Living in a Network

From MEDITATION XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) by John Donne

We are all interconnected within a social network and very likely by a spiritual network because that gives a rationale for how evolution  connected us to conscious/spiritual phenomena. Non-verbal emotional propagation for group coordination would have given a survival advantage to any social species which developed it.

(July 3, 2022) Emotional propagation is the bi-directional transmission feelings and perceptual biases by non-verbal means. This ranges from yawning to the tendency for groups to dress similarly because of a common perceptions of aesthetics. Emotional propagation bias has been scientifically demonstrated to occur in social networks by Christakis and Fowler (2009).  

The evolutionary purpose of this sort of emotional propagation is group coordination via perceptual and emotional biasing. Evolution would have favored those groups which could non-verbally coordinate themselves better than other groups. In order for social animal groups to act coherently in the absence of language they must act from a common perceptual bias based upon non-verbal signals. For example, if the group needed to gather food then non-verbal signals had to be used to motivate the whole group. If the group needed to rest then yawns are propagated instead.​

Christakis and Fowler (2009) consistently found that various emotional influences tend to pass as far as a friend of a friend of a friend (3 degrees of separation). They identified five social network properties:

1. We shape our network
2. Our network shapes us
3. Our friends affect us
4. Our friend’s friend’s friends affect us
5. The network has a life of its own

A consequence of emotional propagation is the Law of Attraction which is also called the Law of Return.  Whenever emotional biases are generated in a network they will circle around and come back to influence the original generator. The classic example of this is yawning. A person yawns causing nearby friends to yawn which in turn causes the first person to yawn more in a positive feedback loop. Eventually the group rests.

References

(July 3, 2022) We shape our network by subconsciously deciding who will be our cooperative associates, in other words, who will be in our "tribe." This subconscious decision is based upon a mix of  genetics, culture, and life experiences. That we even have a social network is due to the evolutionary advantage which groups have over individuals (Christakis and Fowler 2009). More people means better security and greater group productivity due to economic specialization.

This group superiority seems obvious but it has also also demonstrated by mathematical analysis and computer simulation. These show that individuals who get a cooperative gene and so cooperate will out survive better and pass on that cooperative gene to future generations. Consequently, cooperative gene individuals become the most numerous in a population.

But then something surprising happens. The selfish gene does not disappear. When a certain percentage of cooperative people is reached the selfish gene people start getting a free ride. The cooperative types end up doing all the work and taking most the risks (as in hunting). Due to the added risks, the cooperative types now start to die out and the population reverts to mostly selfish loners again. The population keeps cycling like this and never grows above a certain level.

The evolutionary solution was to impose an innate reward/punishment system with those rewards/punishments coming from perceived authorities and leaders. This is why most humans subconsciously recognize and blindly follow various authorities. This is why humans subconsciously define as "good" all cooperative traits and label as "bad" all selfish traits.

This enforcement benefit is seen in various other computer simulation studies including that shown in the figure on the left. 

Consequently, we tend to associate with people we subconsciously see as fellow cooperators in a phenomenon called homophily. These are people who are “like us.” This is reflected in the old adage “birds of a feather flock together.” This phenomena makes those rare social connections between people of different subcultures important for any sort of cultural  innovation.​

Even with our tendency to group with similar people, we still subconsciously define just how many of those we will include in our group and at what level of intimacy. We also define how central we will be in our social network. In a study covering three thousand Americans the average American has four “close social contacts” with most having between two and six, half of whom were friends while the others were family members. The number of people who had no one to discuss important matters or to spend free time was 12% (page 18 of Christakis and Fowler 2009). People’s core network size does not vary with gender and tends to decrease with age. Those with a college degree have core networks twice as large as those who do not. The probability that two of your social contacts know each other is about 52% (this is called the transitivity level).

References

 (July 3, 2022) Our network shapes us by our location within it from our birth order among our siblings to how central we are in the network . The more central we are, the more likely we will be influenced by events occurring elsewhere in the network (Christakis and Fowler 2009).

The structure of the network greatly affects how the people within it can make common decisions. The people in a ring network in which each person is connected only to their two neighbors is slower in coming to a decision than a similar ring network having some cross-connected connections. The more cross-connections the faster will be the tribal  decision.

A network of randomly connected people having the same number of people and same average number and degree of interconnections is very much slower than the cross-connected ring network. In one experiment with 38 people the disorganized network took five times longer to reach a collective decision than those in a cross-connected ring network.

