Happiness Is Contagious

Recent research from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego, reported by several news outlets including WebMD on December 4, 2008, and the Chicago Tribune on December 5th, showed that your happiness can influence the happiness of someone you have never met. The original study was published in the December 4, 2008 issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and was conducted to evaluate whether happiness can spread from person to person.

The study suggests that happiness is transmitted through social networks. The study results note that, "people who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future."

Coauthor, Dr. James H Fowler, associate professor Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, stated in the WebMD article, "We have known for a long time that there is a direct relationship between one person's happiness and another's. But this study shows that indirect relationships also affect happiness. We found a statistical relationship not just between your happiness and your friends' happiness, but between your happiness and your friends' friends' friends' happiness."

The results of the study shows that this happiness transfer extends to the third degree. This means that the happiness of an immediate social contact, called "first degree" increased an individual's chances of becoming happy by 15%. The happiness of a "second-degree contact", for example the spouse of a friend, increases the likeliness of becoming happy by 10%. And researchers showed that even the happiness of a third-degree contact, such as the friend of a friend of a friend, will increase the likelihood of becoming happy by 6%.

Coauthor, Dr. Nicholas A Christakis, professor Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, and Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, tried to explain the results by saying, "If you imagine the fabric of humanity as a patchwork quilt, it turns out if you're happy or not depends on if you're in a happy or unhappy patch."

Dr. Fowler further explained in the WebMD article, "We need to think of happiness as a collective phenomenon. If I come home in a bad mood, I may be missing an opportunity to make not just my wife and son happy, but their friends.

The author's conclusion as published in the British Medical Journal clearly stated the effect that one person has on others when they concluded, "People's happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon."