Our genes influence our social networks

Chromosomes magnified - photo by BlueSunFlower

If you don’t have enough friends or aren’t the social butterfly of your class, now you can blame your genes.

Nick Christakis (Harvard Medical School) and James Fowler (UCSD political scientist) are back with more controversial findings suggesting some genetic determination in our social networks (both in forming friendships and determining where we are in social networks).  Christakis: “the beautiful and complicated pattern of human connection depends on our genes to a significant measure.”  Previous work by Christakis looked at how our social networks and who is in them shape our likelihood of obesity, happiness, and smoking, among other outcomes.

They researched 1,100 same-sex twins in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (colloquially called “Add Health”). Add Health examined high school students in 1994-1995 and asked questions regarding economics, physical health and social involvement. Christakis and Fowler compared the social networks and patterns of identical same-sex twins against fraternal ones to separate nature (genes) from nurture (upbringing).

Their findings go far beyond what people might think about the genetic influence on personality traits (being outgoing, shy, etc.). For example, how often the subject was named as a friend and the likelihood that the subject’s friends knew one another were strongly genetically influenced, but interestingly not the number of friends that the subject listed. This suggests a genetic determinant of being popular (beyond a simple disposition toward being outgoing); further buttressing this interpretation, whether the subject was more the center of attention (central to these networks) or more of a social outcast (peripheral to these networks) was also heritable.

Christakis admits that some of the findings are puzzling, like the fact that the likelihood that my friends Bill and John know each other is attributable to my genes; what this likely means is that some people are genetically disposed to introduce their friends to each other more or to host or arrange social events where these friends would have chances to meet each other.

‘Given that social networks play important roles in determining a wide variety of things ranging from employment and wages to the spread of disease, it is important to understand why networks exhibit the patterns that they do,’  Matthew Jackson, a Stanford University economist, wrote in a commentary accompanying the study called “Do We Inherit Our Positions in Life?”.

James Fowler… said its implications go beyond the theoretical. For some time, scientists have suspected a genetic role in certain conditions, such as obesity. Now, Mr. Fowler wants to investigate whether the dynamics of social networks might affect public-health outcomes, for instance, by exposing people to certain behaviors, such as smoking.”

“Our work shows how humans, like ants, may assemble themselves into a ’super-organism’ with rules governing the assembly, rules that we carry with us deep in our genes,” says Nicholas Christakis.  Christakis et al. also believe that there may be an evolutionary explanation for their findings since one’s position in social networks had costs or benefits to the survival of one’s genes. Being central to a group likely contributed to survival during periods of food scarcity since one could learn where food supplies were, while being peripheral to groups helped genes survive in periods where deadly germs were being transmitted by social contact. Christakis: “It may be that natural selection is acting on not just things like whether or not we can resist the common cold, but also who it is that we are going to come into contact with.”  The paper notes: “There may be many reasons for genetic variation in the ability to attract or the desire to introduce friends.  More friends may mean greater social support in some settings or greater conflict in others.  Having denser social connections may improve groupsolidarity, but it might also insulate a group from beneficial influence or information from individuals outside the group.”  The authors note that more work is required to understand what specific genes are at work and what possible mediating mechanisms might be.

The authors acknowledge some controversy in studies comparing identical twin studies to fraternal twins, with critics noting that identical twins may have a stronger affiliation with  each other that causes them to be more influenced by each other than fraternal twins.  The authors note that twin studies have been validated by comparing identical twins raised apart versus together (suggesting that it is not the shared environment).  The authors further note that personality and cognitive differences between identical and fraternal twins persist even among twins mistakenly believed to be identical by their parents (indicating that parental patterns in raising these ‘identical twins’ can’t explain the outcome).  Finally, they note that that once twins reach adulthood, identical twins living apart tend to become more similar with age, which doesn’t fit with a notion of the importance of their shared environment.

The study appeared online in James Fowler, Christopher Dawes and Nicholas Christakis,  “Model of Genetic Variation in Human Social Networks” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal (January 26, 2009).

“More specifically, the results show that genetic factors account for 46% [95% confidence interval 23%, 69%] of the variation in in-degree (how many times a person is named as a friend), but heritability of out-degree (how many friends a person names) is not significant (22%, CI 0%, 47%). In addition, node transitivity [the likelihood that two of a person's contacts are connected to each other] is significantly heritable, with 47% (CI 13%, 65%) of the variation explained by differences in genes. We also find that genetic variation contributes to variation in other network characteristics; for example, bertween-ness centrality [the fraction of paths through the networks that pass through a given node] is significantly heritable (29%, CI 5%, 39%).”

