Word: similarly
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Skeptics raise other concerns, ones that go beyond the copycat effect. Couldn't happy people simply be exposed to similar lifestyles or social factors that explain their shared joy, such as favorable weather, low unemployment rates or a winning baseball team? If that were the case, argue the authors, then happiness would spread more uniformly among all the relationships; instead, it varied depending on whether the friendship was mutual or merely one-sided. As the investigators teased out these factors, they found that environment didn't have nearly the power that relationships...
...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...
...turn are the most influenced by them. But just because you start off at the center of your web does not guarantee that you'll stay there. In the 1970s, smokers were more likely to occupy that focal position in their network of friends and family. Look at a similar social map today, and you'll see that the smokers have drifted to the periphery...
According to Cigar Aficionado, nearly half of all U.S. Presidents smoked. Ulysses S. Grant never shook the cigar habit he picked up during the Civil War. William McKinley had a similar love of stogies, but like Obama, he never allowed himself to be photographed in the act. Theodore Roosevelt barred his daughter Alice from smoking in the White House, so she took her habit to the roof. Calvin Coolidge was known to offer cigars to Congressmen after White House breakfasts...
...radicals threatening to take over the Solidarity movement and Moscow watching closely, he had no choice but to order the crackdown. Soviet troops put down a popular rebellion in Hungary in 1956 and destroyed a reformist Czech regime in 1968. Jaruzelski was acutely aware that Poland could suffer a similar fate. Martial law was a "dramatically difficult decision," but it "saved Poland from a looming catastrophe," he told the court...