If those riding intellectual fads are sometimes guilty of sloppy reasoning, imagine what happens when two fads collide.
That’s what happened when the British Medical Journal elected to publish a study analyzing 1) happiness in 2) social networks. The study, by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, concludes that happiness is contagious within social networks.
According to the authors, your happiness depends on the happiness of your friends, and their friends, and their friends. It’s a fascinating finding, and it was duly reported by hundreds of newspapers. Indeed, according to Fowler, “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”
Unfortunately, it’s probably not true. Here’s the crux of the research: the authors show that your happiness is positively related to the happiness of your friends, and that this holds even after accounting for a number of other variables, including how happy you and your friends were a few years back. That’s correlation; what about causation?
There are (at least) three reasons why happiness is correlated within social networks. It may be that — as the authors posit — happiness is contagious. Or perhaps people with similar dispositions are more likely to be friends. Economists call this the confounder “selection effects,” while medical journals call it “homophily.” The authors partly account for this by adding statistical controls for the past happiness of both you and your friends.
The third reason is perhaps the most likely: if you and I are friends, we are often subject to similar influences. If a buddy of ours dies, we’ll both be less happy. Or, less dramatically, if our favorite football team wins, we’ll both be happier. But this isn’t contagious happiness — it is simply a natural outcome of the shared experiences of people in the same social circles. Unfortunately, observational data cannot distinguish the headline-grabbing conclusion — that happiness is contagious — from my more mundane alternative: friends have shared emotional influences.
Interestingly, the same issue of the BMJ contained a very careful article by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason Fletcher making precisely this point. They employ a pretty cheeky research strategy: if you want to show that a research design is silly, show that it leads to silly conclusions.
They use Fowler and Christakis’s approach on another dataset, and show that it leads to the unlikely conclusion that height, headaches, and acne are also contagious. The more likely explanation, of course, is that all are subject to similar environmental influences. For instance, the same jackhammer causing your headache is likely causing mine.
I bet that a similar analysis would show that stories about happiness being contagious are, well, contagious. After all, what else explains last week’s epidemic, with stories in The New York Times; The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post? Of course, it may just be that this “epidemic” reflects a shared environmental influence, like each newspaper receiving the same press release.
So we have two studies drawing two conclusions. The first finds that happiness is contagious; the second finds that researchers can too easily draw false conclusions about contagion. Guess which one grabbed the attention of headline writers.
Excellent!
It also dawned on me that 1) happy people like to hang around other people (higher number of friends which increases their weight), and 2) happy people are thus more likely to have happy friends.
All this happiness stuff is strange.
Deeply philosophical…dig around on http://www.TED.com and search “happiness”. Some things you will learn:
1) Happiness seems inversely correlated to choices. The greater choices the less happiness.
2) There are sophisticated ways of capturing how happy people are. A study of emails saying “I feel happy” shows that Hawaii is the happiest state followed by Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire…..Remarkable.
But the cleanest non-Buddhist approach is Existentialism. Objective reality says nothing about happiness. The Subjective reality is where happiness dwells, and it can be manipulated from one minute to the next. If you want to be happy, then believing you are seems to do the trick.
So put on a happy face!
That second article is hilarious. Academiowned!
From the studies and things I’ve read, it absolutely makes good scientific sense. Here’s why….
Neuro-linguistics lets us know that how we “talk” to ourselves impacts our behavior, attitudes, etc.
Further, we know that smiling actually makes you feel better/happier. Why? Very simply, the body is programmed such that when you smile, certain chemicals are released in response to that smile…making you feel better.
So, if you’re around happy people, you are likely going to smile more often than around someone who is morose and the such.
Further, by smiling, you will feel better/happier, and your internal language is likely to improve, as well. You may go from “saying” to yourself, “I am such a loser,” to, at the very least, being distracted from that negative message…and, at best, starting to speak/think in a very positive fashion to yourself (e.g., “Yes, I can make it! After all if Dubner and Levitt made it, it’s a cinch that I can!”).
So, yeah, it makes sense. A bit freaky and twisted, but, hey, we like that stuff, no?
One of the authors of the happiness study, James Fowler, has a “pile” of research that suffers from similar problems. He supposedly proved the Colbert bump, though again its only correlational (what if politicians go on Colbert right before campaigning?). He also has two other papers using the Framingham Heart Study data on obesity and smoking that are likewise useless. How do researchers get away with publishing these kinds of results?
What mystifies me about the Fowler-Christakis happiness study is that they found no effect among coworkers, a mild effect among coresident spouses, and a stronger effect among next-door neighbors. whiskey tango foxtrot! You’d think the opportunity for “contagion” would be greater in the home and the workplace. The authors’ explanatory hypotheses (for the spouse finding, that you’re more likely to pick up happiness cues from people of the same gender, and for the coworker finding, that perhaps there are other things going on in the workplace– because of the competitive nature of the workplace, says Fowler, according to one of the press accounts– that might counteract the contagion) are unpersuasive. That said, though, I think there’s something intriguing here– but it needs to be further verified.
Thank you for calling correlation on contextual effects. The authors seem to argue that mood shapes context but that is backwards. Given that we have context (self-selection, etc.), it would seem that mood is more a consequence of context.
The real lesson would be: hang out with happy people if you want to be happy. Hang out with successful people if you want …
And that, of course, fits with our human experience: we worry about our kids hanging out with the loser crowd, with the “bad” kids who are “bad influence.”
The “similar influenes” causation seems most likely. I’m fairly sure that $5,000 cash would cause more happiness in me than my friend’s friend having a good day.