The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (7 page)

John’s sociogram illustrates a larger social circle with many weak ties
. (Image and Figure Credits
1.4
)

A provocative corollary to the weak-versus-strong bond rule is that most girls and women prefer intimate, one-to-one relationships with a tight group of close family and friends, whereas most boys and men go long and wide, sustaining many more weak relationships in larger social networks—such as big teams, multinational corporations, or the military—while investing much less in each one.
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Roy Baumeister, an American social psychologist, puts it bluntly: “The female style builds a few strong, close social bonds. The male style builds many weaker ones. Do you want a loving marriage with strong family ties? Then you need the female style. Do you want a work group, like a ship’s crew or a hunting group or a soccer team? Then the male style will work better.”
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Each style
requires tradeoffs, he explains, and though most of us want to excel at both, if we’re honest, we’re usually better at one of the two.

Sylvie’s sociogram shows a smaller network comprised primarily of close female relationships
.

Using the logic of weak ties, it might seem that the ultimate weak connection—that between far-flung Facebook friends—would be the most influential of all. And it’s true that these weak cyber contacts might be just the ticket if you’re looking for something concrete, like a new job, a restaurant recommendation, or a quick hookup for Saturday night. But if your needs are existential—if you’re trying to recover from a frightening, debilitating illness, for example—cyber connections are no replacement for the face-to-face. One reason may be that live interaction sparks far greater activity in the brain regions linked to social cognition and reward (the anterior cingulate cortex, ventral striatum, and amygdala), according to the first fMRI study to compare the brain’s responses to face-to-face interactions with canned, prerecorded ones. Rebecca Saxe, the MIT neuroscientist who led this study, explained that it shows why it feels good to be together with someone in the same room, paying attention to exactly the same thing at the same time.
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But does it follow that interactions that lack that in-person, dynamic social element make you feel bad? Well, sort of. There is evidence that turning to the Internet for social connection may stir up feelings of isolation. One study in the early 2000s showed that New York women with non-invasive breast cancer who used their computers as a research tool reported feeling more socially supported than women who didn’t use the web. However, using their laptops to seek medical information was one thing. But the more time these women spent on the Internet, the lonelier they felt.
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This finding has surfaced in several studies and has been called the “Internet paradox,” because the web is supposed to connect us, right?
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Well, that depends on what you need. If it’s information, that’s one thing. If it’s the reassurance of a hug or of sharing a private joke in real time, that’s another.

When American cancer researchers Paula Klemm and Thomas
Hardie compared face-to-face with online cancer support groups, they found that the groups were statistically similar except for one thing: the participants’ moods. Most (92 percent) of the participants in the electronic groups were depressed, while none of the participants in the face-to-face groups were.
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It could be that people who already feel low are attracted to online rather than in-person groups. But it could also be that people who spend more time on the Internet—even in cancer support groups—spend less time hanging out with their family and friends.

This proved to be the case in a large Stanford time-diary study that was published in 2002. People who spent more than five hours a week of their personal time online had less face-to-face contact with their strong ties. The authors of the study, inventor and social scientist Norman Nie, along with several Stanford colleagues, were clear: “For every personal e-mail message sent or received there is almost a 1 minute drop in the amount of time spent with family. With a mean of 13 personal emails sent and received, that amounts to about 13 minutes less of family time a day, or about 1.5 hours a week.… The more time spent on the internet, the less time spent with friends, family, and colleagues.”
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This is just common sense, but it’s been hotly debated. Most of us send dozens, if not hundreds, of emails and texts a day. Whatever the benefits, that’s mostly time spent alone.

Later in the book we’ll encounter this phenomenon again in the guise of “Facebook depression,” that bilious stew of envy and anomie that engulfs people who click through online signs of their friends’ achievements in the mistaken belief that such voyeurism is a form of social glue. It’s not. While networked technologies can do many wonderful things, they can’t make an ill person feel cherished and less existentially alone. Only the people who are near and dear to her can do that. As we shall see, proximity matters.

A
ny visitor to an Italian town soon finds herself standing in the central square, surrounded by its standard architectural features: an imposing church on one side, a municipal building on the other, and a fountain in the middle. The town’s roads radiate from that square and the cafés set into the buildings along its perimeter are perfect places to put down the guidebook and admire the surroundings. To say that Italian town squares are built on a human scale is a platitude; the square’s primary function has always been to assemble its residents at a de facto crossroads.

A couple of millennia before Facebook, the square was the one-stop gathering place for gossip, shopping, and spiritual guidance, a magnet for social interaction, public and private. The government offices and the private chapels located on the square were where the region’s power brokers held their tête-à-têtes. Deals were also made on the square, and in the streets and alleys leading off it; betrothals, marriages, and of course funerals happened there too.

In the Sardinian village of Villagrande Strisaili, which is built on a steep hillside in the central Gennargentu Mountains, the bars, bakeries, and grocery stores surrounding the hulking eighteenth-century church are pitched at a sharp incline—I felt my exploration of the town in my hamstrings. The doors to the shops are a short flight of stairs up or down from the pavement and as I
made my way around the streets near the square, popping in and out of little stores as I shopped for a small gift to offer my dinner hosts one evening, I was unaware that people were watching me intently from windows and doorways. I was new to a place that doesn’t get many visitors.

