在上周的时代周刊上刊登了一篇叫做《快乐效应》的文章，引述科学家的话证明你的快乐是由你周围的圈子影响决定的，同时你也在影响着他们。外国人就是相当的愚钝，非要算出一层一层人际圈子之间传递快乐的百分比。要知道这对于每个人的生活毫无意义，无数先贤早就说了很多至理名言教导我们。在我们中间也流传着那个传递坏脾气的链条：老板训干部，干部骂员工，员工气老婆，老婆打孩子，孩子踢狗，狗咬猫……似乎最后又回到老板身上。当然生活在社会里，我们都或多或少地影响了别人的生活，也因为别人的生活而受影响。有些是出乎意料的喜悦，而有些也是我们始料不及的灾祸，生活奇妙地按照它的规律自顾自地不停运转着。与其探寻其间诡异的关系，不如对你生命中遇到的每个人露出开心的笑脸，你正在积极地改变着这个世界。
Health & Science
The Happiness Effect 快乐效应
The next time you get the flu, there will almost certainly be someone you can blame for your pain. There's the inconsiderate co-worker who decided to drag himself to the office and spent the day sniffling, sneezing and shivering in the cubicle next to yours. Or your child's best friend, the one who showed up for a playdate with a runny nose and a short supply of tissues. Then there's the guy at the gym who spent more time sneezing than sweating on the treadmill before you used it.
下次你得了流感，你总可以找到传染给你的罪魁祸首。也许是哪个不顾及别人的同事，非要硬拖着来到办公室在你旁边的隔间里打喷嚏、擤鼻涕。也许是你孩子的好朋友，在游乐会上大流鼻涕而找不到纸巾。亦或是那个在健身房的脚踏机上不停打喷嚏的哥们，你偏偏选择了他用过的那台脚踏机。
You're right to pass the blame. Pathogens like the influenza virus pass like a holiday fruitcake from person to person, but you probably don't think much past the one who gave it directly to you. An infectious-disease expert, on the other hand, would not be satisfied to stop there. What about the person who passed the virus on to your colleague, the one before him and others earlier still? Contagious diseases operate like a giant infectious network, spreading like the latest YouTube clip among friends of friends online. We're social animals; we share.
你的抱怨是有道理的。类似流感病毒的病原体会像节日水果蛋糕一样人手相传，但你可能不会多想那个把它传递给你的人。然而传染病专家不会就此打住。谁把病毒传给你的同事的，之前又是谁传染给这个人的？传染病像一个巨大的感染网络，就像最新的YouTube短片在朋友间快速传播一样。我们是社会动物，我们会“分享”。
So public-health experts are beginning to wonder whether certain health-related behaviors are just as contagious as microbes. If you're struggling with your weight, did you in effect catch a case of fat by learning poor eating and exercise habits from a friend or family member who was similarly infected by someone else? If you smoke, do you light up because you were behaviorally contaminated by smokers who convinced you of the coolness of the habit? Even more important, if such unhealthy behaviors are contagious, are healthy ones--like quitting smoking or exercising--equally so? And what if not only behaviors but also moods and mental states work the same way? Can you catch a case of happy?
因此公共健康专家开始思索是不是与健康相关的行为也会像微生物一样传染。如果你在奋斗减肥，你是不是受到了一个节食运动朋友或家人的影响，而他们也是受别人类似行为的影响呢？如果你抽烟，你是不是受了那些吸烟者的污染，认为抽烟是很酷的习惯呢？更重要的是，如果这样的不健康行为是传染性的，那么像戒烟或锻炼这样的健康行为是不是也有类似的现象呢？如果不仅仅是行为，情绪或精神状况也有类似的现象呢？你能想到快乐的例子吗？
Increasingly, the answer seems to be yes. That's the intriguing conclusion from a body of work by Harvard social scientist Dr. Nicholas Christakis and his political-science colleague James Fowler at the University of California at San Diego. The pair created a sensation with their announcement earlier this month of a 20-year study showing that emotions can pass among a network of people up to three degrees of separation away, so your joy may, to a larger extent than you realize, be determined by how cheerful your friends' friends' friends are, even if some of the people in this chain are total strangers to you.
