Word: socialities
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...book combines years of the research by the authors with other studies to support its ideas. One of their most striking findings—from a large study that began in 1948 in Framingham, Massachusetts—is that obesity is greatly determined by social networks (some other researchers have questioned this interpretation). According to Connected, “If a mutual friend becomes obese, it nearly triples a person’s risk of becoming obese.” Because of imitation and shared expectations called “norms,” even friends...
...Your social networks, and in particular how popular you are, may also affect how good a candidate for a flu vaccine you are. Vaccinating an entire population may be less efficient than choosing people at random, asking them to name their friends, and then vaccinating those friends. The friends are likely to come into contact with many people, so vaccinating them might do the most good, the authors argue. "You can achieve the same level of protection for the population at one-third the cost doing an intervention like this," Fowler said, according to CNN. He and Christakis hope...
...Social networks are powerful, but, the authors argue, online sites do not seem to be increasing how many close friends students have. In a study of Facebook pages at an unnamed university, students traded posts and photo tags with six and seven people, not far from sociologists’s estimate that people have four to six close friends in real life...
...British anthropologist Robin Dunbar estimated that humans would have social groups of around 150, and Fowler said that the average Facebook user has about 110 friends on the site, which fits the relatively small groups humans evolved in. He and Christakis found that there is a “Three Degrees Rule”—networks are influential to point of the friends of a friend of a friend, but not very much beyond that...
Obama is right, in a civics-class sort of way, because social change can't occur if it's forced from the top down. But that's also a convenient argument for him, since it defers responsibility from his office...