The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (2 page)

My grandfather and I (age five) play cards while my grandmother looks on
. (Image and Figure Credits
itr.1
)

So, do we register digital simulacra the way we react to people who are right in front of us, in the here-and-now? If not, what does social neuroscience tell us we’re missing? Now that Americans spend a total of 520 billion minutes a day online—and the residents of most other countries spend proportionally the same—what stories do our face-to-face relationships tell?
⁷

This book is about the kind of social contact we need to thrive. While researching my previous book,
The Sexual Paradox
, I discovered that women’s tendency to put a premium on their social connections is one of the main reasons they live longer. This fact prompted an
aha
! moment in me. I realized that pastimes we had long written off as frivolous time-wasters—such as chatting with friends on the porch or over a meal—serve important biological functions. That’s likely why we’ve evolved to find them irresistible. Research shows that playing cards once a week or meeting friends every Wednesday night at Starbucks adds as many years to our lives as taking beta blockers or quitting a pack-a-day smoking habit.
How does that work?
I wondered. Whatever the secret substance or process is, learning about it felt like rubbernecking at a restaurant when the server goes by with a steaming plate of something wonderful.
I want what they’re having
, I said to myself.

But what was that, exactly? To find out, I began with the question of longevity, sparked by stumbling across the fact that several remote Sardinian villages are the only places in the world where men live nearly as long as women. Everywhere else there is a gender gap in lifespan of about five to seven years. Though the longevity gap has been shrinking a bit, it’s substantial and nearly universal. These Italian mountain villages are also home to an astonishingly high number of centenarians of both sexes: proportionally, six times as many hundred-plus-year-olds as in any modern city (in some of the villages the ratio is ten to one). Why so many Sardinians born at the beginning of the twentieth century are still alive today is the story I tell in
Chapter 2
. As you will see, there’s no magic elixir. But one essential piece of the puzzle, I discovered, has to do with the epoxy-like social bonds of village life.

I could have called this book
Face-to-Face
, and I nearly did. Instead I chose
The Village Effect
because it evokes a feeling of belonging. It’s a metaphor, of course. You don’t need to experience a health crisis like John McColgan’s or live in a remote Italian
village to feel surrounded by a tight circle of people in whom you’ve invested serious time and affection over the years—and who have returned that attention. You can create the effect with the people you know, right where you live. This book is about the long-term impact of those face-to-face interactions. Even if these connections are now buttressed by electronic communication, I will show how physiological immunity, enhanced learning, and the restorative power of mutual trust derive from face-to-face contact with the people in your intimate circle. This “village effect” not only helps you live longer, it makes you want to.

THE SCIENCE

The universal hunger to connect and belong explains much of human behavior from birth until death. Our very survival depends on it. In A
Short History of Nearly Everything
, Bill Bryson put it this way: “Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.”
⁸
If that happened and you’re reading this now, you can thank the powerful nature of our social bonds.

Yet our recent understanding of what drives health and happiness has centered on the concrete: food, earning power, exercise, drugs. We’ve discovered, for example, that cigarettes, salt, animal fat, and being fat shorten our lives, while antibiotics, physical activity, and the right diet prolong it. Now new findings tell us that our relationships—the people we know and care about—are just as critical to our survival. And not just any kind of social contact, mind you, but the kind that takes place in real time, face-to-face. Beginning from the first moments of life and at every age and stage, close contact with other people—and especially with women—affects how we
think, whom we trust, and where we invest our money. Our social ties influence our sense of satisfaction with life, our cognitive skills, and how resistant we are to infections and chronic disease.
⁹
While information about diet, exercise, and new classes of drugs has created the life-changing breakthroughs of past decades, new evidence shows that social bonds are equally transformative.

Interacting with others exerts such fundamental changes in us that it is hard to deny that we have evolved for face-to-face social contact. University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo and his colleagues, as well as British researchers Catherine and Alex Haslam, have found that people with active social lives recover faster after an illness than those who are solitary—MRIs show greater tissue repair. Dozens of recent studies demonstrate how close social contact affects our physiological resilience, that is, how briskly our bodies bounce back after a trauma. A 2006 University of California study of three thousand women with breast cancer found that those with a large network of friends were
four times
as likely to survive as women with sparser social connections. And in 2007 the first study was published that revealed one of the hidden mechanisms linking social interaction to recovery in humans: Steve Cole and his team at UCLA discovered that social contact switches on and off the genes that regulate our immune response to cancer and the rate of tumor growth.
¹⁰

It’s not just a North American phenomenon. When the habits of nearly seventeen thousand utility workers in France were monitored throughout the nineties, researchers discovered that their degree of social involvement was a good way of predicting who would still be alive by the end of the decade. Chance interactions, our weak networks of far-flung friends and colleagues, and the hours we spend with those intimately tied to us may seem ephemeral, but they have a concrete impact on our brains and psyches. For example, if you’re surrounded by a tightly connected circle of friends who regularly gather to eat and share gossip, you’ll not only have fun but
you’re also likely to live an average of fifteen years longer than a loner. One study of almost three thousand Americans found that people with close friendships are far less likely to die young, and in 2004 a Swedish epidemiologist discovered the lowest rate of dementia in people with extensive social networks. Fifty-year-old men with active friendships are less likely to have heart attacks than more solitary men, while people who have had a stroke are better protected from grave complications by a tight, supportive social network than they are by medication.
¹¹

Despite this powerful evidence, our habits are becoming more solitary. Since the late eighties, when social isolation was first earmarked as a risk for early death in a landmark article in
Science
, more and more people say that they feel isolated and lonely, according to population surveys in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Exactly how much friendlessness has increased and why this is happening has caused academic tussling and fierce public debate. Some say we’re more connected now than ever—mostly due to the Internet—and some say we’re less connected—mostly due to the Internet. Both views are correct.

