Suggests that people within three degrees of influence can have a profound impact on those they have never met and that individual acts like voting and suicide may be directly tied to the actions of a friend of a friend.
Since people are interconnected by nature, their emotions and health are likely to be as well. From that starting premise, Christakis (health care policy, sociology, and medicine, Harvard U.) and Fowler (political science, Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, U. of California, San Diego) present an intriguing popular audience treatment of social science and health research on why happiness, wealth, weight, voting behavior, even suicide can be "contagious," i.e., influenced by one's contacts. Among the social networks featured is one of the authors' friends. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Drs. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide.
In CONNECTED, the authors explain why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, CONNECTED overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm-that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.
Renowned scientists Christakis and Fowler present compelling evidence for the profound influence people have on one another's tastes, health, wealth, happiness, beliefs, even weight, as they explain how social networks form and how they operate.
