The Village Effect E-Book

Susan Pinker

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Marrying the findings of the new field of social neuroscience together with gripping human stories, award-winning author and psychologist Susan Pinker explores the impact of face-to-face contact from cradle to grave, from city to Sardinian mountain village, from classroom to workplace, from love to marriage to divorce. Her results are enlightening and enlivening, and they challenge our assumptions. Most of us have left the literal village behind, and don't want to give up our new technologies to go back there. But, as Pinker writes so compellingly, we need close social bonds and uninterrupted face-time with our friends and families in order to thrive - even to survive. Creating our own 'village effect' can make us happier. It can also save our lives.

Leseprobe

First published in the United States in 2014 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company.

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Susan Pinker, 2014

The moral right of Susan Pinker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Pages 389–90 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 8 587E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 0 183Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 8 594

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To my parents,Roslyn and Harry Pinker

You cannot live for yourselves. A thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men; and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.

— REVEREND HENRY MELVILL, 1856

CONTENTS

Introduction

PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE

1

SWIMMING THROUGH THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

  

How Social Bonds Rejig the Outcome of Chronic Disease

2

IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO RAISE A CENTENARIAN

  

Longevity as a Team Sport

3

A THOUSAND INVISIBLE THREADS

  

Face-to-Face Contact and Social Contagion

4

WHO’S COMING TO DINNER?

  

Food, Drink, and Social Bonds

5

BABY CHEMISTRY

  

How Social Contact Transforms Infants’ Brains

6

DIGITAL NATIVES

  

Does Steady Exposure to Electronic Devices Affect Children’s Language Development, Academic Progress, and Happiness?

7

TEENS AND SCREENS

  

How Digital Technology Has Transformed Teens’ Lives

8

GOING TO THE CHAPEL

  

Face-to-Face Social Networks, Love, and Marriage

9

WHEN MONEY REALLY TALKS

  

Social Networks, Business, and Crime

Conclusion

CREATING THE VILLAGE EFFECT

Acknowledgments

Notes

Image and Figure Credits

Index

Introduction

People Who Need People

One June day in 2009, a rock musician named John McColgan was told that he needed a new kidney and he needed it fast. Every day in the United States, twelve people died waiting for a kidney, and when John’s name was added to the kidney transplant waiting list, the list was 86,218 names long. At the time he was living in Canada, though, where the list included only 2,941 people.1 Still, he took the news badly.

John is a drummer, an energetic, sinewy man with a smoothly shaved head. Though he had been diagnosed with progressive kidney disease when he was in his mid-twenties, he’d had few symptoms and until that moment hadn’t spent much time worrying about his health. At forty-eight he was often on the basketball court with men a decade younger, and he liked nothing better than to shoot a few hoops with his seventeen-year-old son. John skateboarded around town in summer, snowboarded in winter, and did pushups and crunches every day on the floor of his living room, not to mention all the drumming, a workout in itself. Before turning thirty he had played with Linda Ronstadt and Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and a short time later he backed up Big Mama Thornton and opened for superstars such as James Brown and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Still, when money was scarce, he wasn’t above digging irrigation ditches and working renovation jobs. John’s gas tank was often empty, his rent overdue. But his exuberance onstage and his lightheartedness offstage gave him the eternal charm of a schoolboy; he always got by with a little help from his friends.

John was rich in one important way: he had amassed a committed circle of friends, most of whom knew each other and regularly crossed paths—a feature of the most powerful and effective social networks. A large bank balance wouldn’t have helped him much in this situation in any case, as it’s illegal to buy or sell organs for transplantation everywhere in the world except Iran and Singapore.2 And in the current crisis, family couldn’t help him—his father had died at fifty of polycystic kidney disease, a genetic disorder he’d passed on to John, and his mother had died a few years earlier of cancer. After months of dialysis, John realized he couldn’t simply wait for his turn for a new kidney. He had to go looking for one.

By the time I met up with John less than eighteen months later, the transplant ordeal was behind him. I’d known him for at least twenty years and the change in him was stark. He seemed frail; the buzzed hair around the back of his bare skull was as short as a day’s growth of beard, and his skin looked transparent in what little light filtered in through the high, grimy windows of the Montreal café where we met. He told me that four people he knew had offered to give him a kidney.