LONELINESS

Running through the stories you’ll encounter in this book is the question of quantity versus quality in relationships. Why is this question important? Studies show that we are now connected to a larger and more diverse circle of people, but between 12 and 23 percent of Americans say they have nobody to talk to (in 1985 that figure was 8 percent). And we’re not talking about solitary pensioners spending their days alone on park benches, scattering breadcrumbs to the pigeons. The middle-aged are the loneliest group of all in the United States. A third of those between the ages of forty-five and forty-nine say they have no one to confide in. In the United Kingdom it’s young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four who feel the loneliest.
¹²
If that fact weren’t sobering
enough, people in Britain take note: a nationally representative survey commissioned by the UK Mental Health Foundation in 2010 found that a quarter of Britons of all ages feel emotionally unconnected to others, and a third do not feel connected to the wider community.
¹³

The Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam sounded the first alarm about increasing civic apathy in 2000, in
Bowling Alone
, a book said to have launched a thousand debates about whether Americans are becoming disengaged from their communities.
¹⁴
Whether or not fewer bridge clubs and bowling leagues are apt signs of declining social involvement, one thing is certain: Americans don’t have a monopoly on loneliness. In the European Union, loneliness varies by country, but it’s safe to say that, at around 34 percent, the rates of intense anomie felt by adults living in the former Soviet republics—including Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia—are through the roof.
¹⁵

That’s yet another reason why I’m grateful my grandparents fled that part of the world for Canada. Here in my home country, at least 80 percent of people over sixty-five say they frequently see family and friends, volunteer, or go to concerts and sports events (probably hockey).
¹⁶
I’m not sure if the 19 percent who say they feel lonely don’t get out that much, but the data tell us that the quality of their interactions is more important than the quantity. The same principle holds for Americans, which is a mighty good thing, as their “villages” are shrinking. When researchers from the General Social Survey sat down with thousands of people of all ages and asked, “Who are the people with whom you discussed important matters over the last six months?” they discovered that the number of Americans’ quality connections had taken a dive in the past two decades. In 1985, Americans had an average of three confidants. In 2004 they had less than two, including members of their families. In short, they have fewer people they can lean on. “There are lots of people we have relationships with,” says Matthew Brashears, a
sociology professor at Cornell and one of the authors of this study. “But this question picks up ties to people that are particularly strong—people we can go to if we’re in trouble, who could give you a substantial loan, who would help you. They’re important key people, so the number tends to be small.”

What Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, and Haiyan, as well as the Chicago and Paris heat waves, taught us is that surviving is often a matter of who cares enough to check up on you. Who will come by to offer you a lift, some groceries, or a place to stay if you need it? Research shows that those people most at risk of dying have no one nearby to ask for help.
¹⁷
So I was shocked that most Americans say they have fewer than two people they can depend on. When I said as much to the even-keeled and soft-spoken Brashears, he demurred. “Maybe there’s a decline in the people you are close to, but our larger networks haven’t declined.”

“You mean our online networks?” I asked.

He answered with a qualified yes. “We haven’t figured out how to measure our relationship to the Internet yet. But people may be having fewer important discussions face-to-face if they’re having discussions online.” The gist, according to Brashears, seems to be that we don’t have fewer people to talk to in the broad sense. But a significant slice of the social interactions that would have taken place in person a few decades ago are now getting “siphoned off by Facebook.” As Tolstoy put it in
War and Peace
, we are connecting to a crowd—“a numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one was distant.”
¹⁸

Of course, talking to fewer people about what matters and feeling lonely are not the same thing. Loneliness is the
feeling
of being bereft, deprived of intimacy, of hungering for companionship, as opposed to the physical state of being alone. Many of us crave being left to our own devices, as Susan Cain and Anthony Storr rightly point out in their books
Quiet
and
Solitude
.
¹⁹
But loneliness is not about that sacred block of uninterrupted time
that we need to think and work. It’s a distressing physiological state. The evidence tells us that about a third of us now feel lonely, sometimes acutely. “Research on loneliness, conducted mostly in Western countries, has shown that any given time, twenty to forty percent of older adults report feeling lonely, and from five to seven percent report feeling intense or persistent loneliness,” write John Cacioppo and his colleagues at the University of Chicago.
²⁰
While I was writing this book, three women—one in her thirties, another in her fifties, and the third in her sixties—told me that living alone was fine during the week, while they were busy with work. But weekends were miserable. “I cry every Saturday,” Veronica, thirty-seven, said when I met her in the locker room at the gym. “The loneliness is unbearable.”