Only connect?

Do your friends make you fat? Apparently so. In their new book Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler argue that human behaviours are contagious and spread like viruses through the social networks in which we are located. So, if your friends put on weight, then the chances are that you will too.

The findings come from the records of the Framingham Heart Study, a 50-year research project into the health of 15,000 people in the Massachusetts town, and they are startling: when a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese too. The effect even skipped links: so if a friend of a friend became obese, a resident was 20 per cent more likely to become obese. There were similar results for smoking, heavy drinking, voter participation and the likelihood of becoming depressed.

These findings are being absorbed by the political parties in the run-up to the election. The fiscal crisis has put a premium on finding ways to deliver change that do not require extra resource: a better understanding of people’s social networks could help government get more ‘bang for its buck’. So, if you want to encourage school children to do their homework, rather than focusing on each individual you go to the most connected child in the school. If they start doing their homework properly, others will follow their example. We know this from ippr’s work on climate change: by encouraging enough neighbours to behave positively towards the environment, a new social norm is set and other neighbours feel the need to follow.

Of course, there are justice considerations here: there are some services that everyone should receive individually on the basis of their needs, rather than because of how ‘connected’ they are. And we should not allow this new fascination with social networks to lead to more lonely or isolated citizens being even more marginalised.

Nevertheless these findings should be taken seriously as we think of ways to improve services in the absence of new money. Whoever wins the election should increasingly ask public services to understand the connections between the people they work with – and think of their users as members of social networks, rather than just as individual consumers of services.

Rick Muir, senior research fellow, ippr