Kitabı oxu: «Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives»
NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS, MD, PhD
and JAMES FOWLER, PhD
Connected
The Amazing Power of Social Networks
and How They Shape Our Lives
Harper Press
For Erika, Sebastian, Lysander, and Eleni
and
for Harla, Lucas, and Jay
to whom our connection is aeonian
Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
PREFACE
1. IN THE THICK OF IT
2. WHEN YOU SMILE, THE WORLD SMILES WITH YOU
3. LOVE THE ONE YOU’RE WITH
4. THIS HURTS ME AS MUCH AS IT HURTS YOU
5. THE BUCK STARTS HERE
6. POLITICALLY CONNECTED
7. IT’S IN OUR NATURE
8. HYPERCONNECTED
9. THE WHOLE IS GREAT
NOTES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PLATE SECTION
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Preface
Social networks are intricate things of beauty. They are so elaborate and so complex—and so ubiquitous, in fact—that one has to wonder what purpose they serve. Why are we embedded in them? How do they form? How do they work? How do they affect us?
I (Nicholas) have been animated by these questions for the better part of the past ten years. I began by being interested in the simplest social network of all: a pair of people, a dyad. Initially, the dyads I studied were husbands and wives. As a physician caring for terminally ill patients and their families, I noticed the serious toll that a loved one’s death had on a spouse. And I became interested in how illness in one person might cause illness in another. For it seemed to me that if people are interconnected, their health must also be interconnected. If a wife falls ill or dies, her husband’s risk of death assuredly rises. Eventually, I began to realize that there were all kinds of dyads I might study, such as pairs of siblings or pairs of friends or pairs of neighbors who are connected (not separated) by a backyard fence.
But the intellectual heart of the matter was not in these simple arrangements. Instead, the key realization was that these dyads agglomerate to form huge webs of ties stretching far into the distance. A man’s wife has a best friend who has a husband who has a coworker who has a sibling who has a friend, and so on and so forth. These chains branch like lightning bolts, forming intricate patterns throughout human society. The situation, it seemed, was much more complicated. With every step away from an individual in a social network that we take, the number of ties to other humans, and the complexity of the branching, rise very, very fast. As I reflected on this problem, I began to read the work of other social scientists, from lonely German scholars at the turn of the twentieth century to visionary sociologists in the 1970s, who had studied social networks ranging in size from three to thirty people. But my interest lay in social networks of three thousand or thirty thousand or even three million people.
I realized that to study things of such complexity, I would make better progress if I worked with another investigator. As it turned out, James Fowler, also at Harvard, was studying networks from a completely different perspective. James and I did not know each other despite working in adjoining buildings on the same campus for several years. In 2002 we were introduced by a mutual colleague, political scientist Gary King. In other words, we started our journey as friends of a friend. Gary thought we might have common intellectual interests, and he was right. Indeed, the very fact that we met because of our social network illustrates a major point we want to make about how and why social networks operate and how they benefit us.
James had spent a number of years studying the origin of people’s political beliefs and examining how one person’s attempt to solve a social or political problem influenced others. How did humans come together to accomplish what they could not do on their own? And he shared interests in other topics that were a key part of the story: altruism and goodness, both of which are essential for social networks to grow and endure.
Together, as we began to think about the idea that people are connected in vast social networks, we realized that social influence does not end with the people we know. If we affect our friends, and they affect their friends, then our actions can potentially affect people we have never met. We began by studying various health effects. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend became happy, you became happy.
Eventually, we realized that there were fundamental rules that governed both the formation and the operation of social networks. We concluded that if we were going to study how networks function, we also had to understand how they are assembled. One cannot, for example, be friends with absolutely anybody. People are constrained by geography, socioeconomic status, technology, and even genes to have certain kinds of social relationships and to have a certain number of them. The key to understanding people is understanding the ties between them; therefore, it was to the ties that we turned our focus.
Our interest in these topics paralleled the interests of many other scholars who have advanced the mathematics and science of networks over the past ten years. As we began to study human connections, we encountered engineers studying networks of power stations, neuroscientists studying networks of neurons, geneticists studying networks of genes, and physicists studying networks of darn near everything. Their networks might be pretty too, we thought, but ours were more interesting: much more complicated and much more consequential. After all, the nodes in our networks are thinking human beings. They can make decisions, potentially changing their networks even while embedded in them and being affected by them. A network of humans has a special kind of life of its own.
