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June 5 - June 17, 2021
Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.
In the college class, the low score was 2 and the high score was 95. In my random sample, the low score was 9 and the high score was 118.
It wasn’t that his connections hadn’t helped him. It was that he didn’t think of his people collection as a business strategy. He just thought of it as something he did. It was who he was. Horchow has an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections. He’s not aggressive about it. He’s not one of those overly social, back-slapping types for whom the process of acquiring acquaintances is obvious and self-serving. He’s more an observer, with the dry, knowing manner of someone who likes to remain a little bit on the outside. He simply likes people, in a genuine and powerful way, and
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Lois found him interesting, because, in some way, she finds everyone interesting.
sees things in you that you don’t even see in yourself,” which is another way of saying the same thing, that by some marvelous quirk of nature, Lois and the other people like her have some instinct that helps them relate to the people they meet.
They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don’t look right or who live out near the airport, or whom we haven’t seen in sixty-five years, Lois and Roger like them all.
the strength of weak ties.
Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.
The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge.
Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people “senders.”
Affective Communication Test to measure this ability to send emotion, to be contagious.
Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history—it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers.
The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives;
once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable.
if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.
our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances.
the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a “dispositional” explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation. In one
There is something in all of us that makes us instinctively want to explain the world around us in terms of people’s essential attributes: he’s a better basketball player, that person is smarter than I am. We do this because, like vervets, we are a lot more attuned to personal cues than contextual cues.
We do reflect the influences of birth order but, as the psychologist Judith Harris points out in The Nurture Assumption, only around our families. When they are away from their families—in different contexts—older siblings are no more likely to be domineering and younger siblings no more likely to be rebellious than anyone else.
Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.
The only thing that really mattered was whether the student was in a rush.
What this study is suggesting, in other words, is that the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior.
Judith Harris has convincingly argued that peer influence and community influence are more important than family influence in determining how children turn out.
a child is better off in a good neighborhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood and a good family.
Church=neighborhood!
Once we’re part of a group, we’re all susceptible to peer pressure and social norms and any number of other kinds of influence that can play a critical role in sweeping us up in the beginnings of an epidemic.
the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.
make a list of all the people you know whose death would leave you truly devastated. Chances are you will come up with around 12 names. That, at least, is the average answer that most people give to that question. Those names make up what psychologists call our sympathy group.
Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him.
“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
All kinds of high-tech products fail, never making it beyond the Early Adopters, because the companies that make them can’t find a way to transform an idea that makes perfect sense to an Early Adopter into one that makes perfect sense to a member of the Early Majority.
If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then—whether it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software—he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.
Sure enough, there was. Immediately after stories about suicides appeared, suicides in the area served by the newspaper jumped.
“Suicide stories are a kind of natural advertisement for a particular response to your problems,” Phillips continues. “You’ve got all these people who are unhappy and have difficulty making up their minds because they are depressed. They are living with this pain. There are lots of stories advertising different kinds of responses to that. It could be that Billy Graham has a crusade going on that weekend—that’s a religious response. Or it could be that somebody is advertising an escapist movie—that’s another response. Suicide stories offer another kind of alternative.”
In his study of motor fatalities, Phillips found a clear pattern. Stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single-car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide-murders resulted in an increase in multiple-car crashes in which the victims included both drivers and passengers. Stories about young people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving young people. Stories about older people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving older people.
Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool.
our environment plays as big—if not bigger—a role as heredity in shaping personality and intelligence. What it is saying is that whatever that environmental influence is, it doesn’t have a lot to do with parents. It’s something else, and what Judith Harris argues is that that something else is the influence of peers. Why, Harris asks, do the children of recent immigrants almost never retain the accent of their parents? How is it the children of deaf parents manage to learn how to speak as well and as quickly as children whose parents speak to them from the day they were born?
We only need to find the stickiness Tipping Points, and those are the links to depression and the nicotine threshold.
This is what teens do. This is how they learn about the world, and most of the time—in 99.1 percent of the cases with cocaine—that experimentation doesn’t result in anything bad happening.