The first was his ex-wife, Amy. But her drug addiction had savaged her health along with their marriage. Though she had recently kicked the habit, her organs had paid the price. His wife’s sister had also offered, but John decided that would just be too complicated. (When I asked Jessie, a mother of three small children and a professional dancer, why she would take this huge risk, she was taken aback. “Well, you know John. Everyone loves him. Why wouldn’t I give him my kidney?”)

Then a longtime friend, Kate, walked up to John at a gallery opening and blurted out that she wanted to help. She told me later that as soon as she offered her kidney, she felt scared. She then called the transplant nurse to ask what would be the worst thing that could happen if she went ahead. The nurse told her that one person in three thousand dies during the operation, and that the surgeon might accidentally knick her spleen. “Then I thought, I’m not going to die. That’s just not going to happen to me.”

Still, the testing was grueling, and it didn’t stop even after they found that her blood type and tissues were compatible with John’s. “During that year I went back more than five times. I gave sixteen vials of blood. They took various cells to test my compatibility. Then they tested my health. They did ultrasounds and CAT scans. I had a mammogram, which found a cyst, so they did a biopsy. Then I did a twenty-four-hour urine test, twice.”

She also underwent a long interview during which the transplant team examined her motives. “I could tell they were suspicious because I wasn’t family.” As powerful anti-rejection drugs had been available for a decade, it was now less important for the donor and recipient to be related. Still, medical professionals needed to know: Why on earth would someone volunteer to go through this?

It turned out that Kate was ready for the surgery before John was, so in the end the timing didn’t work out; she couldn’t be John’s donor. The kidney John ultimately received was a gift from his longtime friend Fred, with whom he had listened to Hendrix and Zappa as a teenager, two fifteen-year-olds trying out guitar riffs in Fred’s basement. Thirty years later they saw each other perhaps once or twice a year. Still, when John needed a kidney, Fred came forward.

The probability that a person not biologically related to you will offer you a kidney is very small—about three in a thousand. The chances of two people doing so are infinitesimal.3 Then there is John, who received four serious offers. By virtue of his strong relationships, groomed over decades, John beat the odds—and the disease that had killed his father.

John’s story is an unusually concrete example of how strong social bonds can prolong our lives. In the following pages I’ll show how those of us who invest in meaningful personal relationships with lots of real social contact are more robust and have better physiological defenses than those who are solitary or who engage with the world largely online. Digital networks and screen media have the power to make the world seem much smaller. But when it comes to certain life-changing transformations, they’re no match for face-to-face.

Face-to-face interaction does not just spur selfless acts like those of John’s friends, it also affects how well we learn to read, how quickly we fight off infection, and ultimately how long we live. So how exactly does that happen?

Less than 0.01 percent of the Western world’s population needs a new kidney.4 But every one of us needs a tight knot of friends and family in our corner, and not just when the chips are down. If we don’t interact regularly with people face-to-face, the odds are we won’t live as long, remember information as well, or be as happy as we could have been. What do I mean by regularly? When my son was small and went to his first violin lesson, he asked his music teacher, an impish man from Belgrade, if the rumor was true: did he really have to practice every day? Crouching down to Eric’s level and putting a slender hand to his chin, Dragan considered the question. “Not every day. Just every day you eat.”

Social contact is like that. It’s a biological drive. So I learned after spending three years delving into a fairly new field—social neuroscience. The field didn’t exist when I trained as a psychologist, back when brain scans were as rare and expensive as private jets.5 But by the early 1990s brain imaging had become more accessible, with hulking fMRI machines proliferating in windowless rooms in most large hospitals and universities. Research psychologists started to use them, along with demographic and biochemical tools, to track the science underpinning human relationships, and vice versa—to spy on the way our relationships transform our bodies, including our hormonal and neural circuits. I was hooked. In the meantime, though the social parts of our brains had become easier to observe, the meaning of the phrase social network had morphed. Instead of referring to all the people you know and your messy mutual relationships, it had come to mean the way our machines are connected. And I noticed a surefire reaction among those who inquired about my book: they immediately assumed that I was writing about Facebook and Twitter.

Conflating computer-driven networks with face-to-face contact reflects a social trend. Indeed, recent books on social interaction typically blend the two. Even the venerable Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey, which tracks how many hours a day Americans spend on activities like personal care (9.6) or eating and drinking (1.2), lumps online and face-to-face activities together. It codes buying in-season cantaloupes at a farm stand and arranging for escort services on Craigslist the same way—as shopping. Sitting alone in a room for hours losing track of time while playing a MMORPG (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game such as World of Warcraft), falls in the same category as one of my favorite childhood activities: playing gin rummy with my grandfather.6

My grandfather and I (age five) play cards while my grandmother looks on.

