Of course the claim itself sounds very plausible, but I’d like to see the research, because your short summary makes me suspicious that it makes a correlation-is-not-causation kind of mistake. In other words, does the research support the claim that happiness is contagious or that it is clustered? Is there even a temporal aspect present in the analysis?
In the source I’m using, they claim to have checked for it via “mathematical analyses”, but no further details are given. They do provide a reference to their their actual paper. This paper is also mentioned as having come to similar conclusions.
I can’t remember where I saw the research either (it was recent though, maybe on Hacker News), but they did check casuation/temporal effects by following people over time and seeing that when one person became sad, people within a few social links of them were more likely to become sad, etc.
Of course the claim itself sounds very plausible, but I’d like to see the research, because your short summary makes me suspicious that it makes a correlation-is-not-causation kind of mistake. In other words, does the research support the claim that happiness is contagious or that it is clustered? Is there even a temporal aspect present in the analysis?
In the source I’m using, they claim to have checked for it via “mathematical analyses”, but no further details are given. They do provide a reference to their their actual paper. This paper is also mentioned as having come to similar conclusions.
ETA: And here’s the appendix they keep mentioning in the paper.
I can’t remember where I saw the research either (it was recent though, maybe on Hacker News), but they did check casuation/temporal effects by following people over time and seeing that when one person became sad, people within a few social links of them were more likely to become sad, etc.