It's so easy to make friends these days. If you are a member of Linkedin, for example, there are regular suggestions about whom you should befriend. Under the header people you may know, all sorts of names appear. Theoretically, you might well have something in common with them so, what the hell, let's join up, let's be buddies.
But if work by Christakis and Fowler is to be believed (and being eminent people, there is no reason to doubt them), then joining up with new people could expose you to massive risk. Their behaviour could change your behaviour.
Here's the key paragraph from their book, Connected:
Mathematical analyses...suggest that a person is about 15 percent more likely to be happy if a directly connected person (at one degree of separation) is happy. And the spread of happiness doesn't stop there. The happiness effect for people at two degrees of separation (the friend of a friend) is 10 percent, and for people at three degrees of separation (the friend of a friend of a friend), is about 6 percent. At four degrees of separation, the effect peters out.
In other words, other people's friends could make you happy - or quite the reverse.
It's not just happiness that spreads they say. Other people can make you fat. They can also make you want to get married and divorced. Your friends' friends' friends are a danger to your very existence.
We are herd animals. Research shows that we respond positively to messages that talk about how most people behave. By "most people", the implication is most people like us. We want to belong to groups who would want us as members. And therein is the rub. When members of our new group behave in particular ways, we want to do the same. We think to ourselves - they're doing it, it could well be the right thing to do.
Friendship has changed. Whereas our buddies may, in the past, have been taciturn, ironic, people of very few words, now they're almost compelled to utter. Your new friends tell you what they think.
The twitter and blogosphere are vacuums that scream out every day for content. Their emptiness begs us to say out loud things we may well have kept to ourselves. Now, we contribute to an endless stream of thoughts, musings, blogs, passing remarks, suggestions, comments, criticisms, photos, weblinks, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
All this content, coming from ourselves and our friends, just begs to be consumed. You can't ignore what your friends are telling you. It's not the done thing.
And the act of consumption could well increase the likelihood of behaviour change. Our agenda for the day could be abandoned because this morning we read a tweet that caused us to re-evaluate our whole approach to life.
So powerful are these friendly influences, that we should be more circumspect about our befriending decisions.
Don't get me wrong, I have no regrets about my current connections and enjoy their tweets, blogs and musings. Some of the pictures are less inspiring but that's just me.
But if we are to be significantly affected by those we are connected to, maybe we should know something about their likes, dislikes, hates and errant tendencies before we press the connect button. Should we carry out some kind of risk analysis? We might reasonably want the answers to some pretty key questions before we say "yes" to new relationships:
- Are you generally a happy person?
- Are you prone to impulsive behaviour?
- Are you opinionated?
- Are you so charismatic that I will want to be like you?
- Are you, if I should befriend you, likely to be good for me?
And, of course, the reverse must apply - after all, it takes two to create a deep and meaningful relationship.
We must look to ourselves. If we are people of reasonable judgement, would we advise people to befriend us? What risks do we pose others? Are we likely to do something so compellingly interesting that we will talk about it endlessly and literally change others' lives?
Big questions to which none of us might know the answer - but maybe we should.
Please don't take offence and these deep questions. I'm just trying to be honest with you. That's what friends are for after all, isn't it?