See also “Genes and the Friends You Make” (Wall Street Journal, 1/27/09 by Philip Shishkin)

See other articles by Christakis et. al on social networks.

Dentyne hopes social capital message sticks

Dentyne’s latest commercial “Make Face Time” strives to associate gum chewing with connections with friends.  While it’s hard to see the connection (other than the appeal of fresh-smelling breath), their commercial is a nice wry twist on the limits of online connections and the strength of face-to-face connections.  They refer to a friend whispering to another in a pool as “voicemail” and a couple kissing as a real “instant message!.”  [It also has nice background music of Coconut Records, the moonlighting project of actor Jason Schwartzman, singing "Summer Day".]

Dentyne’s web campaign also gives you 3:00 on their website and then tells you to go out and do something.  And on the website you can say goodbye to emoticons (in the Smiley Chamber of Doom), go to the Face Time Finder (to find good local places to connect with others), and make a “Face Time Request” to someone you want to see in person.  While we applaud Dentyne’s connection sentiment, is the Internet really required for this?  How about a phone call? And do we really want to give Dentyne access to some information about our personal networks?

No Virginia, there isn’t a God?

An atheist organization (The American Humanist Association) has adapted the British Humanist Association’s UK campaign (“There’s probably No God – Now stop worrying and enjoy your life “) to the US starting in DC with a Christmas season ad campaign to try to convince more Americans not to believe in God and to be good anyway, (“Why Believe In God?  Just Be Good For Goodness Sake”).

Unfortunately, their campaign flies in the face of strong data-based evidence in the US, from a high quality, large scale survey, of how religious citizens (controlling for lots of other individual factors) are better citizens: they give more to secular causes, volunteer more for secular causes, vote more, are more engaged in their communities, to name only a few benefits.

That said, the survey did not find that it is belief that produces this benefits, it was having friends in a faith community, probably because it was something about being surrounded by others who were infused with moral beliefs that held them accountable for their actions.   The survey findings reveal that “belief in God” is not the crucial predictor; atheists in theory can be nice and happy if go to church and make friends there (although only 4% of those attending church monthly are “not quite sure” they believe in God), and conversely, believers who don’t go to “church” or don’t have any friends there are more likely to be mean and unhappy.  The survey reveals that 21% of those who are “absolutely sure” about God attend church no more than once or twice a year.

This and other evidence of how religion and public life intersect will come out late next year in a book, tentatively entitled “American Grace” (Simon & Schuster) by my colleague Robert Putnam, and professor David Campbell at Notre Dame.

Americans find community in megachurches

Lakewood, largest church in US (picture by j foong)

In megachurches across America (churches regularly drawing over 1000 congregants), Americans are finding community more than smaller churches.

A new study by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion found that megachurch members were twice as likely to have friends in the congregation than members of smaller churches. Megachurch members also were more personally committed to the church — attending services and tithing more often.  ISR’s co-director, Rodney Starke noted that Baylor’s biennial survey disabused several stereotypes of megachurches: “They’re big. … they’re kind of cold, they (have) kind of theater audiences — all wrong.”

The community-building of megachurches is of a piece with a chapter by Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein in Better Together (2004) on Saddleback Church in Southern California (Pastor Rick Warren’s church — of Purpose-Driven Life fame). Putnam/Feldstein described the powerful small-group structure in these churches that gives parishioners strong personal contacts, gives them a sense of community, and taps their passions. There is also an excellent article by Malcolm Gladwell on this cellular church structure in “The Cellular Church“.

The Washington Post noted that the Baylor study found that: “Ninety-two percent of megachurch members believe that hell “absolutely exists,” compared with just over three-quarters of small-church members, the survey found. And eight in 10 megachurch worshipers believe that the Rapture — when followers of Jesus Christ believe they will be taken to heaven — will “absolutely” take place, compared with less than half of those who attend small churches.

“In addition to their evangelical mission, megachurches thrive because of the social experience they provide and their emphasis on music. “The same things that made them popular — contemporary music and practical, applicable sermons that apply to people’s daily lives — remain a real draw for folks,” said Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.”

The Washington Post commented that the Baylor survey follows upon “a survey released last week that found that megachurches’ three-decade expansion shows no signs of abating. That study, of churches with weekend worship attendance of 2,000 or more, found that the average megachurch’s attendance grew 50 percent in the past five years.”

