If we want to understand how society works, we need to fill in the missing links between individuals. We need to understand how interconnections and interactions between people give rise to wholly new aspects of human experience that are not present in the individuals themselves. If we do not understand social networks, we cannot hope to fully understand either ourselves or the world we inhabit.
CHAPTER 2 When You Smile, the World Smiles with You
A strange thing happened in Tanzania in 1962. At a mission boarding school for girls near Lake Victoria in the Bukoba District, there was an epidemic of laughter. And this was not just a few schoolgirls sharing a joke. An irresistible desire to laugh broke out and spread from person to person until more than one thousand people were affected.
The affliction had an abrupt onset, and the initial bout of laughter lasted between a few minutes and a few hours in those affected. This was followed by a period of normal behavior, then typically a few relapses over the course of up to sixteen days. In what was to be a clue about the real nature of this epidemic, the victims often described feeling restless and fearful, despite their laughter.
The physicians who first investigated and reported on the out-break—Dr. Rankin, a faculty member at Makerere University, and Dr. Philip, the medical officer of the Bukoba District—were extremely thorough.1 They found that each new patient had recent contact with another person suffering from the malady. They were able to observe that the incubation period between contact and onset of symptoms ranged from a few hours to a few days. Thankfully, as they intoned without irony, “no fatal cases have been reported.” Afflicted persons recovered fully.
The epidemic began on January 30, 1962, when three girls aged twelve to eighteen started laughing uncontrollably. It spread rapidly, and soon most people at the school had a serious case of the giggles. By March 18, ninety-five of the 159 pupils were affected, and the school was forced to close. The pupils went home to their villages and towns. Ten days later, the uncontrollable laughter broke out in the village of Nshamba, fifty-five miles away, where some of the students had gone. A total of 217 people were affected. Other girls returned to their village near the Ramanshenye Girls’ Middle School, and the epidemic spread to this school in mid-June. It too was forced to close when forty-eight of 154 students were stricken with uncontrollable laughter. Another outbreak occurred in the village of Kanyangereka on June 18, again when a girl went home. The outbreak started with her immediate family and spread to two nearby boys’ schools, and those schools were also forced to close. After a few months, the epidemic petered out.
Rankin and Philip looked hard for biological causes for the epidemic. They performed physical examinations and lab studies on the patients, did spinal taps, examined the food supply for toxins, and ascertained that there was no prior record of a similar epidemic in the region. The villagers themselves did not know what to make of it. In Bukoba, where the illness aroused great interest, there was the “belief that the atmosphere had been poisoned as a result of the atom bomb explosions.” Others described it as a kind of “spreading madness” or “endwara yokusheka,” which means simply, “the illness of laughing.”
As the villagers and the scientists investigating this outbreak realized, the epidemic was no laughing matter. It did not involve the spread of real happiness and joy—though this can happen too, albeit not in quite the same way. Rather, the outbreak was a case of epidemic hysteria, a condition that takes advantage of a deep-rooted tendency of human beings to exhibit emotional contagion. Emotions of all sorts, joyful or otherwise, can spread between pairs of people and among larger groups. Consequently, emotions have a collective and not just an individual origin. How you feel depends on how those to whom you are closely and distantly connected feel.
Our Ancestors Had Feelings
We all have emotions. And they consist of several elements. First, we usually have a conscious awareness of our emotions: when we are happy, we know it. Second, emotions typically affect our physical state: we show how we feel on our faces, in our voices, even in our posture; given the role emotions play in social networks, these physical manifestations are especially important. Third, emotions are associated with specific neurophysiological activity; if you are shown a scary picture, the flow of blood to structures deep in your brain instantly changes. Finally, emotions are associated with visible behaviors, like laughing, crying, or shrieking.2
Experiments have demonstrated that people can “catch” emotional states they observe in others over time frames ranging from seconds to weeks.3 When college freshmen are randomly assigned to live with mildly depressed roommates, they become increasingly depressed over a three-month period.4 Emotional contagion can even take place between strangers, after just ephemeral contact. When waiters are trained to provide “service with a smile,” their customers report feeling more satisfied, and they leave better tips.5 People’s emotions and moods are affected by the emotional states of the people they interact with. Why and how does this happen?
We might consider another question first: Why aren’t emotions merely internal states? Why don’t we just have our own private feelings? Having feelings is surely evolutionarily advantageous to us. For example, the ability to feel startled is probably good for us in situations where we need to react quickly to survive. But we do not just feel startled, we show that we are startled. We jump or shriek or curse or clench, and these actions do not go unnoticed. They are copied by others.
Given the organization of early hominids into social groups, the spread of emotions served an evolutionarily adaptive purpose.6 Early humans had to rely on one another for survival. Their interactions with the physical environment (weather, landscape, predators) were modulated or affected by their interactions with their social environment. Humans bonded with others in order to face the world more effectively, and mechanisms evolved to support this bonding, most obviously verbal communication but also emotional mimicry. The development of emotions in humans, the display of emotions, and the ability to read the emotions of others helped coordinate group activity by three means: facilitating interpersonal bonds, synchronizing behavior, and communicating information.
Emotions and emotional contagion probably first arose to facilitate mother-infant pair bonding and then evolved to extend to kin members and ultimately to nonkin members. Emotional contagion fosters interaction synchrony. At the level of mother-child pairs, emotional contagion may have prompted mothers to be more attentive to and protective of their babies when their babies needed attention. Indeed, we are sadder when our family members are sad than when strangers are sad. There is an advantage in coordinating our moods with those to whom we are related.
Eventually this type of synchrony in mood or activity may have been beneficial for larger group activities, such as warding off enemies or hunting prey. If you are trying to coordinate a hunting party, it helps if members of the group are all upbeat and fired up. Conversely, if you are part of a group and someone in it appears afraid, perhaps that person has seen a predator that you have not seen. Quickly adopting his emotional state can enhance your prospects for survival. Indeed, it is thought that positive emotions may work especially well to increase group cohesiveness (“I’m happy; stay with me”) and that negative emotions may work well as communication devices (“I smell smoke; I’m scared”).
Emotions may be a quicker way to convey information about the environment and its relative safety or danger than other forms of communication, and it seems certain that emotions preceded language. What emotions lack in specificity compared to oral