Just as scientists have become interested in the underlying beauty and explanatory power of networks, the person on the street thinks about them too. This is largely due to the appearance of the Internet in people’s homes, which has given everyone a notion of how lots of things might be interconnected. People began to speak colloquially about the “Net” and eventually the “World Wide Web” (not to mention the smash-hit movie The Matrix). And they began to realize that they were as interconnected as their computers. These connections have become explicitly social to the point that today nearly everyone is familiar with social-network websites like Facebook and MySpace.
As we studied social networks more deeply, we began to think of them as a kind of human superorganism. They grow and evolve. All sorts of things flow and move within them. This superorganism has its own structure and a function, and we became obsessed with understanding both.
Seeing ourselves as part of a superorganism allows us to understand our actions, choices, and experiences in a new light. If we are affected by our embeddedness in social networks and influenced by others who are closely or distantly tied to us, we necessarily lose some power over our own decisions. Such a loss of control can provoke especially strong reactions when people discover that their neighbors or even strangers can influence behaviors and outcomes that have moral overtones and social repercussions. But the flip side of this realization is that people can transcend themselves and their own limitations. In this book, we argue that our interconnection is not only a natural and necessary part of our lives but also a force for good. Just as brains can do things that no single neuron can do, so can social networks do things that no single person can do.
For decades, even centuries, serious human concerns, such as whether a person will live or die, be rich or poor, or act justly or unjustly, have been reduced to a debate about individual versus collective responsibility. Scientists, philosophers, and others who study society have generally divided into two camps: those who think individuals are in control of their destinies, and those who believe that social forces (ranging from a lack of good public education to the presence of a corrupt government) are responsible for what happens to us.
However, we think that a third factor is missing from this debate. Given our research and our own diverse experiences in life—from meeting our spouses to meeting each other, from caring for terminally ill patients to building latrines in poor villages—we believe that our connections to other people matter most, and that by linking the study of individuals to the study of groups, the science of social networks can explain a lot about human experience. This book focuses on our ties to others and how they affect emotions, sex, health, politics, money, evolution, and technology. But most of all it is about what makes us uniquely human. To know who we are, we must understand how we are connected.
CHAPTER 1 In the Thick of It
In the mountain village of Levie, Corsica, during the 1840s, Anton-Claudio Peretti became convinced that his wife, Maria-Angelina, was having an affair with another man and that, even worse, their daughter was not his child. Maria told Anton that she was going to leave him, and she made preparations to do so with her brother, Corto. That very evening, Anton shot his wife and daughter to death and fled to the mountains. The bereft Corto sorely wanted to kill Anton, but he could not find him. In a bit of violent symmetry that seemed sensible to residents of the area, Corto instead killed Anton’s brother, Francesco, and nephew, Aristotelo.
It did not end there. Five years later, Giacomo, brother of the deceased Aristotelo, avenged the deaths of his brother and father by killing Corto’s brother. Giacomo wanted to kill Corto’s father too, but he had already died of natural causes, denying Giacomo the satisfaction.1 In this cascade of death, Giacomo and Corto’s brother were connected by quite a path: Giacomo was the son of Francesco, who was the brother of Anton, who was married to Maria, who was the sister of Corto, whose brother was the target of Giacomo’s murderous wrath.
Such behavior is not restricted to historically or geographically distant places. Here is another example, closer to home: Not long before the summer of 2002 in St. Louis, Missouri, Kimmy, an exotic dancer, left a purse containing $900 in earnings with a friend while she was busy. When she came back to reclaim it, her friend and the purse were gone. But a week later, Kimmy’s cousin spotted the purse thief’s partner at a local shop, and she called Kimmy. Kimmy raced over with a metal pole. She viciously attacked this friend of her erstwhile friend. Later she observed with pride that she had “beat her [friend’s] partner’s ass…I know I did something…[to get even] that’s the closest thing I could [do].”2
Cases like these are puzzling. After all, what did Anton’s brother and nephew and Kimmy’s friend’s friend have to do with anything? What possible sense is there in injuring or killing the innocent? Even by the incomprehensible standards of murderous violence, what is the point of these actions, taken one week or five years later? What explains them?