答案似乎越来越倾向于“是”。这是哈佛社会学家Nicholas Christakis博士和他的加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校的政治学同事James Fowler共同得出的有趣结论。他们因为本月早前声称经过二十年的研究表明情感是可以在人际网络中以三度分割方式传递而引发了轰动，因此你的快乐很大程度上是决定于你朋友的朋友的兴奋程度，即使这些人对你来说都是陌生人。
If that's so, it creates a whole new paradigm for the way people get sick and, more important, how to get them healthy. It may mean that an individual's well-being is the product not just of his behaviors and emotions but more of the way they feed into a larger social network. Think of it as health Facebook-style. "We have a collective identity as a population that transcends individual identity," says Christakis. "This superorganism has an anatomy, physiology, structure and function that we are trying to understand."
如果是这样，它创立了一个人们得病的新例证，更重要的是如果得到健康的。这可能意味着一个独立个体的康乐不仅仅是他个人行为或情绪的结果，更是受所处社会网络影响。可以把这想象成健康Facebook模式。“我们作为人群拥有集体的特性而超越了个体性，”Christakis说“这个超个性在解刨学、生理学、结构和功能有许多有待我们认识的方面。”
In their most recent paper, published in the British Medical Journal, Christakis and Fowler explored the emotional state of nearly 5,000 people and the more than 50,000 social ties they shared. At three points during the long study, all the participants answered a standard questionnaire to determine their happiness level, so that the scientists could track changes in emotional state. That led to their intriguing finding of just how contagious happiness can be: if a subject's friend was happy, that subject was 15% more likely to be happy too; if that friend's friend was happy, the original subject was 10% more likely to be so. Even if the subject's friend's friend's friend--entirely unknown to the subject--was happy, the subject still got a 5.6% boost. The happiness chain also worked in the other direction, radiating from the subject out to her friends.
在他们最新发表在英国医学杂志的论文中，Christakis和Fowler研究了接近5000个人以及他们共享的超过50000个社会节点的精神状态。这项长期研究的三个侧重点中，所有的参与者回答一份标准问卷来表明快乐程度，因此科学家可以追踪他们的情绪变化。这导致了他们发现快乐有多强的传染性：如果一个参与者的朋友是快乐的，他将有高于15%的可能性也是快乐的；如果朋友的朋友是快乐的，他将有高于10%的可能性也是快乐的。即使是完全陌生的朋友的朋友的朋友是快乐的，他依然能有5.6%的情绪提升。这个快乐链在其他方向上也会起作用，从参与者向他的朋友们辐射。
The happiness dividend is more powerful if two people not only know each other but also are equally fond of each other. Happiness is more infectious in mutual relationships (in which both people name the other as a friend) than in unreciprocated ones (in which only one is named).
如果两个人不仅认识而且相互喜爱，这种快乐分红将更加有作用。快乐在相互关系（彼此互称朋友的关系中）中比单向的关系（只有一方认为对方是朋友）中更具传染性。
And it's not just in sterile study settings that the contagion of happiness is spreading. Christakis and Fowler noticed that people who are smiling on their Facebook pages tend to cluster together, forming an online social circle like a delirious flock of cyberbirds. And while some of this joy can certainly be traced to the copycat effect--if your friends post smiling pictures, you might feel like a grouch if you don't too--Christakis and Fowler are analyzing the clusters to see if something more infectious might be at work.
不仅仅在枯燥的研究中定义的快乐具有传染性。Christakis和Fowler提醒人们，那些在Facebook上传笑容照片的人更容易聚敛好友，形成了一群狂热cyberbird的在线社会圈子。有些这种快乐可以被追溯到copycat效应-如果你的朋友上传了笑脸的照片， 而你不跟进就会觉得不悦--Christakis和Fowler在分析在聚类中哪些情况可能促成更强的传染性。
Skeptics raise other concerns, ones that go beyond the copycat effect. Couldn't happy people simply be exposed to similar lifestyles or social factors that explain their shared joy, such as favorable weather, low unemployment rates or a winning baseball team? If that were the case, argue the authors, then happiness would spread more uniformly among all the relationships; instead, it varied depending on whether the friendship was mutual or merely one-sided. As the investigators teased out these factors, they found that environment didn't have nearly the power that relationships did.
