The Happiness Contagion

I just turned off the TV, started to read today's newspaper. And guess what I found? Another happy article. There have been two of them in the news over the last few weeks. Funny. For a minute I thought I was in Bhutan, a country that takes happiness seriously enough to have a Gross National Happiness meter. The GNH measures the citizenry's collective psychological well-being and quality of life. Talk about political will. In the U.S. we just check whether we shop or not.

The Study, The Findings
So what makes this recent article on happiness so special? It's contagion. Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University and Professor James Fowler of UC San Diego produced a groundbreaking study published today in the British Medical Journal. They analyzed information, gathered from 1983 to 2003, on the happiness of 4,739 people and their social networks, including spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and co-workers, amounting to a social network of 50,000 links.

The findings, widely publicized on TV, radio and newspaper, indicate that your happiness may depend on how happy your friends' friends' friends are (folks, you read that right), even if you haven't even met them or know them at all. Happiness, literally, as a rub off effect. That's deep.

Hey the love doesn't last forever. According to the study, happiness has a two-year affect-effect span. The incident that makes your link's link's link happy must have happened over the last year to affect you and, in turn, its effect on you is only expected to last for a year. So tell your friends, to get happy slowly, spread out the wealth.

But how happy is happy? Well, as with all regression and time-series data, it's relative. Once you neutralize for the typical exogenous factors, like age, sex, occupation, etc., "...[a] friend living half a mile away was good for 42% percent bounce, but almost half as much for a friend who lived two miles away." We're talking about happiness that is relative to the average "happiness level" of those with like profiles. Similarly, "[a] next-door neighbor's joy increased one's chances of being happy by 34 percent, but a neighbor down the block had no effect." Yet, what I find most astonishing is the finding that a spouse's happiness had less impact (8%) than a next-door neighbor's (34%).

Where The Beef?
With limiting concessions, I would just love to say that I accept this study because Dr. Daniel Kahneman says I should (disclaimer: he taught a grad school class I took), but life is not that simple. If Dr. Christakis believes that taking cues from your own gender leads to a neighbor having a greater effect than you spouse, then what happends in gay and lesbian marriages? (Hey, I'm just asking!)

The good researchers found that the transmission of sadness was not as reliable as happiness. I'm simply not surprised by that finding. To me it reveals the tenuousness of these studied links and the weakness of the study. It is easier for people to ignore and emotionally disengage from someone who is suffering. In turn, the first thing that folks do when suffering from the disease of depression is to emotionally and socially retreat, thereby isolating themselves. Hence it makes sense that they would be on the fringe of the social network. Happy popular people are simply a self-fulfilling prophecy. While it would be great to just self-select "into circumstances that allow us to stay in a good mood" that is easier said than done for people suffering from depression or other mood disorders.

While further replication of this study is needed, now, more than ever we have a responsibility to do everything we can to be and feel our very best.

The Afterw@rd