RULE 2: OUR NETWORK SHAPES US
Our place in the network affects us in turn. A person who has no friends has a very different life than one who has many. For example, we will see in chapter 4 that having an extra friend may create all kinds of benefits for your health, even if this other person doesn’t actually do anything in particular for you.
One study of hundreds of thousands of Norwegian military conscripts provides a simple example of how the mere number of social contacts (here, siblings) can affect you.11 It has been known for some time that first-born children score a few points higher in terms of intelligence than second-born children, who in turn score a bit higher than third-born children. One of the outstanding questions in this area of investigation, however, has been whether these differences are due to biological factors fixed at birth or to social factors that come later. The study of Norwegian soldiers showed that simple features of social networks, such as family size and structure, are responsible for the differences. If you are a second-born son whose older sibling died while you were a child, your IQ increases and resembles the IQ of a first-born child. If you are a third-born child and one of your older siblings died, your IQ resembles that of a second-born child; and if both of your older siblings died, then your IQ resembles that of a first-born child.
Whether your friends and other social contacts are friends with one another is also crucial to your experience of life. Transitivity can affect everything from whether you find a sexual partner to whether you commit suicide. The effect of transitivity is easily appreciated by the example of how divorce affects a child. If a child’s parents are married (connected) then they probably talk to each other, but if they get divorced (disconnected) they probably do not. Divorce means that communication often has to pass through the child (“Tell your father not to bother picking you up next Saturday!”), and it is much harder to coordinate raising the child (“You mean your mother bought you ice cream too?”). What is remarkable is that even though the child is still deeply connected to both parents, her relationship with each of them changes as a consequence of the divorce. Yet these changes result from the loss of a connection between the parents—a connection the child has little to do with. The child still has two parents, but her life is different depending on whether or not they are connected.
And how many contacts your friends and family have is also relevant. When the people you are connected to become better connected, it reduces the number of hops you have to take from person to person to reach everyone else in the network. You become more central. Being more central makes you more susceptible to whatever is flowing within the network. For example, person C in the figure on page 14 is more central than person D. Ask yourself which person you would rather be if a hot piece of gossip were spreading; you should be person C. Now ask yourself which person you would rather be if a deadly germ were spreading in the network; you should be person D. And this is the case even though persons C and D each have the same number of social ties: they are each directly connected to just six people. In later chapters, we will show how your centrality affects everything from how much money you make to whether you will be happy.
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