Your network determines your behavior
In September, 2009, The New York Times Magazine ran a controversial headline: “Are your friends making you fat?” Then they went on to prove that, yes, in all likelihood, your friends are making you fat.
I encourage you to read the whole article. I’ve pulled out a few of my favorite passages below.
New York Times Magazine - "Are your friends making you fat?"
Behaviors are “contagious” across relationships
…Two years ago, a pair of social scientists named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler used the information collected over the years about Joseph and Eileen and several thousand of their neighbors to make an entirely different kind of discovery. By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people.
Sociograms–little maps of who knew whom
FOR DECADES, SOCIOLOGISTS and philosophers have suspected that behaviors can be “contagious.” In the 1930s, the Austrian sociologist Jacob Moreno began to draw sociograms, little maps of who knew whom in friendship or workplace circles
Different classes of relationships
co-workers did not seem to transmit happiness to one another, while personal friends did. But co-workers did transmit smoking habits; if a person at a small firm stopped smoking, his or her colleagues had a 34 percent better chance of quitting themselves. The difference is based in the nature of workplace relationships, Fowler contends.
Your network is HUGE
As Fowler pointed out, if you want to improve the world with your good behavior, math is on your side. For most of us, within three degrees we are connected to more than 1,000 people — all of whom we can theoretically help make healthier, fitter and happier just by our contagious example. “If someone tells you that you can influence 1,000 people,” Fowler said, “it changes your way of seeing the world.”
Professional Network Visualization
If a picture’s worth 1000 words, what’s data visualization worth?
You may not realize it, but you rely on data visualization every day. In the morning, when you watch the weather forecast, millions of pieces of information about weather of a vast, geographic are are consolidated into one simple image. You could never process the data for the weather in your region in a single day, but you process and act on the radar image (a visualization of that data) in just a few seconds.
Visualize your own network. Free trial. Get started now.
Networks of professional relationships are especially complex sets of data. The data comes from several sources and involves many overlapping relationships. In many cases, the data involved–even after our Professional Network Analysis process crunches it–is so rich and complex, it would take hundreds of pages to print it.
But with out Professional Network Visualization platform, you can make sense of it in just seconds.
Want to see some examples? Contact us and we’ll give you a tour.
You can also visit the “Business Networks” gallery at www.VisualComplexity.com.