We tend to think of such cases as quaint curiosities, like Appalachian feuds, or as backward practices, like the internecine violence between Shiite and Sunni tribesmen or the cycle of killings in Northern Ireland or the reciprocating gang violence in American cities. But this grim logic has ancient roots. It is not just that the impetus to revenge is ancient, nor even that such violence can express group solidarity (“we are Hatfields, and we hate McCoys”), but that violence—in both its minor and extreme forms—can spread through social ties and has done so since humans emerged from the African savanna. It can spread either in a directed fashion (retaliating against the perpetrators) or in a generalized fashion (harming nondisputants nearby). Either way, however, a single murder can set off a cascade of killings. Acts of aggression typically diffuse outward from a starting point—like a bar fight that begins when one man swings at another who ducks, resulting in a third man getting hit, and soon (in what has become a cliché precisely because it evokes deep-seated notions of unleashed aggression) punches are flying everywhere. Sometimes these epidemics of violence, whether in Mediterranean villages or urban gangs, can persist for decades.3
Notions of collective guilt and collective revenge that underlie cascades of violence seem strange only when we regard responsibility as a personal attribute. Yet in many settings, morality resides in groups rather than in individuals. And a further clue to the collective nature of violence is that it tends to be a public, not a private, phenomenon. Two-thirds of the acts of interpersonal violence in the United States are witnessed by third parties, and this fraction approaches three-fourths among young people.4
Given these observations, perhaps the person-to-person spread of violence should not surprise us. Just as it is often said that “the friend of my friend is my friend” and “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” so too the friend of my enemy is my enemy. These aphorisms encapsulate certain truths about animosity and affection, but they also convey a fundamental aspect of our humanity: our connection. While Giacomo and Kimmy acted alone, their actions show just how easily responsibility and retaliation can diffuse from person to person to person across social ties.
In fact, we do not even have to search for complicated paths across which violence spreads, because the initial step, from the very first person to the next, accounts for most of the violence in our society. In trying to explain violence, it is myopic to focus solely on the perpetrator—his frame of mind, his finger on the trigger—because murder is rarely a random act between strangers. In the United States, 75 percent of all homicides involve people who knew each other, often intimately, prior to the murder. If you want to know who might take your life, just look at the people around you.
But your social network also includes those who might save your life. “On March 14, 2002, I gave my right kidney to my best friend’s husband,” Cathy would later note in an online forum that chronicles the experiences of people who become “living donors” of organs. The summer before, during a heartfelt chat, Cathy had learned that her friend’s husband’s renal failure had worsened and that he needed a kidney transplant in order to survive. Overcome with the desire to help, Cathy underwent a series of medical and psychological evaluations, getting more and more excited as she passed each one and moved closer to her goal of donating one of her kidneys. “The experience has been the most rewarding of my life,” she wrote. “I am so grateful that I was able to help my best friend’s husband. His wife has her husband back. His sons have their dad back…. It’s a win-win situation. We all win. I gave the gift of life.”5
Similar stories abound, and such “directed donations” of organs can even come to involve people who have rather tenuous connections, a Starbucks clerk and his longtime customer, for example. There can even be organdonation cascades that loosely resemble the Perettis’ murder cascade. John Lavis, a sixty-two-year-old resident of the town of Mississauga, Ontario, father of four and grandfather of three, was dying of heart failure in 1995. His heart had failed during triple-bypass surgery, and he was placed on a temporary artificial heart. In a stroke of unbelievable good fortune, a donor heart was transplanted into him just eight days later when he was on the brink of death. His daughter recalled: “We were a family of immense gratitude…. [My father] received the biggest gift he will ever receive—his life was given back to him.” Motivated by this experience, Lavis’s children all signed organ-donor cards, thinking that this symmetrical act was the least they could do. Then in 2007, Lavis’s son Dan died in a work-related accident. Eight people benefited from Dan’s decision to donate his organs. The woman who received his heart later wrote to the Lavis family, thanking them for “giving her a new life.”6 The same year in the United States, a similar cascade an amazing ten links long took place between unrelated living kidney donors (albeit with explicit medical coordination), saving many lives along the way.7
Social-network ties can—and, as we will see, usually do—convey benefits that are the very opposite of violence. They can be conduits for altruistic acts in which individuals pay back a debt of gratitude by paying it forward. The role that social connections can play in the spread of both good and bad deeds has even prompted the creation of novel strategies to address social problems. For example, programs in several U.S. metropolitan areas involve teams of “violence interrupters.” These streetwise individuals, often former gang members, try to stop the killing by attempting to break the cycle of transmission. They rush to the bedsides of victims or to the homes of victims’ families and friends, encouraging them not to seek revenge. If they can persuade just one person not to be violent, quite a few lives can be saved.
