Christakis: friends influence our choices, but not on Facebook, Twitter…
I s it possible that someone with 50 thousand followers on Twitter is actually unsocial? It most certainly is. This answer is what thrust Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a social researcher and professor at Harvard University, into the media spotlight last year. For in his view, online social networks have almost nothing to do with true, intimate and lasting social relationships. According to Christakis, Facebook resembles the soap operas of the past: with the difference that the stories into which we can immerse ourselves are no longer played out by unknown actors, but by people we actually know in real life. In his Harvard office Christakis responded to my questions with passion, launching right into the topics most familiar to him and reflecting a bit before answering more unusual questions. Here's a synthesis of our conversation.
Professor, one person alone can't create any kind of relationship. But with just two people things already start to get complicated. When we then get to talking about seven billion globalized individuals, studying the relationships that exist among all of these people is no easy task. How do you do it?
What I and my team do isn't studying the interactions among people, but the way in which they influence one another. We don't study the six degrees of separation phenomenon, a theory that's moreover already been amply demonstrated, but rather what we call the three degrees of influence, which concerns not large masses of people, but more intimate relationships, the ones that connect us with those truly close to us.
Can you explain more?
People who spend time together influence one another. This is something easily observed. Someone living with an obese person has greater probability of gaining weight than others do. The same happens for someone living with a smoker or someone who has quit smoking. What's less easy to see is that this mechanism is often at work even beyond direct acquaintances. It's emerged from our studies that each of us is influenced in our choices and convictions not only by the people whom we know, but also by those whom the people that we know know. The influence we have on people (and that consequently others have on us) extends in some cases up to three levels of distance.
Are you telling me that my attitudes are influenced by my friend's friend's friend?
Not always. But it's possible, yes. It happens for example in the case of obesity, which we've shown spreads to three degrees. Or with the attitude to quit or to start smoking. The push to get divorced however extends to just two levels. Even our very happiness spreads in this way. But the central element is not on how many levels attitudes, habits and mental states are spread. What's important is that there is more than one level. This is what makes our research so interesting.
What you're saying seems a bit disturbing to me, professor. I have the impression that you're putting my free will in doubt.
Indeed some have considered our work a low blow to the idea of free will. In spite of that, if it is true, as we have shown, that one's weight, attitude towards smoking, political inclinations, even one's happiness, are conditioned not only by one's friends and relatives, but also by hundreds of strangers, it does then mean that you are less the creator of your future than you may believe. Our destinies are in fact interconnected and interdependent amongst themselves in a network that's difficult to comprehend, but is without a doubt quite fascinating from a scientific point of view.
And yet each of us participates, if only collectively, in the definition of our present. And of our future...
Exactly. It's fundamental that every individual exercise their free will so that they can have the greatest possible influence on this sort of common destiny. If you decide to quit smoking, this decision of yours will have a direct effect on your network of relationships up to the third level of acquaintance. The same will happen if you decide to lose or gain weight. The decisions that you make for yourself will directly influence hundreds, in some cases even thousands of people.
Is this something that happens only with us humans or does it occur with animals too?
What has always fascinated me about human relationships is that we create relationships with other people (family, colleagues, friends...), people chosen with care and not only for reproductive goals: we don't befriend just anybody. We've been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years and I am convinced that this happens for very precise biological reasons. It's true that ants to do it too, but for practical motivations. The interesting thing is that we human beings choose to live our lives in a very particular area of this big network of interactions which is entirely our own. We choose our friends, for example, but we don't choose our colleagues or our parents. We choose, when we can, our neighbors. In short: the reasons that lead us to belong to that specific portion of this immense social network are various, but the point is that it is we human beings who are biologically and psychologically pushed to take part in specific social networks and these networks end up having a determining effect on our lives.
Over the last few years people have been talking quite a bit about Internet social networks, where everyone (or many of us, at least) have set about accumulating greater and greater numbers of friends. Do you think these networks modify somehow our way of influencing others, or of being influenced by them?
