 2000). Thanks are due to my brother Steve for introducing me to the term
meatspace
.
9.
Kyungjoon Lee et al., “Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration?”
PLOS One
5, no. 12 (2010); Jonah Lehrer, “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth,”
New Yorker
, January 30, 2012; Greg Lindsay, “Engineering Serendipity,”
New York Times
, April 7, 2013; Michelle Young, “Googleplex, Mountain View: Designing Interior Spaces at an Urban Scale,” Untapped Cities, January 2, 2012,
http://www.untappedcities.com/2012/01/02/googleplex-mountainview-designing-interior-spaces-at-an-urban-scale/
; Paul Goldberger, “Exclusive Preview: Google’s New Built from Scratch Googleplex,”
Vanity Fair
, February 22, 2013. Another social scientist who has written persuasively about physical proximity as a catalyst for ideas and economic growth is Edward Glaeser, who writes: “The most important communications still take place in person, and electronic access is no substitute for being at the geographic center of an intellectual movement.” Edward Glaeser,
Triumph of the City
(New York: Penguin, 2011).