So, do we register digital simulacra the way we react to people who are right in front of us, in the here-and-now? If not, what does social neuroscience tell us we’re missing? Now that Americans spend a total of 520 billion minutes a day online—and the residents of most other countries spend proportionally the same—what stories do our face-to-face relationships tell?7

This book is about the kind of social contact we need to thrive. While researching my previous book, The Sexual Paradox, I discovered that women’s tendency to put a premium on their social connections is one of the main reasons they live longer. This fact prompted an aha! moment in me. I realized that pastimes we had long written off as frivolous time-wasters—such as chatting with friends on the porch or over a meal—serve important biological functions. That’s likely why we’ve evolved to find them irresistible. Research shows that playing cards once a week or meeting friends every Wednesday night at Starbucks adds as many years to our lives as taking beta blockers or quitting a pack-a-day smoking habit. How does that work? I wondered. Whatever the secret substance or process is, learning about it felt like rubbernecking at a restaurant when the server goes by with a steaming plate of something wonderful. I want what they’re having, I said to myself.

But what was that, exactly? To find out, I began with the question of longevity, sparked by stumbling across the fact that several remote Sardinian villages are the only places in the world where men live nearly as long as women. Everywhere else there is a gender gap in lifespan of about five to seven years. Though the longevity gap has been shrinking a bit, it’s substantial and nearly universal. These Italian mountain villages are also home to an astonishingly high number of centenarians of both sexes: proportionally, six times as many hundred-plus-year-olds as in any modern city (in some of the villages the ratio is ten to one). Why so many Sardinians born at the beginning of the twentieth century are still alive today is the story I tell in Chapter 2. As you will see, there’s no magic elixir. But one essential piece of the puzzle, I discovered, has to do with the epoxy-like social bonds of village life.

I could have called this book Face-to-Face, and I nearly did. Instead I chose The Village Effect because it evokes a feeling of belonging. It’s a metaphor, of course. You don’t need to experience a health crisis like John McColgan’s or live in a remote Italian village to feel surrounded by a tight circle of people in whom you’ve invested serious time and affection over the years—and who have returned that attention. You can create the effect with the people you know, right where you live. This book is about the long-term impact of those face-to-face interactions. Even if these connections are now buttressed by electronic communication, I will show how physiological immunity, enhanced learning, and the restorative power of mutual trust derive from face-to-face contact with the people in your intimate circle. This “village effect” not only helps you live longer, it makes you want to.

THE SCIENCE

The universal hunger to connect and belong explains much of human behavior from birth until death. Our very survival depends on it. In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson put it this way: “Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.”8 If that happened and you’re reading this now, you can thank the powerful nature of our social bonds.

Yet our recent understanding of what drives health and happiness has centered on the concrete: food, earning power, exercise, drugs. We’ve discovered, for example, that cigarettes, salt, animal fat, and being fat shorten our lives, while antibiotics, physical activity, and the right diet prolong it. Now new findings tell us that our relationships—the people we know and care about—are just as critical to our survival. And not just any kind of social contact, mind you, but the kind that takes place in real time, face-to-face. Beginning from the first moments of life and at every age and stage, close contact with other people—and especially with women—affects how we think, whom we trust, and where we invest our money. Our social ties influence our sense of satisfaction with life, our cognitive skills, and how resistant we are to infections and chronic disease.9 While information about diet, exercise, and new classes of drugs has created the life-changing breakthroughs of past decades, new evidence shows that social bonds are equally transformative.

