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Even Remote Social Connections Can Influence Our Habits

Posted on: Thursday, 22 May 2008, 06:00 CDT

By Liz Szabo

Smoking is addictive, but quitting may be contagious, according to research that suggests social networks shape people's behavior far more powerfully than previously suspected.

Although many smokers see their battle with nicotine as an individual struggle, the study shows that people actually give up smoking in groups, quitting at the same time as others in their social network. Researchers found that someone who stops smoking may inspire not just his friends but distant members of his "social niche" -- a friend of a friend of a friend -- whom he doesn't even know.

Authors based their findings, in today's New England Journal of Medicine, on the landmark Framingham Heart Study, which allowed them to track 12,000 interconnected people over 32 years.

Those who quit appear to have done so under pressure from others in their group, says co-author James Fowler of the University of California-San Diego. Over time, researchers noticed that smokers and non-smokers began to drift apart. Smokers who were once at the center of their social network were pushed to the margins, connected largely to other smokers.

Co-author Nicholas Christakis compares the phenomenon to flocks of birds that fly in synchrony.

"If a bird three birds over starts flying to the right, you end up flying to the right, too," says Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School. "Norms change, and whole groups of smokers quit at once."

The number of smokers in the study fell sharply from 1971 to 2003, mirroring national trends. In the past 40 years, the smoking rate has declined from 45% to 21%, the study shows.

Peer pressure also appears to have pushed people to quit years before the creation of anti-smoking laws, Fowlers says. He found a "huge shift" in smoking habits in the late 1980s and early 1990s, more than a decade before cities and states began substantially raising cigarette taxes and banning indoor smoking.

Last year, the same researchers found that people are more likely to put on pounds if their friends and relatives gained weight. The authors didn't then have the ability to map entire social networks, however, so they weren't able to show whether people have gained or lost weight in clusters, Christakis says.

There's no evidence to show that people deliberately joined together to stop smoking, Christakis says. Rather, the trend probably spread like a fashion.

Doctors are a prime example of a group that has quit smoking together, says the American Cancer Society's Tom Glynn. Before the surgeon general's report in the 1960s, more than half of doctors smoked. Today, only 1% of doctors smoke.

The study suggests that reaching the nearly 45 million Americans who still smoke may be difficult, because they have few ties with non-smokers and fewer social connections in general, Glynn says. But helping them quit is vitally important, he says, given that smoking causes 440,00 deaths a year. (c) Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

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