Nicholas Christakis, a professor of sociology and medicine at Yale University has a particular passion: how a person is affected by his social network.
As a sociologist, Christakis studies how and why “nodes” — meaning individual human beings — cluster together, and how individuals are affected when they form these groups.
Another aspect of sociological study is what is referred to as “geodesic distance,” or degrees of separation. This refers to how close you are to others in the group, with each layer being represented by a “degree.” There is one degree of separation between you and your friends; two degrees between you and your friends’ friends; and three degrees between you and the friends of your friends’ friends.
Christakis has discovered that that the relationship between happy people and their friends who were happy extended up to three degrees of separation. His analysis of the data shows that happiness is definitely contagious, not self-selecting; clusters of happiness resulted from the natural spread of happiness, and not just from a happy person’s tendency to find other happy people to be with. People who were surrounded by many happy people and were central in the network were more likely to become happy in the future. Happiness was socially contagious.
Not long ago, Christakis discovered a pay-it-forward phenomenon in networks. The participants were randomly assigned to a sequence of different groups in order to play a series of a game called the “Public Goods,” a standard in experimental economics and game theory. This game is designed to test how people behave when asked to contribute to something that could benefit the entire community, but at a price to themselves. It’s a bit like asking people to voluntarily pay a sum of their own choosing in taxation toward maintaining the parks in California.
In this scenario, a number of participants are given tokens, which are redeemable at the end for money. They’re allowed to decide secretly how much of it to keep and how much to put into a common pot. The experimenters then award some percentage of the total in the pot — 40 per cent, say — to everyone playing.
This enabled Christakis to draw up networks of interactions, so that they could explore exactly how the behavior spreads from person to person along the network. They discovered an extraordinary result: giving creates a contagion of giving, a network of “pay-it-forward” altruism.
The actions of participants affected the future interactions of other people along the network. “If Tom is kind to Harry, Harry will be kind to Susan, Susan will be kind to Jane, and Jane will be kind to Peter,” writes Christakis. “So, Tom’s kindness to Harry is seen in Jane’s kindness to Peter, even though Jane and Peter had nothing to do with Tom and Harry and never interacted with them.”
All it took was one act of kindness and generosity to spread through multiple periods of play and up to three degrees along the network. “Each additional contribution a person made to the public good in the first period of play is tripled over the course of the experiment by other people who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence,” Christakis writes.
So for every act of kindness or generosity you do for a friend, he or she pays it forward to their friends and their friends’ friends and their friends’ friends’ friends. Kindness and generosity create a cascade of cooperative behavior, even in the most hardened of hearts.
Now, let’s look at what happens with an Intention Experiment®, if the effect of that altruistic activity – to heal something in the world – spreads three degrees down a social network.
Let’s say that 10,000 people take part in a typical experiment. In the surveys I send out to people, I regularly record that after participating in an Intention Experiment®, 50% of the participants feel more love for everyone they come in contact with.
So let’s do the math and work out what happens if just half of those 10,000 people, or 5,000, who took part in this Experiment feel more love for everyone they come in contact with.
If each of them knows 50 friends, and their love spreads three degrees down a social network, they will affect 625 million people.
If each of them knows 150 people – the standard model of how many people each of us are in contact with – and their love is socially contagious three degrees down a social network, they will affect. . .
16 billion people – twice the world’s population!
One simple collective thought is all you need to heal the world. . .