See: Big Churches Not Always Impersonal, Study Finds (Washington Post, 9/19/08, p. A6, Jacqueline L. Salmon)

Do fat friends make you fat and less happy? (new evidence)

I blogged earlier about Christakis and Fowler’s 2007 research about obesity as a social epidemic.  [See blog posts here.]

David Branchflower et al have released a paper using European Barometer data (across 29 European countries) that suggests that for Europeans as well, having fat friends may increasingly make them fat.  One’s friends influences what one thinks of as fat or skinny, so having more obese friends, makes one ratchet up (subconsciously) what one thinks of as the dividing line between fat and thin.

Blanchflower and colleagues also find in German panel data that controlling for other factors, being fatter (having a higher Body Mass Index, or BMI) reduces one’s sense of subjective wellbeing (i.e., happiness).  As I noted in an earlier blog, since having friends itself is associated with higher happiness and many benefits of social capital, the conclusion is not to drop one’s overweight friends, but it does suggest that if one is not mindful to ensure that you have a healthy dose of thinner friends as well, you may well find yourself fatter and less happy overall.

See: David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald, Bert Van Landeghem, “Imitative Obesity and Relative Utility” (NBER Working Paper No. 14337, September 2008)

See also, Clive Thompson, “Is Happiness Catching?” (NYT Sunday Magazine, 9/13/09)

Anxious about non-friends inviting you to be their Facebook ‘friend’? You’re not alone.

I’ve written earlier about how odd it is to be invited by non-friends or the weakest of friends to be their Facebook friends and this post raising the same issue through humor troupe Idiot’s of Ants.

Turns out that sociologists now have a name for this angst: Social Networking Anxiety Disorder.

Nicole Ferraro of Internet Evolution writes: ” Speaking on a recent O’Reilly Webcast (The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive — and Most Don’t), Shelly Farnham, doctor of social psychology, said, “A common problem in social networking applications is it’s hard to say no to people who want to be your friend,” adding that a number of applications ease this pain by allowing you to isolate 25 Friends (e.g., Top Friends).

“But what about when someone you don’t consider to be a ‘Top Friend’ per se requests to be part of that elite list? Truth be told, our social algorithms and applications just can’t capture the complexities of human relationships.

“Not sure if you’re suffering? Here are three symptoms of SNAD to look out for. If you have any of these, you should contact your mental-health-professional avatar immediately.

“1. You were considering breaking up with your significant other, but decided to stick it out because of the anxiety associated with changing your Relationship Status on Facebook and de-tagging hundreds of photos.

“2. You currently have 36+ Friend requests festering on Facebook or MySpace, which have built up month over month because you don’t want your rejection to send these strangers on a downward, emotional spiral.

“3. You belong to several groups including “I Skin Cats on Sundays” and “Cousins Make Great Husbands,” because, well, they were nice enough to invite you…”

To see Nicole’s whole interesting post, click here.

Trivial technologies (Twitter, Flash Mobs) have power in non-democratic countries

[Updated 4/7/09 to reflect latest use of Twitter in Moldovan protests.]

Clay Shirky, author of the interesting read, Here Comes Everybody, has commented on how technologies that seemed trivial and pointless have shown their mettle outside the U.S.

Flash mobs: As Shirky says everyone remembers flash mobs. The technology that made it possible to almost instantaneously and without a clear organization, assemble a pillow fight in downtown Toronto, or enable a mob to all meet in New York’s Central Park, and make pigeon noises for a few minutes. A wonderful recent cool, but pointless example, was 100s of New Yorkers freezing simultaneously in Grand Central Station for a minute.

The anonymous New York founder “Bill”, aimed to critique hipster culture and art happenings.

I published a piece on the meaningless of this trend (“Flash-in -the-pan Mobs?“, 2003). But then in 2006, a developer created a page on Live Journal in Belarus. He proposed a flash mob of citizens convening in the central square and simultaneously eating ice cream. The government’s rules prohibited group public actions (although no doubt the law’s inventors weren’t thinking about ice cream eating). The protesters brought their cameras and filmed black clad security forces apprehending them in October Square. The mission didn’t bring down the government since the protesters overestimated how enraged citizens outside Belarus would at this action, but they did make the government look foolish.

Twitter: another seemingly mindless technology being put to social use. Twitter users send ‘tweets’ (short descriptions, up to 140 characters, of what they are doing at the moment). ‘Having a little trail mix’, ‘On my way to the daily grind’, etc. As the Toronto Star describes Twitter: “In Akron last week, JuggleNuts coded 250 death certificates in a single day. “A new record,” he said. In Bakersfield, jcjdoss “(j)ust bit into a rotten apple… almost barfed.” Seconds later and half a world away, sauj in Auckland, New Zealand, shared a moment that was, he said, “Beautiful: the early morning train, witnessing the gentle pink blushes or the sun reflected on the wind-caressed waves of the Orakei basin.