As I crossed the square, I met the gaze of a tall, black-clad woman in her late seventies. After a perfunctory greeting she asked me who I was and what I was doing there. Only when I named my hosts for that evening—my Sardinian interpreter, Delia, and her family—did the shutters on her eyes lift. She knew Delia, and Angela, Delia’s mother, not to mention Angela’s mother, aunt, and great-aunt. Having established where I belonged—however temporarily—in the town’s social order, she finally offered, “
La posso aiutare? Figlia di chi sei
?” (Can I help you? Who are your parents?)
¹

It was October 2008, and I was visiting this remote region of Sardinia with my twenty-four-year-old daughter on a research trip we were combining with a mother-and-daughter adventure. Eva had graduated from university and was between jobs, while I had just finished
The Sexual Paradox
, about the science of unexpected sex differences. One of the most intriguing of those paradoxes, I’d discovered, is a biological fragility among males that is nearly universal. Almost everywhere in the world, men die an average of five to seven years before women do, leaving nations of widows to populate their town squares, supermarkets, and seniors’ homes.
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The residents of the rugged hilltop villages of central Sardinia are the world’s only exceptions to this rule. Almost everywhere else, including on the Italian mainland, there are six female centenarians for every male.
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Elsewhere, most men don’t make it to eighty, but once Sardinian men in this region have lived through their dangerous, risk-taking adolescent and young adult years, they tend to live as long as their wives and sisters—well into their nineties and even beyond.

And there was another local mystery. Despite living hardscrabble lives as shepherds, farmers, and laborers in a rugged, inhospitable
environment, Sardinians who were born and live in Villagrande and the surrounding villages are outlasting their fellow citizens in Europe and North America by as many as two or three decades. The huge number of centenarians in this part of Sardinia is intriguing, not only because they’re already living decades longer than the rest of us, but because so many of them remain active, working well into their eighties and nineties and living in their own homes, usually with people they’ve known their whole lives (most of them women, as it happens). Currently, ten times as many men in Villagrande live past the age of one hundred as men who live elsewhere. While the rest of us slather on sunscreen, down fistfuls of vitamins, sweat it out with hot yoga, and practice mindfulness meditation, the residents of Villagrande are the ones who are living to tell the tale.
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These Sardinian hilltop villages comprise one of the world’s exceptional “Blue Zones”—a handful of mountainous regions where more people live to the age of one hundred (and beyond) than anywhere else.
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I wanted to know why.

Sardinia is Italy’s second largest island, after Sicily, and sits smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean, with Corsica to the north and North Africa to the south. It has nearly the landmass of Switzerland but less than a quarter of its population. Just a million and a half people live in the towns dotting its rugged shoreline and the pastoral mountain villages in the Ogliastra region, the epicenter of the Blue Zone. Centuries of invaders and regular attacks from North African pirates drove residents away from the coast and inland, beyond the rugged Gennargentu mountain range, which formed a natural barrier against invasion (as well as coastal malaria). This geographic isolation forcibly created the area’s tightly bonded families and communities—that’s the upside. The downside is that always having to defend your boundaries created a longstanding mistrust of strangers, aptly illustrated by the local saying “
Furat chie benit dae su mare
”: those who come from the sea come to steal.

During the twentieth century, though, the threat was more likely to come from within. Warring factions among neighboring villages gave this area a Wild West reputation. Even then these hilltop villages were “as remote from one another as the stars,” as the Sardinian novelist Salvatore Satta wrote. My guidebook informed me that the area boasted one of the island’s worst reputations for vendettas, banditry, and violence.
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In recent decades, though, things have calmed down. Now the area is better known for its breathtaking panoramas, political murals, and black-shawled older women than for deadly multigenerational grudges. Still, before Eva and I left for the interior, we thought it best to get the lay of the land. We decided to fly into Alghero, a Moorish-looking seaside town with an airport and a university, on the western side of the island. The plan was to meet one of the two experts who had discovered the phenomenon of Sardinian super-longevity, a local physician and biomedical researcher named Giovanni Pes.

Sporting a generous moustache and a short gray beard, Dr. Pes wore the mid-career academic’s uniform of polo shirt, khakis, and rimless glasses, and like most Sardinian men, he is compactly built. Known to everyone as Gianni, he is as warm and personable as he is erudite. The evening we arrived, he met us in the lobby of our small hotel in Alghero, bringing along a young graduate student, Francesco Tolu, and a geneticist colleague, Paolo Francalacci. Gianni had arranged for our interpreter and accommodations in the Blue Zone, and the day we met he handed me a blue plastic folder packed with local information and maps. But most important, he immediately included us in his lively circle of close friends, family, and colleagues. This feeling of inclusion turned out to be a crucial piece of the longevity puzzle. For better or for worse, no one is left alone here for long.