Word: fowlers
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Shortly before Christmas, a friend of mine, Veronica Fowler of Ames, Iowa, decided to throw a last-minute bash - not a holiday party but a "poverty" party. About 30 people showed up, dutifully following the invitation?s instructions to bring a "dish to share, a [cheap] bottle of wine, a hard-luck story and a devil-may-care attitude." Fowler, 46, a freelance writer and editor whose guests were mainly fellow media types and academics in their 40s and 50s, says, "It was fun to spit in the eye of impending doom. All of this tension is a lot more...
Increasingly, the answer seems to be yes. That's the intriguing conclusion from a body of work by Harvard social scientist Dr. Nicholas Christakis and his political-science colleague James Fowler at the University of California at San Diego. The pair created a sensation with their announcement earlier this month of a 20-year study showing that emotions can pass among a network of people up to three degrees of separation away, so your joy may, to a larger extent than you realize, be determined by how cheerful your friends' friends' friends are, even if some of the people...
...their most recent paper, published in the British Medical Journal, Christakis and Fowler explored the emotional state of nearly 5,000 people and the more than 50,000 social ties they shared. At three points during the long study, all the participants answered a standard questionnaire to determine their happiness level, so that the scientists could track changes in emotional state. That led to their intriguing finding of just how contagious happiness can be: if a subject's friend was happy, that subject was 15% more likely to be happy too; if that friend's friend was happy, the original...
...just in sterile study settings that the contagion of happiness is spreading. Christakis and Fowler noticed that people who are smiling on their Facebook pages tend to cluster together, forming an online social circle like a delirious flock of cyberbirds. And while some of this joy can certainly be traced to the copycat effect--if your friends post smiling pictures, you might feel like a grouch if you don't too--Christakis and Fowler are analyzing the clusters to see if something more infectious might be at work...
...infectiousness of happiness is only the latest in a series of similar phenomena Christakis and Fowler have studied. In 2007 they published a paper showing that obesity travels across webs in a similar way, with individuals having a 57% greater risk of being overweight if they have an obese friend. The same holds true for quitting smoking, with success 30% more common among friends of quitters than among friends of smokers...