怀疑论者提出了其他思考挑战copycat效应。如果快乐的人没有处于相似的生活方式或社会因素例如：喜爱的天气、低失业率或同一只棒球队的胜利时，还能不能解释他们分享的快乐？作者争辩道，如果是这种情况下，快乐将会在所有的关系中规则地传递；这样的变化决定于友谊是双向的还是单向的。当调查者剔除这些因素，他们发现环境不具有关系那样的传播能力。
The infectiousness of happiness is only the latest in a series of similar phenomena Christakis and Fowler have studied. In 2007 they published a paper showing that obesity travels across webs in a similar way, with individuals having a 57% greater risk of being overweight if they have an obese friend. The same holds true for quitting smoking, with success 30% more common among friends of quitters than among friends of smokers.
快乐的传染性只是Christakis和Fowler所进行的一系列研究中的最新成果。2007年他们发表了一篇论文显示肥胖也在网络上以相同方式传递，如果一个人拥有肥胖的朋友，那么他将有不低于57%的可能性超重。这些结论同样适用于戒烟，在戒烟朋友圈子中戒烟的成功率要高出烟友圈子30%。
In all these cases, there's a predictable topography to how people influence one another, one that can be reduced to a sort of social map. People who are central to their networks--who in effect are the hub through which most of the other relationships or information flows--may have the most influence on others and in turn are the most influenced by them. But just because you start off at the center of your web does not guarantee that you'll stay there. In the 1970s, smokers were more likely to occupy that focal position in their network of friends and family. Look at a similar social map today, and you'll see that the smokers have drifted to the periphery.
在所有的例子中，有着拓扑学理论预测人们如何影响别人，这种理论可以被简化为一种社会地图。处于所在网络中心的人们--他们实际上是其他关系和信息的中转站--他们可能对他人有着很大的影响，反过来也很大程度生受别人的影响。然而就因为你开始处于中心并不确保你一直在中心位置。在上个世纪七十年代，吸烟者往往会占据朋友和家庭圈子的中心。看看现今的社会地图，你会看到吸烟者们已经被边缘化。
The better this kind of mapping becomes, the more value it has. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are exploiting the connectedness of youngsters in online social networks, for example, to improve flu-vaccination rates, not just among those under age 18 but among all the people to whom these children have ties. "Because of their social and peer networks, children have a higher likelihood of sharing information with the most people," says Jay Bernhardt of the CDC. By targeting youngsters on these sites with information about the importance of annual flu shots, health officials hope to trigger a literal and figurative viral wave of vaccination among the kids' peers, their peers' peers, and even those peers' parents and grandparents.
这样的地图变得越好，他的价值越高。疾病预防控制中心的官员们在探索在线社会网络中的青少年们的连通性，例如，提高流感疫苗的接种比例，不仅仅是在未成年人中而是在所有与这些孩子有联系的人群。“因为这些社会关系中，孩子更可能与这些人分享信息。”Jay Bernhardt表示。健康机构希望通过锁定这些与每年接种流感疫苗信息有关的年轻人来引发孩子之间虚拟的疫苗波浪，甚至波及到他们的父母和祖父母。
"We are always looking for exciting new areas of research that will help people live healthier," says Richard Suzman, director of the division of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging. "Without a doubt, I see this as a very promising area." And with the health community a web like any other, expect that idea to spread further and further.
“我们一直在寻求令人兴奋的新研究领域来帮助人们生活得更健康，”国家老龄化研究所的行为区分和社会研究项目的主持者Richard Suzman说：“毫无疑问，我把这看做有发展前途的领域”。像其他网络一样，期盼着这个想法在健康社区网络中传播得越远愈好。
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