If you enjoyed the Crawler’s first look at the new study from Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and co-author James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, about the transmission of happiness, take a look at the latest installment courtesy of this weekend’s New York Times. 

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

Read on.

EurekAlert posted a press release this morning about a new study out of Brandeis University based on a content analysis of a prayer book housed in a Baltimore hospital. The study lends important insight into the details of individual prayers – an important subject of study given that 90% of Americans pray and more than half do so once a day or more. The release suggests that prayers can be large, such as good health, employment, and enduring relationships or small, including such assistance as finding parking spaces or missing objects.

The study found that prayer writers seek general strength, support, and blessing from their prayers, rather than explicit solutions to life’s difficult situations, and, more often than not, frame their prayers broadly enough to allow multiple outcomes to be interpreted as evidence of their prayers being answered.

Sociologist Wendy Cadge, the lead author, worked with others to conduct an analysis of 683 individuals prayers written between 1999 and 2005. The researchers found that “prayers fell into one of three categories: about 28 percent of the prayers were requests of God, while 28 percent were prayers to both thank and petition God, while another 22 percent of the prayers thanked God.”

“If researchers studying religion and health take seriously even the possibility that prayer may influence health, they need to learn more about what people pray for, how they pray, and what they hope will result from their prayers,” says Cadge. “The information in this study serves as general background and informs the mechanisms through which religion may influence health.”

Read more.

The New Scientist reports this morning that, “Like an influenza outbreak, happiness – and misery too – spread through social networks, affecting people through three degrees of separation. For instance, a happy friend of a friend of a friend increases the chances of personal happiness by about 6% (see graphic). Compare that to research showing that a $5000 income bump ups the odds by just 2%, says James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the new study.”

“Even people we don’t know and have never met have bigger effect on our mood than substantial increases in income,” he says. He and colleague Nicholas Christakis, of Boston’s Harvard Medical School, made the connection by mining 53,228 social connections between 5124 people who took part in a decades-long clinical study.

This study employed similar methods to those used to study smoking and obesity as part of the Framingham Heart Study, the research subjects recorded social contacts and health status as part of the long-term clinical study. Social links between participants allowed the investigators to map the spread of happiness — one item on the psychological questionnaire included in the study.

Even more than smoking and obesity, happiness spreads best at close distances, they found. A happy next-door neighbour ups the odds of person happiness by 34%, a sibling who lives within 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) by 14%, and a friend within half a mile by a whopping 42%.

The effect falls off through the network, with friends’ happiness boosting the chances of personal happiness by an average of 15% and friends of friends by 10%. As with obesity and smoking, Fowler and Christakis detected no effect beyond three degrees of separation.

And the sociological commentary…

Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands, editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies, and curator of the World Database of Happiness agrees. “Happy people are typically more involved, are nicer to their kids and their dog, and live longer,” he says.

The study, which he describes as “terribly creative”, might even help people improve their daily lives. “If you want to make people happier, you know at least how it spreads.”

Read the full story.

Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a story about how undercover sheriff’s operatives from the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office, along with an FBI informer, worked to infiltrate the ‘RNC Welcoming Committee,’ a group that was planning blockades for the Republican National Convention this past September.

On Aug. 31, 2007, Marilyn Hedstrom, who appeared to be in her early 50s, walked into a run-down store-front where anarchists hung out on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis. She introduced herself as Norma Jean. Asked by a man at the Jack Pine Center why she was there, she said she had issues with President Bush and the Iraq war. “I told him I was interested in helping the cause and interested in participating in the protesting,” she later wrote in reports reviewed by the Star Tribune… For a year Deputy Hedstrom led a double life as Norma Jean Johnson, filing her recollections, often daily, with the Special Investigations Unit, as did the other operatives. The covert operation was not without drama. When one informant was accused of being a cop, he broke into tears, convincing his accusers that they were mistaken, according to a report.