Our connections affect every aspect of our daily lives. Rare events such as murder and organ donation are just the tip of the iceberg. How we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on the ties that bind us. Social networks spread happiness, generosity, and love. They are always there, exerting both subtle and dramatic influence over our choices, actions, thoughts, feelings, even our desires. And our connections do not end with the people we know. Beyond our own social horizons, friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us, like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.
Bucket Brigades and Telephone Trees
Imagine your house is on fire. Luckily, a cool river runs nearby. But you are all alone. You run back and forth to the river, bucket in hand, toting gallon after gallon of water to splash on your burning home. Unfortunately, your efforts are useless. Without some help, you will not be able to carry water fast enough to outpace the inferno.
Now suppose that you are not alone. You have one hundred neighbors, and, lucky for you, they all feel motivated to help. And each one just happens to have a bucket. If your neighbors are sufficiently strong, they can run back and forth to the river, haphazardly dumping buckets of water on the fire. A hundred people tossing water on your burning house is clearly better than you doing it by yourself. The problem is that once they get started your neighbors waste a lot of time running back and forth. Some of them tire easily; others are uncoordinated and spill a lot of water; one guy gets lost on his way back to your house. If each person acts independently, then your house will surely be destroyed.
Fortunately, this does not happen because a peculiar form of social organization is deployed: the bucket brigade. Your hundred neighbors form a line from the river to your house, passing full buckets of water toward your house and empty buckets toward the river. Not only does the bucket brigade arrangement mean that people do not have to spend time and energy walking back and forth to the river; it also means that weaker people who might not be able to walk or carry a heavy bucket long distances now have something to offer. A hundred people taking part in a bucket brigade might do the work of two hundred people running haphazardly.
But why exactly is a group of people arranged this way more effective than the same group of people—or even a larger group—working independently? If the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, how exactly does the whole come to be greater? Where does the “greater” part come from? It’s amazing to be able to increase the effectiveness of human beings by as much as an order of magnitude simply by arranging them differently. But what is it about combining people into groups with particular configurations that makes them able to do more things and different things than the individuals themselves?
To answer these questions, and before we get to the fun stuff, we first need to explain a few basic terms and ideas of network theory. These basic concepts set the stage for the individual stories and the more complicated ideas we will soon explore as we investigate the surprising power of social networks to affect the full spectrum of human experience.
We should first clarify what we mean by a group of people. A group can be defined by an attribute (for example, women, Democrats, lawyers, long-distance runners) or as a specific collection of individuals to whom we can literally point (“those people, right over there, waiting to get into the concert”). A social network is altogether different. While a network, like a group, is a collection of people, it includes something more: a specific set of connections between people in the group. These ties, and the particular pattern of these ties, are often more important than the individual people themselves. They allow groups to do things that a disconnected collection of individuals cannot. The ties explain why the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And the specific pattern of the ties is crucial to understanding how networks function.
The bucket brigade that saves a house is a very simple social network. It is linear and has no branches: each person (except the first and last) is connected to two other people, the one in front and the one behind. For moving something like water long distances, this is a good way to be organized. But the optimal organization of one hundred people into a network depends very much on the task at hand. The best pattern of connections between a hundred people to put out a fire is different from the best pattern for, say, achieving a military objective. A company of one hundred soldiers is typically organized into ten tightly interconnected squads of ten. This allows each soldier to know all of his squad mates rather than just the grunt in front of him and the grunt behind him. The military goes to great lengths to help squad members know each other very well, so well in fact that they are willing to give their lives for one another.
Consider still another social network: the telephone tree. Suppose you need to contact a hundred people quickly to let them know that school is canceled. Before modern communications and the Internet, this was a challenge because there was no public source of up-to-the-minute information that everyone could access from their homes (though the ringing of church bells in the town square comes to mind). Instead, each person needed to be contacted directly. The telephone made this task much easier, but it was still a burden for one person to make all one hundred calls. And even if someone set out to do this, it might take quite a while to get to the people at the end of the list, by which time they may have already left home for school. Having a single person make all the calls is both inefficient and burdensome.
Ideally, one person would set off a chain reaction so that everyone could be reached as quickly as possible and with the least burden on any particular individual. One option is to create a list and have the person at the top of the list call the next person, the second person call the third, and so on until everyone gets the message, as in a bucket brigade. This would distribute the burden evenly, but it would still take a really long time for the hundredth person to be reached. Moreover, if someone in the sequence was not home when called, everyone later in the list would be left in the dark.
