020 the Mechanics of Friendship

The Mechanics of Friendship Impact of Social Networks Christine Brooks, PhD November 30th, 2012 the science of FRIENDSHIP scienceoffriendship.com The term friendship when used in casual conversation may conjure an image of an individual, say, a best friend, or a small group of tightly knit people who are a person’s core group. Even though the definition of what constitutes a best friend varies widely in the social science literature, most individuals know if they have a best friend. That person is a confidant, the person we call in times of need and times of celebration, and a person with whom we have history and trust. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson shared professional exploits, but were also two of the closest of friends in fictional literature. Our close group of friends—our intimate circle—is rather loosely defined in much of the research, and friendship groups vary in size and demographic make-up. In popular culture, the 1990s television show Friends revolved around 6 inseparable individuals who did everything together. The people on Friends lived their friendships on the day-to-day and demonstrated what it takes to make and maintain strong ties: ongoing contact, shared information and emotion, and solidarity or trust. A major focal point of the show was that Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Ross, Chandler, and Joey spent much of their time at a coffee shop doing very little, or so it would seem. What they were doing was practicing the three major components of friendship: spending time together, conversing, and fostering connection. These behaviors forge the bonds of friendship and are vital to keeping the friends that we have, especially our closest friends. The structural landscape and behavioral tropes described above can be considered the Mechanics of Friendship. In short, mechanics describe how we make friends, how we keep friends, and the impact of our interconnected relationships. Our friend lives can be understood from both macro and micro perspectives. Understanding of both views is important to grasp the enormous impact that friends have on our everyday lives as well as our potential for success and well-being. Social Networks: The Macro View of the Science of Friendship “A social network is an organized set of people that consists of two kinds of elements: human beings and the connections between them” Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler Increasingly science is suggesting that we are all interconnected into webs of association. Individuals are connected by both family and non-kin ties into large groups known as social networks. These groups range from small clusters of just a few, such as a nuclear family of four, to large, complex masses of individuals, such as a graduating class from a large suburban high school. It is via our social networks that we gather information about the world, receive emotional and instrumental support, and create a sense of belonging in our social sphere. As will be described below, whom we know literally makes us who we are. In both science and popular culture, a concept known as Six Degrees of Separation has captured imaginations. Two social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler (2009) are intrigued by social networks and described in their book, Connected, Stanley Milgram’s classic experiment that hypothesized that all people are connected by six degrees. In other words, it takes, on average, six points of contact, from person to person, to reach any other individual. Milgram’s research took place in the 1960s and was conducted within the borders of the United States. Thus some critics of his research noted that such interconnectivity may be true within one country, but could not be a global phenomenon. Christakis and Fowler went on to describe sociological research the science of FRIENDSHIP 2 conducted in 2002 that proved that, indeed, the same Six Degree rule held true when email was forwarded from one person to another even across the globe. This concept is so compelling that it has even infiltrated pop culture. The actor Kevin Bacon, a ubiquitous celebrity with a career that spans 30 years, is the central figure in a game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game posits that any other actor, dead or alive, who has worked in Hollywood, is connected to Kevin Bacon by six degrees or less. This game was created by a group of college students, but became a widespread pop phenomenon. Kevin Bacon recounts that he initially felt that he was the brunt of an unkind joke, but, ultimately, he had the realization that he could use his celebrity for a good cause and founded sixdegrees.org, a website that uses the concept of Six Degrees of Separation as a fundraising tool for a variety of charities. To date, the organization has raised over $5 million (Bacon, 2012). Such astounding interconnectivity suggests that people must impact one another in virtually everything that we do. This concept runs counter to the typical Western notion that human beings are separate, autonomous individuals in charge of one’s own destiny. In fact, all of Christakis and Fowler’s research repeatedly disproves the lone individual view of human experience. But Six Degrees of Separation does not explain the precise impact that others have on an individual’s lived experience. While we may be able to reach any other person on the planet in six hops of connection in our given social networks, not all of the people in that network have direct impact on our day-to-day lives. Instead, Christakis and Fowler proved that the Three Degrees of Influence Rule is even more valuable in understanding how social networks impact our daily lives (Christakis & Fowler). Everything we do or say tends to ripple through our network, having an impact on our friends (one degree), our friends’ friends (two degrees), and even our friends’ friends’ friends (three degrees). Our influence gradually dissipates and ceases to have a noticeable effect on people beyond the social frontier that lies at three degrees of separation. (Christakis & Fowler, 2009, p. 26) Sociological, psychological, public health, and political research have demonstrated that the Three Degree of Influence Rule can influence everything from weight gain, to the spread of disease, to smoking cessation and even the candidate that someone will vote for. The connectivity in a network literally shapes and changes who we are as people. And the size effect of this influence can be considerable. To put an example of actual numbers on the scope of influence the Three Degree Rule describes, imagine that a person has 20 1st degree social contacts (these would include both friends and family). Each of those 20 contacts has 20 social contacts (2nd degree ties), and then each of those individuals also has 20 contacts (3rd degree ties). With these numbers, this means that a person would be connected to 8,000 people who can directly impact their life (Christakis & Fowler, 2009). Generally, our friend networks are largest in adolescence and early adulthood, shrink in midlife due to competing needs of family and work, and increase again slightly later in life. In one study, on average, adults report between 4.7 friends and 6.0 friends, depending on their stage in life (parents of teenagers on the lower end, and those nearing retirement on the upper end) (Weiss and Lowenthall, 1975, as cited in Blieszner and Adams, 1992). However, more recent research suggests “that we have fifteen [close the science of FRIENDSHIP 3 friends] and sixteen lesser, but still ‘somewhat close’ ties” (Pew Internet & American Life Project as cited in Blau & Fingerman, 2009, p. 24). As with most research on friendship, the language of how we describe our friends is constantly shifting and also is not operationalized across research initiatives, so results of surveys vary widely depending upon the approach and language utilized by the researchers. Evidence from ongoing studies about structure, strength, and density of social networks suggests connectivity much larger than earlier reported averages. Ties That Bind: Strong and Weak Links Another way to envision the structure of social networks is through the variety of interpersonal ties, or strong ties, weak ties, and absent ties in a group. Sociologists have, for decades, examined the levels of connectivity demonstrated in friend dyads as well as across networks. In a classic 1973 essay that first differentiated between the three levels of ties, sociologist Mark Granovetter described the factors that define the strength of ties: “The strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie” (p. 1361). Thus, we have strong ties, or those to whom we are most closely connected (family, intimates, best friends and close friends), weak ties, people whom we know and interact with, but generally at some distance with regard to interval or proximity (friends and acquaintances), and absent ties, people we do not really know or know at all (Granovetter described these as “nodding” relationships; the people we may buy a newspaper from or know in passing on the subway). As noted above, in recent years, researchers have developed the Three Degrees of Influence Rule, but Granovetter and others assert that there is value in all interpersonal ties, even, arguably beyond three degrees. The number of strong ties and weak ties in a given social network also impacts the way that individuals in the network interact with the rest of the world. For example, in a hypothetical social group, if Tom is friends with Carol; Carol is friends with Mark; and Mark is also friends with Tom, these people are said to have high transitivity, a scientific term for people deeply embedded in their social network.

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