Social Networks

and the "herd mentality"




(from an article on msnbc)
Facebook, MySpace and other Web sites have unleashed a potent new phenomenon of social networking in cyberspace. But at the same time, a growing body of evidence is suggesting that traditional social networks, in the real world, play a surprisingly powerful and underrecognized role in influencing how people behave.

The latest research comes from Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at the Harvard Medical School, and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. The pair reported last summer that obesity appeared to spread from one person to another through social networks, almost like a virus or a fad.

In a follow-up to that provocative research, the team has produced similar findings about another major health issue: smoking. In a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the team found that a person's decision to kick the habit is strongly affected by whether other people in their social network quit -- even people they do not know. And, surprisingly, entire networks of smokers appear to quit virtually simultaneously.

Taken together, these studies and others are fueling a growing recognition that many behaviors are swayed by social networks in ways that have not been fully understood. And it may be possible, the researchers say, to harness the power of these networks for many purposes, such as encouraging safe sex, getting more people to exercise or even fighting crime.

"What all these studies do is force us to start to kind of rethink our mental model of how we behave," said Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist. "Public policy in general treats people as if they are sort of atomized individuals and puts policies in place to try to get them to stop smoking, eat right, start exercising or make better decisions about retirement, et cetera. What we see in this research is that we are missing a lot of what is happening if we think only that way."

In a study encompassing 12,067 people over 30 years, researchers analyzed the patterns of those who managed to quit smoking over the period, they found that the decision appeared to be highly influenced by whether someone close to them stopped. A person whose spouse quit was 67 percent more likely to kick the habit. If a friend gave it up, a person was 36 percent more likely to do so. If a sibling quit, the chances increased by 25 percent. "You appear to have to have a close relationship with the person for it to be influential," Fowler said. Even though the overall number of smokers plummeted, from 45 percent to 21 percent of the population during that time, the researchers realized that what happened was that entire networks of smokers would quit almost simultaneously.

It's sort of like an ant colony or a flock of birds. A single bird doesn't decide to turn to the right or the left; the whole flock has mind of its own." Another intriguing -- and disturbing -- finding was that as more people quit, the remaining smokers tended to wind up on the edges of society, the periphery, with fewer and fewer social connections.

This use of the word periphery makes me wonder if the global economy, and the Third World economy, is a result of any similar phenomenon.

This knowledge can be applied to the obesity epidemic. For smokers, the anti-smoking campaign has unintentionally been hurting them by wreaking havoc on their social lives, so one of the implications is it's harder to reach smokers. Increasingly, they are huddled together in groups that are not connected to other people who don't smoke.



So if, in the fight for better health, we stigmatize the state of being overweight, obese people could lose friends, I guess is the implication, in addition to feeling bad about themselves. "Smoking is an example of how we can create problems at the same time we solve others." Perhaps it's cruelty to be kind?