As the result of information collected by Hedstrom and the other operatives, these undercover operations led to the arrest of eight members of the Welcoming Committee…

A sociologist expressed concern over these developments:

…But David Cunningham, a professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, says that while authorities may have had probable cause to infiltrate anarchist groups, he is concerned about a potential chill on civil liberties. Cunningham, author of “There’s Something Happening Here,” a history of covert FBI activities in the 1960s and ’70s, said there needs to be more oversight of undercover work from Congress. He also believes local law enforcement agencies should be required to obtain court approval for undercover operations.

Read more.

KCBS, a California-based radio station, ran a story this past weekend that featured the work of sociologist Shila Katz, who has worked with the Obama transition team on issues surrounding families on welfare.

The station reports:

When Shila Katz sits down with President Elect Obama’s transition team, she has a message to get across: “Higher education can really be the key to higher wages that will support a family.”

Katz, an assistant professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, has done research about education as a way to get from welfare to work. “Mothers on welfare who are pursuing higher education here in the Bay Area, [who] earn associate degrees and bachelors degrees, find jobs at wages that they never need welfare again.”…“We need to provide welfare services that are actually supportive and will help people get into jobs that will earn wages so that they can support their families and higher education is the key to that.”

Katz worked on the Obama campaign and says that now is the time to enact policies that show what his values are.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE.

A new study suggests that link between obesity in parents and children is the result of both social and genetic factors. This important study, first reported by Reuters, gives equal weight to family lifestyle and genes in determining teenagers’ weight.

“What we do as a family — our family lifestyles — matters for weight. Lifestyles aren’t just about individual behaviors,” study author Dr. Molly A. Martin, Pennsylvania State University in University Park told Reuters Health. The study is the first to demonstrate that the connection between parents and children’s weight is social as well as genetic.

“We had a gut sense that this was known or true, but in the research literature it actually had not been proven,” added Martin, a sociologist who studies families, social inequalities, and adolescent health. Instead, she said, scientists studying behavior and genetics have focused solely on the roles of genes and environment, without trying to separate out the effects of a family’s behavior.

The study was also picked up by US News & World Report, which reported:

Adolescents tended to be heavier in families that frequently missed meals or spent several hours a day in front of the TV or video games, researchers report in a special issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

“My study finds that weight runs in families, but it’s not just because of genetics. What we do together, how we spend our time together, what we eat and how we organize ourselves as family matters,” said study author Molly Martin, an assistant professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

The methods…

For the new study, Martin included data from more than 2,500 pairs of twins, siblings or half-siblings. She examined numerous factors that could contribute to a teen’s weight status, such as parental obesity, socioeconomic status, parental education levels, birth weight, activity levels and more.

Two factors that emerged as separate from a family’s genetic influence were whether or not families missed meals, and the amount of time they spent watching TV or playing video games.

Read more from Reuters.
Read more from US News & World Report.

The Los Angeles Times reported this weekend on how some multiracial families see Barack Obama as ‘Other’ like them — meaning that Obama’s multiracial identity, not fitting into a single “racial category,” is sometimes best described by the term ‘Other.’ The article tells the stories of several multiracial families who provide commentary on the difficulty of assigning themselves to a single racial category on forms like college applications. The LA Times reports:

Race, however, continues to be a stubborn puzzle. It wasn’t until 2000 that Americans were allowed to check more than one box for race on U.S. census forms. At that time, about 6.83 million people, or 2.4%, checked two or more races on census forms out of a population of about 281 million.

Additional commentary from a sociologist and a demographer helps to clarify this new trend…

Carolyn Liebler, a sociology professor specializing in family, race and ethnicity at the University of Minnesota, said she expected that the numbers of people identifying as multiracial would be higher in 2010 than they were in 2000 “because the number of mixed-raced marriages are going up” and because of Obama.

Tom W. Smith, an expert on race and demographics at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, calls it the “Obama effect.” “He’s made being multiracial salient,” Smith said.

Read more.