“Random musings, mundane updates, boredom-fueled brain farts, the rare poetic outburst – all constant fare on Twitter, the online social-networking (think: Facebook) world’s fascination of the moment.

“Until very recently, Twitter could have been regarded as little more than that: an always-on inanity machine, indulging spontaneous tedium. In the past two months, though, those narrow parameters have broadened considerably.”

Then Egypt and China found twitter. An American journalism grade, James Karl Buck, arrested in April in Egypt, send a ‘tweet’ through his cellphone that said simply ‘Arrested.’ Buck’s tweet, after being taken in by policy following an anti-government protest, rallied family, friends and even the U.S. government and led to his ultimate release.

On April 6, 2009, 10,000 protesters used Twitter to mobilize out of thin air to protest the communist government, in a protest that began peaceably and turned violent. Protesters created their own searchable Twitter tag so other would-be protesters could learn of the impending protest.

Last month, the Chinese 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Chengdu offered Twitter another chance to shine as a meaningful technology. The Toronto Star notes that “Twitter users offered the first on-scene accounts. “Slight ly dizzy after being shaken around by the Chengdu earthquake for several hours now,” tweeted one user, Casperodj.

“Suddenly, Twitter’s triviality was no longer its most notable feature. ‘I saw three people in Chengdou giving reports on the ground long before traditional media could even get close,’ said Fons Tuinstra, a media consultant in Shanghai and a fellow at the U.S. media nonprofit organization the Poynter Institute. ‘On that first day, it was a very important tool – a great example of how it could work.’

“A year ago, it was a weird little toy,” says Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of Technology Review, a publication owned by M.I.T. “Now, its potential seems significantly greater than that.

“How much greater? That’s open for debate. (‘One of the reasons it’s not fully mature yet is that it keeps breaking,’ says Pontin, a nod to the service’s iffy architecture).

“But slow down a moment. The weird little toy is still very much at play, and with tweets like this one, from femmedelacreme, still being the norm, overblown idealism is kept well in check: ‘I am really craving shavings of parmesan cheese. Plain. Such oddness.’ “

Twitter users have doubled in only 18 months from just over 600,000 to more than 1.2 million. The creators (much like Flash Mobs) did not build it with social purpose in mind, although the Toronto Star notes that Twitter offers to turn the world into 24-hour a day micro-blogging.

And some claim that with Twitter’s rise in popularity, comes the increased corporatization of the site (a la Friendster, Facebook or Second Life) that ultimately portends its demise as an innovative social approach.

Volunteering, family ties forestall mental declines

Harvard School of Public Health researchers Karen Ertel, Lisa Berkman, and Maria Glymour, in a paper to appear in the July 2008 issue of American Journal of Public Health, found that an active social life forestalled memory losses. Before you get too excited, they didn’t find that an active party life was associated with the same beneficial impact!

The study of nearly 17,000 people found that the least socially connected individuals experience memory-loss (dementia) declines at twice the rate of the most socially connected individuals in their study. They used data from a large national health and retirement study in the U.S. that followed individuals over 6 years and calibrated their memory four times over the study.

Their social integration scale was composed of factors like:
- volunteering at least one hour in the past year;
- contacting one of their parents and one of their children once or more a week by phone email or in person;
- getting together with neighbors once a week just to chat; and
- being married.

These results held even when controlling for age, income, health status and other factors. And they found no evidence that the relationship between socializing and memory went the other way: i.e., that those with the best memories became more social.

The mechanism is unclear. One theory is that “the sort of emotional validation and sense of purpose that comes from these social contacts may have neuro-hormonal benefits” for the brain, Ertel said. Another hypothesis holds that being socially active stimulates the brain in a way that either boosts memory function or protects it from decline. Or it may be that people with a strong social network have lots of friends who encourage them to stay healthy and to keep up with their medication, Ertel says.
See press advisory about this study.

How technology affects friendships

The Economist has an interesting set of stories this week on the relationship of technology to social capital.

They note that these smaller mini-connections with friends and family throughout the day using cellphones, texting, IM, etc. keep us more connected to kith and kin, at the cost of our connections with strangers — the latter potentially a cohesive glue that holds society together. There is also some question whether the continuing ties of adolescents to their parents through cellphones is retarding adolescence. The article discusses how new technology is changing dating rituals in Japan.

