Book review: CONNECTED
How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do
Genres:
- Psychology
- Social Science
- Behavioral Science
Review posted on:
17.11.2016
The number of pages:
368 pages
Book rating:
3/5
Year the book was published:
First edition published 2011
Who should read this book:
- People in Sales, Marketers, and Entrepreneurs.
Why did I pick up this book and what did I expect to get out of it:
I picked up Connected by Nicholas A. Christaksi and James H. Fowler because of the topic of connectivity. I am very fascinated by how I am being influenced, and how I influence others. In your opinion, who influences who more? Do you influence your friends more or do your friends have more influence on you? I hope that the authors include some credible research about this topic and that the book is not just filled with their beliefs of who influences who and how “relationships work”.
My thoughts about the book:
The book Connected covers the topic of connections and what kind of influence and implications they have for different areas in our lives, like love, politics, job opportunities, hobbies, sex, and so on. The biggest nugget or eye-opening takeaway I got from the book is the theory of weak connections. I know that my close friends will help me, and I will help them, but the real question is will they or will I be able to? The question is not if we want to help each other, but if we have the potential, the knowledge, or the right connections to do so. The authors gave a piece of interesting advice, get as many weak connections as you can, it will help you in the long run. Why you may ask?
In what way and by how many people we are influenced mostly depends on where we are in our social network. The author made an interesting point in the book – because we share a lot of similar interests, hobbies, and ways of thinking with our closest/strong connections they do not offer us much help when we are looking for a new job or when we find ourselves in any other life-changing situations, because we are in the same “mental box”/way of thinking, and we have the same connections. So when you find yourself in a life-changing situation you should look for help in your weak connections, which are your friends’ friends. At this point, you are probably asking yourself “Why is that”? And it is very simple, it’s because you have different interests, different hobbies, you go to different places and meet different people, work at different companies and job positions. Weak connections can offer you something that was not in your close social circle until now. In the book, you will also read how the happiness and sadness of others actually influence you and for how long. Overall the book was a nice read, but I missed more case studies and research based on which the authors Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler based their findings. Maybe there will be more data available in the future. We will see.
If you picked up this book please let me know what you think about it in the comment section.
My notes from the book:
- In many settings morality resides in groups rather than in individuals.
- We have a conscious and unconscious tendency to associate with people who resemble us. We seek people who share our interests, histories, and dreams.
- Our network shapes us. how many contacts you, your friends, and your family have is very relevant. When the people you are connected to become better connected it becomes easier for you to reach everyone else in the network. You become more central. But being more central makes you more susceptible to whatever is flowing within the network.
- The three degrees of influence rule: everything we do or say tends to ripple through our network. Having an impact on our friends, our friends’ friends, and even our friends’ friends’ friends. Likewise, we are influenced by friends within three degrees.
- In a kind of social chain reaction, we can be deeply affected by events we do not witness that happen to people we do not know.
- Social networks have value precisely because they can help us to achieve what we could not achieve on our own. Yet social network effects are not always positive. Social networks, it turns out, tend to magnify whatever they are seeded with.
- What is created in a social network does not belong to any one individual – it is shared by all those in the network. In this way a social network is like a commonly owned forest: we all stand to benefit from it, but we also must work together to ensure it remains healthy and productive.
- Our emotions consist of several elements: first, we usually have a conscious awareness of our emotions. Second, emotions typically affect our physical state. Third, they are associated with a specific neuropsychological activity. And finally, emotions are associated with visible behaviors, like laughing, crying, or shrieking.
- Emotional contagion can even take place between strangers, after just a short contact. People’s emotions and moods are affected by the emotional states of the people they interact with.
- Mathematical analyses of the network suggest that a person is about 15% more likely to be happy if a directly connected person is happy. The happiness effect for people at two degrees of separation (friend of a friend) is 10%, and for people at three degrees of separation (the friend of a friend of a friend), it is about 6%.
- Each happy friend a person has increases that person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. Each unhappy friend decreases it by 7%.
- Feelings of loneliness are much more closely tied to our network of optional social connections than to those handed to us at birth.
- People often care more about their relative standing in the world than their absolute standing. People assess how well they are doing not so much by how much money they make or how much stuff they consume but, rather, by how much they make and consume compared to other people they know.
- Modern research confirms that marriage is indeed a good thing for you. Being married on average adds seven years to a man’s life and two years to a woman’s life.
- Being near a familiar person – even an acquaintance, let alone a spouse – can have effects as diverse as lowering heart rate, improving immune function, and reducing depression.
- If a friend becomes obese, it nearly triples a person’s risk of becoming obese.
- Friends and siblings are much more susceptible to influence by peers of the same sex than by peers of the opposite sex.
- The path-specific motion of information through a social network is very important. For example, if a group of people is deciding on the price of an item and bid on it independently, then their average guess is probably a good indicator of its market value. however, if people make decisions in sequence and are aware of prior decisions, we can end up with the blind leading the blind.
- Keep in mind that we form strong ties in our social network in the form of clustered tightly-knit groups. While this structure is good for reaching everyone in your group, it is very bad for reaching people outside the group. Therefore strong ties may bind individuals together into groups, but weak ties bind groups together into the larger society and are crucial for the spread of information.
- Social networks may help us do what we could not do on our own, but they also often give more power to people who are well-connected. As a result, those with the most connections often reap the highest rewards.
- If I know what your friends are doing, I can make a good guess as to what you will soon be doing.
- The social networks we create have lives of their own. Social networks can also change the way individuals behave.
- The ubiquity of human connection means that each of us has a much bigger impact on others than we can see. When we take better care of ourselves, so do many other people. when we practice random acts of kindness they can spread to dozens or even hundreds of other people and with each good deed, we help to sustain the very network that sustains us.