An alternative pattern of connections is a telephone tree. The first person calls two people, who each call two people, and so on until everyone is contacted. Unlike the bucket brigade, the telephone tree is designed to spread information to many people simultaneously, creating a cascade. The workload is distributed evenly among all group members, and the problem caused by one person not being home is limited. Moreover, with a single call, one person can set off a chain of events that could influence hundreds or thousands of other people—just as the person who donated the heart that was transplanted into John Lavis prompted another donation that saved eight more lives. The telephone tree also vastly reduces the number of steps it takes for information to flow among people in the group, minimizing the chance that the message will be degraded. This particular network structure thus helps to both amplify and preserve the message. In fact, within a few decades of the widespread deployment of home-based phones in the United States, telephone trees were used for all sorts of purposes. An article in the Los Angeles Times from 1957, for example, describes the use of a phone tree to mobilize amateur astronomers, as part of the “Moonwatch System” of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, to track American and Russian satellites.8
Alas, this same network structure also allows a single swindler to cheat thousands of people. In Ponzi schemes, money flows “up” a structure like a telephone tree. As new people are added to the network, they send money to the people “above” them and then new members are recruited “below” them to provide more money. As time passes, money is collected from more and more people. In what might be the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, federal investigators discovered in 2008 that during the previous thirty years Bernie Madoff had swindled $50 billion from thousands of investors. Like the Corsican vendetta network we described earlier, Madoff’s investment network is the kind most of us would like to avoid.
The four different types of networks we have considered so far are shown in the illustration. First is a group of one hundred people (each represented by a circle, or node) among whom there are no ties. Next is a bucket brigade. Here, in addition to the one hundred people, there are a total of ninety-nine ties between the members of the group; every person (except the first and last) is connected to two other people by a mutual tie (meaning that full and empty buckets pass in both directions). In the telephone tree, there are one hundred people and again ninety-nine ties. But here, everyone, with the exception of the first and last people in the tree, is connected to three other people, with one inbound tie (the person they get the call from) and two outbound ties (the people they make calls to). There are no mutual ties; the flow of information is directional and so are the ties between people. In a company of one hundred soldiers, each member of each squad knows every other member of the squad very well; and each person has exactly nine ties. Here, there are one hundred people and 450 ties connecting them. (The reason there are not nine hundred ties is that each tie counts once for the two people it connects.) In the drawing, we imagine that there are no ties between squads or, at least, that the ties within squads are much tighter than the ties between squads. This is clearly an oversimplification, but it illustrates still another point about communities in social networks. A network community can be defined as a group of people who are much more connected to one another than they are to other groups of connected people found in other parts of the network. The communities are defined by structural connections, not necessarily by any particular shared traits.
Four different ways to connect one hundred people. Each circle (“node”) represents a person, and each line (“tie”) a relationship between two people. Lines with arrows indicate a directed relationship; in the telephone tree, one person calls another. Otherwise, ties are mutual: in the bucket brigade, full and empty buckets travel in both directions; in military squads, the connections between the soldiers are all two-way.
In a very basic sense, then, a social network is an organized set of people that consists of two kinds of elements: human beings and the connections between them. Unlike the bucket brigade, telephone tree, and military company, however, the organization of natural social networks is typically not imposed from the top. Real, everyday social networks evolve organically from the natural tendency of each person to seek out and make many or few friends, to have large or small families, to work in personable or anonymous workplaces.
For example, in the next illustration, we show a network of 105 students in a single dormitory at an American university and the friendship ties between them. On average, each student is connected to six other close friends, but some students have only one friend, and others have many. Moreover, some students are more embedded than others, meaning they have more connections to other people in the network via friends or friends of friends. In fact, network visualization software is designed to place those who are more interconnected in the center and those who are less interconnected at the periphery, helping us to see each person’s location in the network. When your friends and family become better connected, it increases your level of connection to the whole social network. We say it makes you more central because having better-connected friends literally moves you away from the edges and toward the center of a social network. And we can measure your centrality by counting not just the number of your friends and other contacts but also by counting your friends’ friends, and their friends, and so on. Unlike the bucket brigade where everyone feels his position to be the same (“there’s a guy on my left passing me buckets and a guy on my right to whom I give them—it doesn’t matter where in the line I am”), here, people are located in distinctly different kinds of places within the network.
