Are weight gain and happiness contagious? Can your genes influence your vote? These are the types of unusual questions that pique the interest of UC San Diego political and social scientist James Fowler. It turns out he’s not the only one interested in the answers. His recent studies on social networks have gained national and international attention. He was also named “the most original thinker of 2008” on "The McLaughlin Group". In this interview, he talks about the origins of his research, his new book—"Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives"—and how his own social networks have affected his life.

Fowler: I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, so being on the debate team in high school was a big experience for me; it helped me see that there was an outside world and that’s where my love affair with politics started.

Fowler: I got involved in the study of genetics in political behavior while working on behavioral economics experiments which showed someone’s altruism could predict whether or not they voted.  It occurred to me it would be really easy to study whether or not genes had an influence on voting because of an already existing twin registry and existing public records of whether or not people voted.  All we had to do was match the two to see if genes make a difference, and it showed they do.

My initial interest in social networks began when I was a graduate student.  I wasn’t satisfied with other people’s studies on voter turnout.  One night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought of an old commercial about shampoo where a woman told two friends about this product and the screen split into two, and then they tell two friends and the screen splits into four, then eight and so on…and suddenly everyone’s using the shampoo.  This commercial came back to me at a time when I was trying to figure out what to write for my dissertation.  It occurred to me that one of the reasons why we might vote is because we inherently understand that our actions aren’t just our own.  Our actions ripple through the social network and, as a consequence, there is this exponential increase in the number of people we have at two, three or four degrees of separation.  So one person’s action, even though it might only have a small effect going from one person to another, is impacting a much larger population.

Fowler: It seems many political scientists avoid thinking about biology because they have this theory about human beings, that we’re all exactly alike. For instance, you could take a human being out of one context, say a barrio in Argentina, and put them in Beverly Hills, and they would no longer be like the person in Argentina, they’d be like the person from Beverly Hills in all things political. That’s kind of a depressing image because it means we’re all interchangeable cogs in the machine. And I think the study of genetic variation tells us we’re much more like snowflakes than cogs in a machine. Each of us has a unique combination of personality types, biology and personal experiences that really cause us to think about politics and act in different ways. Genes are the blueprint for human life. And social networks are the study of how you interact with other people, the things that connect us to all these blueprints. Overall, I think the study of these two things help to explain a whole lot of how we behave and that each of us might be unique in this world.

Fowler: Doing these studies have had a strong impact on how I think about myself and my behavior. We have a number of studies that show that something one person does can affect not just the person they’re directly connected to in their social network but also people up to three degrees of separation. If I gain weight, there’s an increased likelihood my friend’s spouse will gain weight. Or if I’m happy, my friend’s neighbor might be happy. So you can take the information in one of two ways. The effect is so strong that you can perceive you have no control or free will; all these people beyond your social horizon who you’ve never met are doing things that will impact your life. The flip side of looking at this is that you also are influencing those people; every action you take ripples through the network and influences hundreds of people.

When we did the obesity study, my reaction was to lose five pounds. My reaction to the happiness study was to make sure I wasn’t spreading a bad mood when I came home at the end of the day. So for six months after the happiness study, I put on my favorite song before I got home to make myself a little happier, because I knew this could affect not only my sons and my wife, but also maybe my son’s friend’s mother. That’s a big responsibility to have an influence on so many people in this world. I think if people acknowledged that they had that kind of influence, we’d all probably try to be better people.

Fowler: I have noticed the influence on my family whenever I work on my mood when I come home. But I think what’s difficult is that we don’t usually see our influence. If a friend’s friend ends up being influenced by you, the chances are low that you’ll see that. It’s rare when we make those connections beyond our social horizon. So I have not observed a lot of my own influence, but I believe it to be true because, in these studies, we get to see what people don’t see in their own social networks.

Fowler: It will be interesting in this century to see how this online social life has an impact on social networks that we’ve developed over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.  I think, as we go forward, we want to study how much of our influence is spread online because some of our research suggests you might need face-to-face contact for things to spread.  Our studies on happiness, loneliness and depression suggest that you need to live near your close friends in order for their emotions to have an influence on your emotions.  But it’s possible that online contact could be a substitute for in-person contact.  We just don’t know yet.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve lived in small groups.  And suddenly we’re in these really large online groups, where lots of people have access to us in a way that they never did before.  Our brains are designed to handle about 150 relationships.  I have a feeling that if we were on Facebook for hundreds of thousands of years, our social networks would change.  But in the short term, the size of our brains are not going to change and I think our networks will continue to work in the same ways that they always have.  The real question is going to be how we cope with all this information about these people that we’re only loosely connected to.  It’s going to be fascinating over the next 10 to 20 years to see how these networks co-evolve with our natural tendency to connect with one another.

Fowler: In general, what we find is that people need human connection.  You can spread bad things through networks, such as germs and disease, and people can get taken advantage of, such as the Bernie Madoff scandal, but we keep coming back to the networks.  But because good things can spread through networks, like happiness and good health, and because these networks exist, we think, on balance, they’re probably good for us. 

Fowler: I study things that just sound interesting to me.  I’m sort of bathed in pop culture.  If you look hard enough, ideas for scientific papers are everywhere, such as the commercial that piqued my interest in social networks.  I’m the guy that really tries to learn as much as I can about a wide variety of things and pull them together.  As a consequence, I collaborate with a lot of different people on a lot of different projects.

For several years now, I’ve been collaborating with Harvard sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis on researching social networks and their impact on behavior. Because there has been so much interest in our findings, we wanted to write something broadly accessible and show people why this research matters for their own lives.

Fun Faves

Favorite part of your job: Discovery

Favorite social networking medium: Facebook

Favorite accomplishment: Co-authoring the book

Favorite place on Earth: My home

Favorite food: Indian cuisine

Favorite hobby:  Going to the Movies

Favorite band:  Sing-Sing

Favorite words to live by:  “To know who we are, we must understand how and why we are connected.” – a sentence we wrote in our new book

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