The answer is no. And I'll explain why. On Facebook or other similar sites, the word "friend" is used too loosely. The people that are a part of one's network of friends on Facebook or other such sites are nothing more than acquaintances. If you asked my 13-year-old daughter how many friends she has, she'd probably say four, which is the average for a person of that age. Now the point is that were I to put the same question to my grandmother, asking her how many friends she had when she was my daughter's age, she would give me the same answer: four friends. My daughter has the Internet, a cell phone and a bunch of technological gadgets which my grandmother didn't have, but nonetheless this number of intimate friends hasn't changed at all. Here's another example: two thousand years ago a Roman battalion was made up of one hundred men: roughly the same dimension of a battalion of American soldiers today. Over the last centuries we have invented the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone and the Internet, but none of these have changed even minimally the scale of our fundamental social relationships.
Why?
Because that which limits or amplifies the interactions between humans is not technology, but the mind and biology. Internet does not change the influence we have on others, anymore than it changes our inclination to love or our attitude towards violence. If a friend calls you and suggests buying a bicycle you might take it into consideration. But if a stranger does the same it's much less likely that you'll follow his advice, wouldn't you say? In the same way, with Facebook and other social networks we can certainly interact with more people, but not necessarily influence them.
Allow me an objection. Beyond my closest friends there is a circle of friends, a few dozen let's say, who aren't part of my circle of close relationships, but with whom I nevertheless wish to stay in contact. Social networks help me to do this. Doesn't the same thing happen to you?
For this category of what we might call second-level friendships, I admit that the amount of contact and influence can benefit from online social networks. In my lastest book (Connected) we studied this question and concluded that online relationships are in many ways similar to real life ones, but at the same time different. They don't change people's desire to interact with others or to influence them. There is however a new phenomenon, which we call enormity, namely the possibility of influencing hundreds of thousands of people. The second phenomenon that the Internet makes possible is commonality: the possibility of collaborating in very large groups (Wikipedia is an excellent example of this). The third is specificity, or the possibility of finding particular information extremely quickly or also of creating relationships with specific people, as in the case of dating sites for singles with shared interests, religions, political attitudes... This third aspect has some contraindications as well. Think of the people with forms of depression that cause them to convince themselves that they're being spied on 24 hours a day by some secret government organization. Today with the Internet they can easily find others like themselves and feed their paranoia together. The fourth aspect that makes relationships on the Internet different from those of real life is virtuality, which allows one to adopt a different identity from one's own. For instance online a man can pretend to be a woman. Or someone in a wheelchair can make it so that online no one knows about it.
So how do you explain this collective enthusiasm towards these new social networks?
It's because they are quite precisely based on and act on our primary needs: love, friendship, the desire to interact with others and to influence them.
So, to summarize: technology definitely has not changed our intimate relationships in the past and it won't in the future either?
Exactly. The Internet has probably changed and will continue to change the economy. But I have only one wife because I want to have only one wife and no technology will ever be able to change this fundamental aspect of mine.
Speaking of friendships, I am convinced that deep friendships come in two types: the contextual kind, that live only in a determined context and end along with that context, like what happens in school or in the army, and others that last a lifetime. They are both deep, but have different durations. How do they differ in your opinion?
As far as I know the subject has not yet been studied in depth. But I believe that the difference depends on the fact that in some phases of our lives we find ourselves in moments of transition in which we're more open to establish deep relationships with strangers, also because we know we need friends in that particular moment.
So then what are the criteria we use to choose our friends?
Actually we don't have a definitive answer yet. We know that it's not just matter of psychology, because if it's true that the people most similar to ourselves will probably be less competitive, it's also true that we have a lot to learn and to improve upon spending time with people different from ourselves. But we are working to try to answer, beyond what mere common sense can tell us, these fundamental questions: Why do we have friends? Why do we have only a certain number of them? Why do we create relationships with specific social networks? Why do we prefer the company of people that are similar to us?
Let's go back to online social networks. Give us some advice on how to use them. After all you do have 460 friends of Facebook...
I use Facebook almost exclusively for interacting with my family, my close friends and my students. So first of all: don't accept friend requests from people you don't know already in real life. And don't forget that everything you say or post on these sites will stay there forever. A gaffe made in a bar is soon forgotten, but if it happens online it's memorized forever. Interactions have a memory. We remember some things and forget others for reasons that are often unknown even to ourselves, but that mean something. Social networks interfere with this process, they change it, making something permanent which in traditional social relationships can be forgotten or dismissed. Our civilization evolved basing itself on a social memory that did not foresee this permanent form that online social networks have introduced. I will think further on this aspect because I think it has a certain importance.
After leaving Professor Christakis's office I turned on my iPhone and asked him to be friends on Facebook. Five minutes later he accepted.
