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Loneliness is turning out to be the modern killer disease, rapidly replacing all the more usual candidates as the commonest cause of death.
The big surprise was that it was the social measures that most influenced your chances of surviving, and especially so after heart attacks and strokes.
it is the sense of relaxedness that comes with spending time with friends that is important,
factors like social isolation, living alone and feeling lonely increased your chances of dying by about 30 per cent. In other words, people who had many friends or were living with someone else (it doesn’t have to be a spouse!) or felt more engaged with their local community lived longer than those who didn’t score so highly on these.
When you look at their graphs for the community as a whole, it is blindingly obvious that happy people cluster together and that unhappy people cluster together.
a depressed friend was six times more likely to make you depressed than a happy friend was to make you happy. Female friends had an especially strong effect on the spread of depression.
If you had a happy friend who lived within a mile of you, you were 25 per cent more likely to become happy.
One of the strongest effects to emerge from this study was that the rates at which the children fell ill, or even died, were significantly affected by the size of their extended families: those who had more relatives were ill much less often and survived better.
In effect, friends act like a virtual aspirin, taking away the momentary symptoms that are wearing you down and making you depressed.
endorphins triggered by the presence of friends tune the immune system and give us enhanced resistance to the bugs that are responsible for many of the diseases that so discomfort us.
In other words, friends do a lot for us and we invest in them to ensure that they do.
It was the weak ties that he was particularly interested in. His suggestion was that these provide an information network through which we garner knowledge about opportunities that we might never otherwise come across if we had to find them for ourselves.
During the course of this work, he came up with the idea that loneliness is actually an evolutionary alarm signal that something is wrong – a prompt that you need to do something about your life, and fast.
this is very direct evidence that having friends buffers you against ill health as well as against the future risk of heart attacks and strokes.
persistent loneliness is correlated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, depression and dementia, as well as poor sleeping habits
the effects of social relationships on these physiological measures of good health during adolescence and young adulthood persisted into old age.
the more socially integrated a child was at age six years, the lower their blood pressure and body mass index two decades later in their early thirties.
All in all, social isolation is not good for us, and we should make every effort to avoid it. Being social and having friends carries many psychological and health benefits. Friendship protects us against disease as well as cognitive decline, allows us to be more engaged with the tasks that we have to do, and helps us become more embedded within, and trusting of, the wider community within which we live.
these relationships are all about a sense of obligation and the exchange of favours – the people you wouldn’t feel embarrassed about asking for a favour and whom you wouldn’t think twice about helping out. Genuine friends are the sort of people you would like to spend time with if you had the chance, and would be willing to make the effort to do so.
The kinship premium seems to derive from one of the most fundamental principles in evolutionary biology, the theory of kin selection – that we are more likely to behave altruistically, and less likely to behave selfishly, towards close relatives than distant relatives, and towards distant relatives than to unrelated folk.
Distant family relationships need only the occasional reminder to be kept ticking over, but friendships die fast if they are not maintained at the appropriate level of contact for any length of time.
It takes only a couple of years for a friend to become just an acquaintance – someone I once knew. Family members, in contrast, required much less work to maintain, and emotional closeness to them hardly budged an inch over the eighteen months of the study.
the Social Brain Hypothesis is a two-step explanation: ecological problems are solved by living in a group, and living in a group is solved by having a large enough brain to manage the stresses involved.
The bottom line is that our social world is by far the most complex thing in the universe precisely because it is so dynamic and in constant flux, and keeping track of that and managing it is very demanding in information processing terms.
The main point is that all of them broadly confirm what we found in our original study: the number of friends you have correlates with the size of those bits of the brain known to be involved in managing the social world.
Ryota Kanai had been responsible for one of the brain-scan studies that confirmed that people with fewer friends (in his case, indexed as the number of friends on Facebook) have smaller brains.
His study also confirmed that loneliness was associated with difficulty in processing social cues, as might be expected, as well as confirming that other psychological factors such as a small social network size, high anxiety and low empathy independently contribute to loneliness.