Interacting with others exerts such fundamental changes in us that it is hard to deny that we have evolved for face-to-face social contact. University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo and his colleagues, as well as British researchers Catherine and Alex Haslam, have found that people with active social lives recover faster after an illness than those who are solitary—MRIs show greater tissue repair. Dozens of recent studies demonstrate how close social contact affects our physiological resilience, that is, how briskly our bodies bounce back after a trauma. A 2006 University of California study of three thousand women with breast cancer found that those with a large network of friends were four times as likely to survive as women with sparser social connections. And in 2007 the first study was published that revealed one of the hidden mechanisms linking social interaction to recovery in humans: Steve Cole and his team at UCLA discovered that social contact switches on and off the genes that regulate our immune response to cancer and the rate of tumor growth.10

It’s not just a North American phenomenon. When the habits of nearly seventeen thousand utility workers in France were monitored throughout the nineties, researchers discovered that their degree of social involvement was a good way of predicting who would still be alive by the end of the decade. Chance interactions, our weak networks of far-flung friends and colleagues, and the hours we spend with those intimately tied to us may seem ephemeral, but they have a concrete impact on our brains and psyches. For example, if you’re surrounded by a tightly connected circle of friends who regularly gather to eat and share gossip, you’ll not only have fun but you’re also likely to live an average of fifteen years longer than a loner. One study of almost three thousand Americans found that people with close friendships are far less likely to die young, and in 2004 a Swedish epidemiologist discovered the lowest rate of dementia in people with extensive social networks. Fifty-year-old men with active friendships are less likely to have heart attacks than more solitary men, while people who have had a stroke are better protected from grave complications by a tight, supportive social network than they are by medication.11

Despite this powerful evidence, our habits are becoming more solitary. Since the late eighties, when social isolation was first earmarked as a risk for early death in a landmark article in Science, more and more people say that they feel isolated and lonely, according to population surveys in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Exactly how much friendlessness has increased and why this is happening has caused academic tussling and fierce public debate. Some say we’re more connected now than ever—mostly due to the Internet—and some say we’re less connected—mostly due to the Internet. Both views are correct.

LONELINESS

Running through the stories you’ll encounter in this book is the question of quantity versus quality in relationships. Why is this question important? Studies show that we are now connected to a larger and more diverse circle of people, but between 12 and 23 percent of Americans say they have nobody to talk to (in 1985 that figure was 8 percent). And we’re not talking about solitary pensioners spending their days alone on park benches, scattering breadcrumbs to the pigeons. The middle-aged are the loneliest group of all in the United States. A third of those between the ages of forty-five and forty-nine say they have no one to confide in. In the United Kingdom it’s young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four who feel the loneliest.12 If that fact weren’t sobering enough, people in Britain take note: a nationally representative survey commissioned by the UK Mental Health Foundation in 2010 found that a quarter of Britons of all ages feel emotionally unconnected to others, and a third do not feel connected to the wider community.13

The Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam sounded the first alarm about increasing civic apathy in 2000, in Bowling Alone, a book said to have launched a thousand debates about whether Americans are becoming disengaged from their communities.14 Whether or not fewer bridge clubs and bowling leagues are apt signs of declining social involvement, one thing is certain: Americans don’t have a monopoly on loneliness. In the European Union, loneliness varies by country, but it’s safe to say that, at around 34 percent, the rates of intense anomie felt by adults living in the former Soviet republics—including Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia—are through the roof.15

That’s yet another reason why I’m grateful my grandparents fled that part of the world for Canada. Here in my home country, at least 80 percent of people over sixty-five say they frequently see family and friends, volunteer, or go to concerts and sports events (probably hockey).16 I’m not sure if the 19 percent who say they feel lonely don’t get out that much, but the data tell us that the quality of their interactions is more important than the quantity. The same principle holds for Americans, which is a mighty good thing, as their “villages” are shrinking. When researchers from the General Social Survey sat down with thousands of people of all ages and asked, “Who are the people with whom you discussed important matters over the last six months?” they discovered that the number of Americans’ quality connections had taken a dive in the past two decades. In 1985, Americans had an average of three confidants. In 2004 they had less than two, including members of their families. In short, they have fewer people they can lean on. “There are lots of people we have relationships with,” says Matthew Brashears, a sociology professor at Cornell and one of the authors of this study. “But this question picks up ties to people that are particularly strong—people we can go to if we’re in trouble, who could give you a substantial loan, who would help you. They’re important key people, so the number tends to be small.”

What Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, and Haiyan, as well as the Chicago and Paris heat waves, taught us is that surviving is often a matter of who cares enough to check up on you. Who will come by to offer you a lift, some groceries, or a place to stay if you need it? Research shows that those people most at risk of dying have no one nearby to ask for help.17 So I was shocked that most Americans say they have fewer than two people they can depend on. When I said as much to the even-keeled and soft-spoken Brashears, he demurred. “Maybe there’s a decline in the people you are close to, but our larger networks haven’t declined.”

