I just read this while waiting at the airport for my flight to Jakarta:
“Participants are 52 per cent more likely to be lonely if a person to whom they are directly connected (at one degree of separation) is lonely,” the authors write.
At two degrees of separation, they were 25 per cent more likely to feel lonely. At three degrees it was 15 per cent and at four degrees the effect disappeared. This pattern – what the authors term the “three degrees of influence rule of social contagion” – also appeared in the obesity, smoking and happiness studies.
I think I’ve always known this to be true of many things other than just obesity, smoking and happiness. I believe that the social modeling instinct we are born with causes us to model the people and environment around us. Would you be surprised that millionaires hang around millionaires? Or that promiscuous people hang around other promiscuous people? Or depressed people mix more with depressed people than others?
After all, once you ‘learn’ this skill, you tend to have the capability to pass it on in your behavior and attitude, isn’t it?
We all have thought viruses. This points to one final conclusion – what are you interested in ‘catching’? Watch out for the people whom you hang around with!
