Choose Your Friends, Coworkers, and Friends' Friends Wisely

Science is beginning to learn that human beings are even more social than we'd realized.

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says
"How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all. And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood. So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought." Click to continue.

Which is why it's so critical for our spouses to have a healthy work environment...

370: Ruining It for the Rest of Us
"A bad apple, at least at work, can spoil the whole barrel. And there's research to prove it. This American Life host Ira Glass talks to Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, who designed an experiment to see what happens when a bad worker joins a team. Felps divided people into small groups and gave them a task. One member of the group would be an actor, acting either like a jerk, a slacker or a depressive. And within 45 minutes, the rest of the group started behaving like the bad apple. Felps found three types of bad apples:
1. the jerk
2. the slacker
3. the depressive pessimist
Click to continue on to the TAL website, where you can listen to the whole episode.

...and friends who don't smoke...

Study Finds Big Social Factor in Quitting Smoking
"Smokers tend to quit in groups, the study finds, which means smoking cessation programs should work best if they focus on groups rather than individuals. It also means that people may help many more than just themselves by quitting: quitting can have a ripple effect prompting an entire social network to break the habit." Click to continue.

...and friends who are thin...

Find Yourself Packing It On? Blame Friends
"Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too... Researchers report...that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person’s chances of becoming obese by 57 percent. There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends. It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles away, the influence remained. And the greatest influence of all was between close mutual friends. There, if one became obese, the other had a 171 percent increased chance of becoming obese, too. The same effect seemed to occur for weight loss, the investigators say." Click to continue.