“You mean our online networks?” I asked.

He answered with a qualified yes. “We haven’t figured out how to measure our relationship to the Internet yet. But people may be having fewer important discussions face-to-face if they’re having discussions online.” The gist, according to Brashears, seems to be that we don’t have fewer people to talk to in the broad sense. But a significant slice of the social interactions that would have taken place in person a few decades ago are now getting “siphoned off by Facebook.” As Tolstoy put it in War and Peace, we are connecting to a crowd—“a numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one was distant.”18

Of course, talking to fewer people about what matters and feeling lonely are not the same thing. Loneliness is the feeling of being bereft, deprived of intimacy, of hungering for companionship, as opposed to the physical state of being alone. Many of us crave being left to our own devices, as Susan Cain and Anthony Storr rightly point out in their books Quiet and Solitude.19 But loneliness is not about that sacred block of uninterrupted time that we need to think and work. It’s a distressing physiological state. The evidence tells us that about a third of us now feel lonely, sometimes acutely. “Research on loneliness, conducted mostly in Western countries, has shown that any given time, twenty to forty percent of older adults report feeling lonely, and from five to seven percent report feeling intense or persistent loneliness,” write John Cacioppo and his colleagues at the University of Chicago.20 While I was writing this book, three women—one in her thirties, another in her fifties, and the third in her sixties—told me that living alone was fine during the week, while they were busy with work. But weekends were miserable. “I cry every Saturday,” Veronica, thirty-seven, said when I met her in the locker room at the gym. “The loneliness is unbearable.”

Feeling lonely is as painful as being wildly hungry or thirsty. This makes sense, says Cacioppo, if human brains evolved at a time when social cohesion meant survival while social isolation meant starvation, predation, and certain death. If our big brains evolved to interact, loneliness would be an early warning system—a built-in alarm that sent a biological signal to members who had somehow become separated from the group. Like physical pain or hunger, loneliness effectively says, Hey, you! If you don’t find your people (or they don’t find you), you’re a goner.

If intimate face-to-face contact is protective—girding our cardiovascular and immunological systems and even raising our lifetime IQ levels—loneliness has the opposite effect. Feeling lonely exaggerates the inflammation and reactivity to stress that are linked to heart disease while interfering with our ability to retain facts and solve problems, according to work by the British epidemiologist Andrew Steptoe.21 Loneliness is particularly risky for women. In one huge population study of middle-aged Japanese citizens, women who rarely had the chance to spend time with their relatives had the highest risk of dying.22 Women are also more likely to be affected by their friends’ feelings of loneliness, as feelings spread more easily within their social networks.23 But other studies show that lack of intimacy is an equal-opportunity stalker. John Cacioppo and his colleagues have found that loneliness drives up the cortisol and blood pressure levels that damage the internal organs in both sexes, and at all ages and stages of adult life.24

Whether we’re college students or retirees, the data are telling us that chronic loneliness is less an exalted existential state than a public health risk. Yet there is a glib insouciance about loneliness in popular culture. Headlines such as “Get Over Your Loner Phobia” and “Eat to the Tweet” suggest that it’s now dorky to admit that if you live alone you might be lonely, or to imagine that other people might feel that way.25 In their book Networked, Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet Project and Barry Wellman, a Canadian sociologist who is the doyen of electronic social networks, mock the “Eleanor Rigby” lyric All the lonely people, where do they all come from? Skeptical that screen time could be contributing to loneliness, they call it a trap to assume that “internet encounters contain less social information and communication that might cause relationships to atrophy.” We have a strong sense of the people we meet up with online, and the medium is not the message, they write, adding this odd postscript: “People rarely interact with strangers over the internet.”26

Yet there is an undeniable fact: due to the convenience and power of the Internet, many of us now live, shop, go to school, and work alone. With classes now posted online and the proliferation of MOOCs (massive open online courses), many college students don’t bother to leave their rooms. Just as the sidewalk vanished in much of American urban planning in the mid twentieth century, when the car became the dominant form of transportation, the post office, newsstand, bookstore, and video store—all places where we crossed paths just a few years ago—are becoming obsolete. True, there are lots of online conversations and apps that connect people, and cafés are more common on street corners than supermarkets. In effect the Internet has allowed us to be more choosy about whom we meet, at least in person. Instead of bumping into neighbors or distant friends spontaneously, we are in control. Some research shows that our networked devices make us less solipsistic, more involved in the world outside ourselves. “Internet use does not pull people away from public places, but rather is associated with frequent visits to places such as parks, cafes, and restaurants,” write Wellman and Rainie.27 But as the Boston Globe columnist, Ellen Goodman, reminds us, “Go into Starbucks and a third of the customers are having coffee dates with their laptops.”28

