The Influence of a Friend

In Sunday School this past Sunday we discussed some stories from the beginning of the Book of Judges. While discussing the story of Deborah, we talked about the influence and importance of friends. We all know how much of an effect our friends have on us. I began thinking about the friends I've had. I then realized that two of the best decisions in my life were with respect to the friends I chose.

Sometime around the age of 14 I changed the friends I spent most of my time with because they were having quite a negative effect on me. Then, when I returned to BYU last January, I sought out friends who would help me maintain a level of spirituality most similar to what I had while on my mission in Chile. They changed me in a lot of ways, entirely for the better. And most of all, if it hadn't been for that, my wife and I would never have started dating.

After writing those thoughts down in a notebook, I remembered a study which came out about 18 months ago. It found that happiness was contagious up to three degrees of separation (a friend of a friend of a friend) over long periods of time.

A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation.

On a side note, it is interesting to note that in this study happy coresident spouses only increased someone's possibility of becoming happy by 8%, compared to 34% by a next door neighbor. We must be really disconnected from our spouses in this country. Perhaps that sheds more light on high divorce rates.

I like the following quote which The Washington Post shared in their story:

"For a long time, we measured the health of a country by looking at its gross domestic product," said Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego who co-authored the study. "But our work shows that whether a friend's friend is happy has more influence than a $5,000 raise. So at a time when we're facing such economic difficulties, the message could be, 'Hang in there. You still have your friends and family, and these are the people to rely on to be happy.'"