There is also an interesting conversation about how it is changing etiquette. They note a huge gradient in the US by age about whether using cellphones in public is a major irritation with 74% of those over age 60 saying yes, and only 32% of those ages 18-27 agreeing.

Excerpt: “Trickier etiquette problems arise when the issue is not so much noise as context. One example that will enter the history books occurred last September when Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, was still waging a vigorous campaign for the presidency. As he was up on his podium and in mid-sentence addressing the National Rifle Association (NRA), a crucial constituency for a Republican candidate, his mobile rang and, to gasps in the huge audience, he decided to answer it. What followed, captured on microphone, is worth repeating in its banality: “Hello, dear. I’m talking, I’m talking to the members of the NRA right now. Would you like to say hello? I love you, and I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m finished. OK? OK, have a safe trip. Bye-bye. Talk to you later, dear. I love you.” When he hung up, the audience had turned to stone.

“Usually the situation is subtler and the incongruence has more to do with attention. This can be true even during silent mobile communications. It is now routine for university students to text, e-mail and instant-message during lectures. Mr Ling, whose job includes loitering in public places for observation, watched a woman at an Oslo underground station who texted as she walked. She was wholly focused on her text message but had to look up occasionally to weave through the crowds on the platform. Other people were doing the same. It was an “atomised and individualised” scene, says Mr Ling: a new form of the proverbial lonely crowd.

“But at least this particular Norwegian woman was signalling through her body language to all around her that she wanted to be left alone. The spread of “hands-free” Bluetooth devices, with hidden earplugs seemingly attached to nothing, is removing even those clues. Steve Love, a psychologist, was travelling on a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow once when a girl standing next to him started talking to him. She asked him how he was and how his day had been, and Mr Love, though a bit shy, politely told her how much he was looking forward to watching Scotland play football that evening. As he spoke, the girl looked at him in horror, then turned away. Only then did Mr Love hear her say “OK, I’ll call you later.” Not a word or gesture was exchanged for the remainder of the (suddenly uncomfortable) journey.

“Probably the single most common etiquette conflict occurs, as Mr Ling puts it, when mediated communication interrupts co-present communication, as when two or more people are sitting at a table in conversation or negotiation and one of them gets, and answers, a call. The other co-present people must now keep themselves busy while seeming nonchalant. What is more, they must pretend not to be eavesdropping even though they are only a few feet away from the mediated conversation, ideally by assuming a pose of concentration on some other object, such as their fingernails or their own phone. As soon as the intervening call ends, everybody must try to re-enter the co-present context as gracefully as possible.

“So there is evidence that nomadism is good for in-groups, but at the expense of strangers. If that is true, Mr Granovetter would consider it bad for society. Fortunately, however, the last chapter has not yet been written. Since the outburst of pessimism about the internet among sociologists in the 1990s, the web has recently become an intensely social medium, thanks in large part to proliferating online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Young people have been using these websites on their PCs to keep in touch with much larger groups of people than has ever been feasible before. It is not uncommon for adolescents to add several “friends” a day to their “social graph” on Facebook or to the “buddy list” of their instant-messaging service.”

See Family Ties: Kith and Kin Get Closer with Consequences for Strangers (4/10/08 special report in Economist) and A Wireless Word: Our Nomadic Future (4/10/08 issue of Economist).

Friends help you recuperate from surgery

Daniel Hinshaw and fellow researchers reported in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons that people with more active friendship networks felt less pain and anxiety pre-surgery.  As a result, they used less pain medication, felt less post-operative pain/anxiety and had faster recuperation times.

Hinshad indicated that surgeons should ask patients about levels of social support in addition to other more commonly asked questions asked of patients pre-surgery and build support for patients who are more socially isolated into their surgical plans.
 

Reuters Health noted that “Hinshaw, at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues had been conducting a study of massage therapy in 605 patients who underwent major surgery of the chest or abdominal area, and performed the current analysis to determine how social connectedness affected a variety of outcomes.

 ”The researchers gauged social connectedness by counting how many close friends and relatives study participants had, how often they saw them, and whether they attended a place of worship or other social function at least once a week. Nearly 88 percent of the study participants reported having three or more friends or relatives they saw at least once a month, while 12 percent had less than three…..Individuals with larger social networks were less likely to have anxious personalities, and they felt less pain and anxiety before surgery.”

 Patients with larger social networks were 16% less likely to spend 7 or more days in the hospital.

View abstract here.