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it can hardly be viewed as an intimate connection. Still, talking to our friends and loved ones by landline, mobile phone, or Skype is the next best thing to being there, as Ma Bell presciently put it. I’m certainly a convert. We recently Skyped the son of a close neighborhood friend into our Passover seder. He was serving in the military at the time, but we set a place at the table for the “Ethan” laptop. Another friend who used to live across the street joined us at Chinese New Year celebrations via her father’s iPad, which was passed around from guest to guest like a wedding videographer’s microphone so everyone could greet her.

Indeed, there’s a long history of women in my family using the telephone to keep their social ties alive. At the end of every workday my grandmother picked up the receiver of her black rotary model to check up on the health and happiness of her female friends, who despite the intimacy of their conversations she addressed formally as Mrs. Dubow, Mrs. Silver, Mrs. Cooper, Mrs. Tartar, and Mrs. Teitelbaum. During her years at home with small children, my mother’s fully extended nine-foot long kitchen phone cord kept her attached—in more ways than one—to her social circle. Now it’s my turn. If I can’t see my friends and loved ones in person, I use a combination of cordless, cellphone, email, text, and Skype to keep up with my social network, which, graphed out, looks something like this:

My sociogram: The circles are female, the triangles are male, and the black dots indicate people profiled in this book. The thickness of the line shows the strength of the connection.

A Pew Internet study confirms that cellphone users have larger personal networks—12 percent larger, to be precise—than the small fraction of people who shun them.29 But in a different set of studies, the same group of scientists showed that avid users of social networking sites have more diverse electronic networks but know fewer of their neighbors and are less integrated into their local communities than those who rarely use social media.30 “A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty,” Emerson wrote in 1857. True, that was a long time ago, but are we really that different?

The power and immediacy of electronic media have persuaded us that the different ways of “clothing ourselves” in social contact are interchangeable. In the coming pages I’ll show that the latest evidence upends this idea. Electronic media can sway voters and topple newspapers, but when it comes to human cognition and health, they’re no match for the face-to-face.

The “come-hither” aspect of electronic media has pulled the wool over our eyes, convincing us that different ways of making contact are the same as being there, and leading us to believe that our networks are expanding. In fact, even if our electronic networks are larger, the size of our face-to-face social networks has stayed roughly the same, while the number of people we feel close to is shrinking. Given that the only person many Americans say they can trust is their spouse, it turns out that many of us are just one person away from having no one at all.

Of course, there are paradoxes. The longer you live—which is usually a good thing—the more likely that your spouse, partner, and close friends will predecease you, leaving you on your own. Unless you’re resourceful and have groomed your networks over a lifetime, solitary living can mean forgoing face-to-face contact on a day-to-day basis. Claude Fischer, a Berkeley sociologist who has been studying social networks and urban life for three decades, points out that “living alone is largely what Americans do,” and that the widowed and divorced are largely responsible for the boom in people living alone.31 While a quarter of American men over seventy-five now live alone, fully half of all women that age do, many of them having divorced or outlived their spouses. In Britain the number of people living alone has doubled since the early 1970s; in 2010, sales of single-serving cookware increased by 140 percent, according to the Daily Mail, which reported that “frying pans small enough for just one egg, plates for one slice of toast, and one-cup teapots are now some of the fastest selling items in cookware.” Where large casseroles were the must-have items of the latter half of the twentieth century, the article notes that “even woks have been downsized for the single market.” Given that 80 percent of British citizens over eighty-five live alone, those whipping up one-egg omelets are very likely to be seniors.32

These are extraordinary statistics, and they can be understood in a couple of ways. The good news is that in North America, Japan, and Europe, people, especially women, are living longer than ever and the majority can now afford to live alone, if that’s what they choose. But the other part of the story is that they might live even longer if they had the right company. In a study of nearly seven thousand older people in Finland, epidemiologists found that one of the most powerful predictors of loneliness was living alone; when they followed up four years later, the lonely folks—no matter their state of health to begin with—were 31 percent more likely to have died in the meantime than people who felt intimately connected.33 In a huge study of 11,500 middle-aged Japanese citizens led by Tokyo epidemiologist Motoki Iwasaki, urban women who rarely had the chance to interact face-to-face with their relatives had the highest risk of dying.34 The researchers followed all of the women between the ages of forty and sixty-nine who lived in Gunma Prefecture; these women were hardly the oldest, nor were they the poorest. Yet their resilience was fatefully affected by their opportunities for face-to-face contact.

