Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do, written by Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard professor and his colleague from the University of California, San Diego, James Fowler, contends that people are influenced by and have great influence over the people in our social network, even if we have never met them. There have been other recent books on human connectedness and influence, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and the fields of behavioral health and health economics also have had recent popular research on social connectedness. This book, however, focuses on research that looks at not just the individual’s experience in society, but the overall structure of the network, and it treats the connection between two people as an area of study.
Their extensive scientific research is written here for a mass audience, and focuses on topics that readers will relate to, such as the social network’s influence obesity, deciding to have a child, eating disorders, suicide contagion, altruism and dying of a broken heart. Many of the topics discussed are commonly thought to be an individual’s complete responsibility, but the authors contend that much of what we do and think is because of what someone else is doing and thinking. Examining how networks are structured and how different people in the network are connected to the others can bring new insights into how innovation, trends and norms flow through the network.
The methods used to demonstrate the contentions are to discuss an idea, then give anecdotal evidence, then examine research that supports the idea, both from other studies and the author’s own research. This makes the book engaging and interesting. While I was reading it I often would turn to whomever was next to me and read entire paragraphs out loud to them, which demonstrates the level of excitement I had for the material. This book is a great introduction to the research topics, but is not an in-depth academic analysis, although it will entice some to follow it up by reading journal articles published from the research.
There are several main contentions in the book, which are woven throughout different topics. The first two are the ideas of Six Degrees of Separation Rule, that each person is connected to anyone else in the world via six connections, and the Three Degrees of Influence Rule, that the wave of influence we have extends to our friends’ friends’ friends before it dissipates. The idea of Six Degrees of Separation, according to the authors, means that each of us “can reach halfway to everyone else on the planet,” (p. 29). With the Three Degrees of Influence Rule, if each of the people in our network has 20 unique connections, we are able to influence 8,000 people.
The next two areas of study are the structure and function of networks, which is the shape the network, takes and the way information flows through it. These are demonstrated using plates that show how network visualization software creates a picture of a network, which are well explained and really enhance the reader’s ability to visualize the differences in types of networks. The two aspects of networks that are important to understand are connection, who is connected to whom, and contagion, what flows across the ties. Other ideas that permeate the book are that people obey rules which then determine the structure of the network they are in and that norms spread from person to person and can change over time.
One great example of how the authors have used existing research to examine networks is their use of the data from the Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1948 to study cardiovascular health. The researchers kept meticulous records of relations for those being studied in order to help find them every few years and many of the relations were also part of the study, which Christakis and Fowler were able to use to reconstruct the social networks of study participants and then use the data to see if there were signs of influence over their health, related to the health of those connected to them. They found that a person becoming obese often happened as those they were connected to gained weight as well, even if that person were three degrees away. Similar patterns were found regarding smoking and drinking.
When networks are viewed from a distance, hubs around central people can be seen that would not be apparent to someone within the network. For example, two people in a network may have similar characteristics and the same number of connections, but their position can be vastly different depending on how many connections their connections have. This visualization also makes it easy to see which people are on the periphery, like smokers and people experiencing loneliness. Looking at how those with certain behaviors are positioned and the structure of the network may be able to help design interventions more easily, as is demonstrated in the network based on information from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. It revealed that these high school students followed a rule that says “Don’t date your old partner’s current partner’s old partner,” (p. 99), which means they don’t swap partners with their best friend. This rule created a network that consists of a circle with long branches extending from it, making any student in the circle more susceptible to a sexually transmitted disease, even though they may have less partners than a person positioned on a branch of the network. Awareness of these networks can be useful in preventing the spread of any type of germ and allow those working on intervention target their educational efforts or vaccinations to the places and people that will have the most affect.
When the discussion begins to include online social networks, the research is more positive than the general consensus. Through a study of a neighborhood that was built with some homes that were connected via a fast broadband system and some that were not, it was found that those with the ability to connect to others online were not only more central to the network of their neighborhood, but stayed more connected to those in their former neighborhoods. This is a wonderful starting point for examining how technology widens our circle of acquaintances and allows relationships to continue that otherwise may not have.
The only shortcomings I found are in the lack of depth of the description of analysis which would be needed to put the ideas into practice. It would also be helpful to have included more discussion of criticisms and contentions of the ideas presented, as some are difficult to accept initially because they are counter intuitive. Although, to be fair, there are sixteen pages of notes in the back of the book with footnoted resources to support their claims, so anyone wanting to do more research can easily do so. To have included in-depth discussion of each contention would have made this into a textbook, which is not the intention.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone that is interested in human behavior, but especially to those studying or working in public administration because it changes the way we can examine how ideas flow from person to person, how actions of one can affect people they have not even met, how to focus on the ties between people and how an organization’s structure effects the outcome. It is also a great introduction into the ability to model networks and see them from an outside perspective that those in the network are not aware of.
These ideas could change the way those that serve the public and have the impossible task of solving “wicked problems” such as preparation for a natural disaster or pandemic. They also could fundamentally change the way we solve problems of inequalities of society, by focusing not just on a person’s situation inequalities, which are caused by their socio-economic status, but also on the positional inequalities, which have to do with their location in the network and who they know. Understanding this can help us create a more just society by finding ways to exploit the fact that those with money have more friends and having more friends leads to making more money and to connect more people to those that can help them.