Sociologist Juliet Schor wrote an opinion piece about holiday shopping that ran in the Los Angeles Times this weekend. The Boston College sociology professor urges us to “turn away” Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

She writes:

In fact, reining in holiday spending is a message some have been broadcasting for a while. Adbusters, with its Buy Nothing Day, begun in 1992, urges consumers to boycott Black Friday by refusing to purchase anything on the day after Thanksgiving. Performance artist the Rev. Billy Talen and his Church of Stop Shopping target the excesses of the season. The organization I helped to found, the Center for a New American Dream, helps people simplify the holidays by promoting socially responsible gifts, alternative gift fairs and spending time with family and community. 

These and many other groups have long recognized that the consumer binge was unsustainable, financially and environmentally. It has been depleting our savings, to be sure, but also degrading the atmosphere, destroying ecosystems and undermining the potential of the planet to support life in all its magnificent forms. Ecological footprint analysis reveals that by the late 1970s, humans had begun to draw down stocks of “natural capital” — that is, degrade the Earth’s ecosystems. We’re turning arable land into deserts, transforming ocean areas into chemically induced dead zones and heating up the climate. 

The U.S. holiday season, with its traditional excess, has long been an outsized part of that decline. Roughly a quarter of annual spending, garbage and ecological impact occurs between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Measured in carbon alone, that represents five tons of emissions for each American. 

Read the full commentary.

Adam Liptak’s ‘Sidebar‘ column in the New York Times ran the following opening line yesterday: “Two years after Exxon was hit with a $5 billion punitive damages award for the Exxon Valdez disaster, Prof. William R. Freudenburg’s phone rang. The call propelled him, the professor said the other day, into ‘an ethical quagmire of the bottomless pit variety.'”

Freudenburg, a sociologist, explains how the phone call was from an engineer at Exxon who wanted to fund him to carry out a study with a ‘dim view of punitive damages.’ The engineer said the study was imperative as the case would eventually reach the Supreme Court and empirical evidence establishing a negative stance on punitive damages would prove useful… especially if published in an academic journal.

Professor Freudenburg, who now teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, took Exxon’s money and conducted preliminary research. Exxon stopped supporting the study when the early findings did not point in a direction helpful to the company. But Exxon did help pay for several studies critical of punitive damages that appeared in places like The Yale Law Journal and The Columbia Law Review.

The evidence ended up in the Supreme Court proceedings…

As the engineer predicted, the case did reach the Supreme Court. In a 5-to-3 decision in June, the court said the appropriate punishment for dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 was no more than about $500 million, a tenth of what the jury had awarded. But the court also addressed the aggressive effort to reshape the academic debate over punitive damages. “Because this research was funded in part by Exxon,” Justice David H. Souter wrote in a footnote that has rocked the legal academy, “we decline to rely on it.”

Read on… what do you think? What are a sociologist’s ethical obligations in this situation?

Science Daily reports on a new study from sociologist Rob Ford about the decline in racial prejudice in Britain since the 1980s, which the research suggests is attributable to the tolerance of younger generations.

Dr. Rob Ford from The University of Manchester says that social contact with black or Asian Britons is becoming increasingly unremarkable to white people in their 20s and 30s.

The study published in next month’s British Journal of Sociology found that while 60% of people born in the 1910s opposed marriage between white relatives and ethnic minorities, this figure falls to 25% for people born in the 1970s.

The study draws upon data from the British Social Attitudes Survey conducted in the 1980s and 90s.

“The marked decline in racial prejudice is backed by further data points in 2006, 2004 and 2003 so the results here are pretty emphatic: we are becoming a more tolerant society. The attitudes of older cohorts reflect the fact that their perceptions were shaped by growing up in an ethnically homogeneous Britain before mass immigration began,” he said. “Those cohorts express much more hostility about social contact with minority groups than their children and grandchildren.”

Ford cautions against the assumption that racial prejudice will disappear in the immediate future. He notes, “…while prejudice is therefore likely to be less of a problem in the future, it is unlikely to disappear overnight. Cohort replacement is a slow process and significant levels of hostility to ethnic minorities remain even in the youngest cohorts surveyed here.”

Read more.