In the following pages I’ll address some crucial questions about human relationships in a digital age. How important is face-to-face interaction as children develop new skills, when adults fall in love, when they negotiate business deals, and as they age?35 How did humans evolve such finely tuned barometers of trust and betrayal, and do these mechanisms still work if you’re not face-to-face with your partner? Why are women’s social networks tighter than men’s, and what does this mean for their health and the health of others? For example, Tom Valente, at the University of California at San Diego, among others, has shown that smoking, drinking, and drug use among adolescents spreads (and may be reversed) via popular kids who act as hubs of influence through overlapping cliques.36 Without deploying adolescents’ social networks, expensive public health programs are likely to fail, even if Twitter and Facebook are used to spread the message.

This research is telling us that proximity matters. Sixty years ago Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.” In the following pages, you’ll see that he was wrong.

Swimming Through the School of Hard Knocks

How Social Bonds Rejig the Outcome of Chronic Disease

When Sylvie La Fontaine was diagnosed with breast cancer in April 1999, she had just competed with her team in the Canadian Masters national swimming championships. Five foot ten, with rectangular tortoiseshell glasses and pixie-cut hair, Sylvie favored snug wraparound tops she sewed herself, worn over leggings and boots; she hardly looked the part of a grandmother of three. A real estate agent and interior designer, she was the de facto hub of several intense face-to-face social networks, including her swim team. Its president for seven years by that time, she fielded a multitude of personal and training questions from its 150 members, including but not limited to their health issues, reproductive concerns and sports injuries, marital flare-ups and child-rearing doubts, thoughts on the pool’s water quality and the coach’s latest endurance workout. She was even a shoulder to cry on when a member’s beloved pet had to be put down. She sustained this role with bemused equanimity until a teammate blasted her—and not for the first time—about some insignificant mishap at a competition. The attack penetrated her usual defenses and really stung. Given her recent cancer diagnosis, Sylvie wondered whether she should pull back from the team in order to conserve her emotional resources.

But she found that it wasn’t that simple for her to withdraw. Not only did people keep seeking her out for advice, Sylvie couldn’t resist getting involved when there was work to be done. Along with being swim team president, she was also president of a rural homeowners association that had recently planted sixty thousand trees to naturalize communally owned farmland (she had planted fifteen thousand of them herself). She unwittingly drew confidences from people she barely knew—which puzzled her, as she tended to keep her own counsel. I was just one of what seemed like several hundred swim buddies, colleagues, and neighbors who considered Sylvie a friend. And that was just her middle social layer: she had many closer friends too.

Sylvie and her husband had formed strong bonds with several navy couples while he was enlisted and their kids were young. Closer still were three couples she had met through the swim team; they now dined and traveled together whenever they got the chance. When Gary, one of these close swim friends, found out he had colon cancer, the same week Sylvie received her diagnosis, she competed alongside him at the national championships, then threw herself into his care, organizing tag teams to drive him to the hospital and helping to coordinate his treatment regimen. Supporting Gary as he fought his six-month survival estimate became her most pressing project. “I wasn’t sick. He was,” she flatly retorted when I asked why she talked about Gary when I asked about her own health. (Gary outlived his initial prognosis by three and half years.) “I didn’t really need anything at the time. Breast cancer is not something that hurts, you know. It’s very mental.”

Not everyone would agree with this assessment. What’s indisputable is that despite her vow to withdraw, Sylvie continued to be deeply immersed in several face-to-face social networks that involved taking care of other people. Though cancer did prompt her to give up her leadership roles for a while, she still swam with the team, entertained family and friends, and took care of people in her circle she thought needed her help. Few see looking after others as therapeutic for the person who does the caretaking, or consider community involvement as therapeutic as drugs. Yet there is mounting evidence that a rich network of face-to-face relationships creates a biological force field against disease.