In other words, the less popular individuals seemed to be paying much closer attention to everyone, whereas the more popular ones were only interested in the most popular individuals (the community leaders).
It is possible that your prefrontal cortex and other social brain areas grow in size as a result of how much they are used, though this probably doesn’t continue much after the mid-twenties. Be that as it may, by the time you reach adulthood it seems that your brain is probably pretty much fixed.
One of the things we had noticed in our various studies of social networks was that women always had slightly more friends than men.
For most male mammals, reproductive success is mainly a consequence of how effectively they compete against each other.
Conversely, in primates at least, sociality is the key to female reproductive success: females that have more friends are less stressed by events such as rampaging males, have more offspring who in turn are more likely to make it to adulthood, and live longer themselves.
To give these circles a bit more of an everyday feel, we might think of them as, respectively, our close friends (five), best friends (fifteen), good friends (fifty) and just friends (150).
A woman’s best friend is an intimate, someone to confide in and seek advice from; a man’s best friend is just someone to spend an evening in the pub with. It is a very different kind of friendship. This is suggested by the fact that men were four times more likely to have a best friend (someone to go drinking with) if they were single than if they were married (63 per cent versus 15 per cent, respectively).
Fritz Heider had argued that having too many close friends was a disadvantage because it increases the risk of conflict between them, and this would then set a limit on the number of close friends you could have. In addition, friends incur obligations, and too many obligations can weigh you down – and especially so if obligations towards different close friends come into conflict with each other.
We know from our studies of both monkeys and humans that the quality of a friendship depends directly on the time we invest in it.
Max Burton showed that our expectation of someone helping us out is directly related to how much time we devote to them. In effect, we decide who is important to us and then we allocate time to them in ways that reflect their value to us.
The existence of these layers in our social networks raises one last important question: do the layers offer different benefits?
Strong ties, he suggested, provide emotional aid, loans of household items, the occasional help with household chores, and companionship.
Weak ties provide more casual benefits, including information exchange.
The 15-layer was already spoken for, of course, in its capacity as the sympathy group. The 5-layer seemed to function as the support clique – the small group of people willing to provide unstinting emotional, physical and financial help and advice.
The 15-layer is probably where you draw most of your everyday social companions from – the people you invite round for a quiet dinner or an evening out at the pub or theatre. I am inclined to think of the 50-layer as your party friends: the people you would invite round for a weekend BBQ or a celebratory birthday or anniversary party. The 150-layer is what you might call the wedding/bar mitzvah/funeral group
In effect, socialising needs were satisfied by the sympathy group (best friends), whereas intimacy needs were satisfied by the support group (close friends).
the 150-layer, however, marks an abrupt transition point in our willingness to be altruistic.
There are several lessons to be drawn from the last three chapters. One is that the number of meaningful friends is surprisingly limited, and, on the whole, seems to vary only to a limited extent across individuals, and even cultures.
A second is that this social world of ours is highly structured into a series of circles, or layers, that also have very distinct sizes, each of which is associated with very specific frequencies of contact, a specific sense of emotional closeness and willingness to provide help.
The third point is the way that kinship structures our networks – even in the developed West where we no longer think of family as being quite as important as more traditional cultures do. Apparently, despite what we sometimes say, family is still very important for us.
The big surprise was that when we looked at the patterns of contact before and after a change in friendships, they were almost identical. It seems that when we replace someone in our social network with a new friend, we slot the new friend into exactly the same position as that previously occupied by the old friend in terms of the frequency we contact them.
Averaging across these various studies, it seems that we spend around 20 per cent of our eighteen-hour waking day engaged in social interaction. That’s about three and a half hours a day, averaged across the week.
There is an unwritten law in the study of social networks known as the ‘Thirty-Minute Rule’: you will make the effort to see someone, and view them as important to you, if they live within thirty minutes’ travel time of where you live.
