Superorganism – webmindset

Chapter 2 Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:03:00 +0000

Book Title: Connected – The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

Written by: Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

Chapter Title: When You Smile, the World Smiles with You

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Connected - Chapter Two - When You Smile, the World Smiles with You

Emotions have a collective and not just an individual origin. How you feel depends on how those to whom you are closely and distantly connected feel.

Emotional contagion can even take place between strangers, after just ephemeral contact.

When waiters are trained to provide “service with smile”, their customers report feeling more satisfied, and they leave better tips.

Given the organization of early hominids, into social groups. the spread of emotions served as an evolutionary adaptive purpose.

Early humans had to rely on one another for survival.

The ability to read the emotions of others helped coordinate group activity by three means:

facilitating personal bonds
synchronizing behavior
communicating information

[…]If you are trying to coordinate a hunting party, it helps if members of the group are all upbeat and fired up.
Conversely, if you are part of a group and someone in it appears afraid, perhaps that person has seen a predator that you have not seen.
Quickly adopting his emotional state can enhance your prospects for survival.

Emotions may be a quicker way to convey information about the environment and its relative safety or danger than other forms of communication.

The affective afference or the facial feedback theory:

…the path of the signals is from the muscles (of the face) to the brain, rather than more usual, efferent pathway from the brain to the muscles…

… The telephone operators are trained to smile when they work, even though the person at the other end of the line cannot see them.

This theory also explains why it helps to smile when your heart is breaking.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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Chapter 1 Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sun, 14 Aug 2016 17:57:35 +0000

Book Title: Connected – The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

Written by: Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

Chapter Title: In the thick of it

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Connected - Chapter one - In the thick of it

Notions of collective guilt and collective revenge that underlie cascade of violence seem strange only when we regard responsibility as a personal attribute.

Perhaps the person-to-person spread of violence should not surprise us.

Just as it is often said that “the friend of my friend is my friend” and “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” so too the friend of my enemy is my enemy.

In the United States, 75 percent of all homicides involve people who knew each other, often intimately, prior to the murder.

If you want to know who might take your life, just look at the people around you.

Social-network ties can – and, as we will see, usually do – convey benefits that are the very opposite of violence.

Our connections do not end with the people we know.

Beyond our own social horizons, friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us, like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.

Rules of life in the network:

We shape our network
Our network shapes us
Our friends affect us
Our friends’ friends’ friends affect us
The network has a life of its own

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Chapter 1 Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler appeared first on webmindset.

Preface Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 05:58:42 +0000

Book Title: Connected – The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

Written by: Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

Chapter Title: Scarcity and Abundance

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Connected - Preface

It seemed to me that if people are interconnected, their health must also be interconnected.

We realized that social influence does not end with the people we know.

If we affect our friends, and they affect their friends, then our actions can potentially affect people we have never met.

We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. We we discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend became happy, you became happy.

The key to understanding people is understanding the ties between them.

As we studied social networks more deeply, we began to think of them as a kind of human superorganism. They grow and evolve… This superorganism has it’s own structure and a function and we became obsessed with understanding both.

To know who we are, we must understand how we are connected.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Preface Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler appeared first on webmindset.

Book Review: Connected by Nicholas Christakis

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 31 Oct 2015 13:31:22 +0000

Nicholas Christakis, Photo by Paul Schnaittacher

“The structure of the social licking network among cows is one of the best patterns for understanding and predicting the network structure of interaction among U.S. senators”.

Considering above fact and other similar researches reported by Nicholas Christakis in his book titled connected, would not be surprising when he tells us that the obesity or mood is a contagion property in human networks.

Christakis, a professor of social and natural science at Yale, was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the world in 2009.

If Christakis and James Fowler had to choose another title for their book, most probably they would choose Contagious instead of Connected. The whole book concentrates on the contagious effect of the human attributes, moods and behaviors in the networks.

According to their reports, a variety of individuals’ attributes like obesity, smoking, and happiness are not individualistic behaviors as we thought before and are seriously correlated – and even caused – by our connections with other people.

Contagious effect of the mood and behavior is not something new. However, social networks have provided a better means for transmitting these attributes compared to traditional traditional face-to-face and personal communications. Christakis calls this feature as the long-distance contagious property of the social networks.

At the early years of the web, the Six degrees of separation was the famous story everywhere. Reading the connected book, you would be convinced that the social networks have a more amazing story now: The three degrees of influence:

Our influence gradually dissipates and eases to have noticeable effect on people beyond the special frontier that lies at three degrees of separation. We are generally influenced by friends within 3 degree but general not by those beyond.

The book has an evolutionary point of view in describing the emotional contagion: I am happier when you are happy, and I feel sad because you are so. In the process of evolution, we have learned to mimic others’ emotions outwardly, and this outward mimicking have led us to adopt the others’ internal states.

Although this process helped us in the development of emotional empathy, the same capability has become a threat to us in today’s complicated network-rich hyperconnected world.

The book’s message is clear and important: We no longer dominate the territory of our feelings and emotions. Not only my direct friends in the network have a non-neglectable contribution in my mood, but also my friend’s friends have a great influence on my feeling and emotions.

In the age of hyperconnectedness, feeling lonely can be totally different from being alone, as the feeling of loneliness can be induced unconsciously by the people I am connected with. Therefore, the most control we have, is choosing the people we are connected, and this is the decision most of us have left to the random suggestions of the social applications!

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