References

(July 3, 2022) Our tribal members affect us because we subconsciously copy them in order to be seen as belonging to the group of cooperators. Students with studious roommates become more studious, people with overweight friends tend to become overweight and so on. College students assigned a mildly depressed roommate tend to also become increasingly depressed over the next three months. These effects are strongest within the same gender for almost all traits except alcohol consumption in which women have the most influence over both men and other women.​

This subconscious emotional copy tendency is responsible for epidemic (mass) hysterias. On January 30, 1962 a laughing epidemic started in a girl’s school in Tanzania. By March 18 ninety-five of the 159 were affected and the school was forced to close and the pupils went home to their villages. Ten days later laughing attacks broke out in one of those villages fifty-five miles away where it affected 217 people. Some of the students went to another school and 48 out of 154 students there caught it, forcing that school to close in mid-June. Another outbreak occurred in another one of these girl’s villages on June 18. This outbreak started with her immediate family and spread to two nearby boy’s schools forcing them to close. After a few months the epidemic petered out. The victims described feeling restless and fearful despite their laughter.​

 A review of reported cases of epidemic hysteria between 1973 and 1993 found that 50% took place in schools, 40% in small towns and factories, and 10% in other settings. The outbreaks usually involved at least thirty people but often involved hundreds. Most outbreaks lasted less than two weeks but 20% lasted more than a month. The following passage describes such an epidemic among New York bridge employees:​

The mind abhors a vacuum so people are motivated to assign a cause or blame for various events even in the absence of hard evidence. The authors go on to say:

In a bygone era, demons and witchcraft were often seen as causes of these symptoms, but today toxic chemicals and environmental contamination are the triggers subjects usually identify (Christakis. & Fowler 2009 p 41).

Social network scientists have theorized an evolutionary purpose for this sort of subconscious emotional propagation. This same reasoning is valid when applied to the evolutionary purpose for conscious experiences:​

This evolutionary advantage idea is supported by studies of yawning in chimps and bonobos. Yawning is best propagated within kinship groups and close friends when it is started by a high ranking social member (Demuru and Palagi 2012). Yawning is the social group rest signal.

References

 (July 3, 2022) So choose you close friends wisely.

More than just our friends affect us, our friend’s friend’s friends affect us. Our tendency to imitate is strong enough that an emotional influence will propagate through the network and even work its way back to the originator in a feedback effect. This phenomena is called the Law of Attraction or the Law of Return.

 Some influences depend upon amplification from a number of people. The classic example is Stanley Milgram’s 1968 New York sidewalk experiment. If one person looked up at a window for one minute 4% of passers-by stopped and looked up and 42% looked up but kept walking. If fifteen people looked up then 40% stopped and looked and 86% looked up but kept walking. If five people were used instead of fifteen the result was almost as strong.

In a sampling of about 12,000 people from Framingham, Massachusetts in the year 2000, researchers found that happy people were clustered together and were separated from unhappy people who also clustered among themselves (Christakis. & Fowler 2009 p 50). The unhappy people existed in the more peripheral regions of this city’s social network indicating they were more disconnected.

 The initial impetus for this clustering would seem to be the homophily effect because happiness does have a large genetic component. In comparisons with identical twins the general feeling of happiness was found to be 50% genetic, 10% due to personal circumstances (education, income level, marital status, etc.), and 40% due to other things such as one’s own habits of mind and social network situation (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005).

References

(July 3, 2022) Because of the Law of Attraction effect, emotional influences injected into the emotional propagation network continue to reverberate around for some time even if the originator dies or moves away. The stickiness of emotions in networks has not been well researched yet although those cultural based emotions used for defining the  tribe seem to be more sticky than others. These include such things as "proper" behavior and who or what is identified as the "proper" authorities.

The persistence of emotional effects in the network is similar too but not quite the same as the idea of karma in the Buddhist religion and grace in the Christian Catholic religion. Both concepts are defined in dualist, judgemental terms. If a person does "good" things so that the person has more good than bad karma or grace then that person will be reincarnated in a better earthly position (Buddhist) or gain everlasting life and go to heaven (Catholic).

 In contract, the emotions in the Law of Attraction only become good or evil depending on the standard used to define those terms. Killing someone in a war to protect yourself, nation or family is considered to be good while killing someone on a local street is considered to be bad. Emotions in and of themselves are neither good or bad.

References

(July 3, 2022) Law of Attraction is also described by the observation of  Synchronicity by psychiatrist Carl Jung.

The word “synchronicity” was defined by pioneer Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung as the meaningful coincidence of two or more events. He first mentioned it in his 1930 memorial address for Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the Chinese “I Ching”, or “Book of Changes.” Jung was seeking to explain the workings of “I Ching,” which he first came across during the early 1920's in an English translation by James Legge (1882).  I-Ching means "Classic of Changes" and it is an ancient Chinese text explaining a number based divination scheme. Its earliest part dates to about 900 BCE

Jung fully developed the synchronicity idea in his 1952 essay “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.”​ Yet Jung's explanation of synchronicity is seriously flawed.

Jung did not accept the idea of a separate realm of consciousness. Consequently, he tried to explain synchronicity in terms of quantum mechanics because it was something new and crazy. He did not really understand it (not until the late 1960's, after the development of quantum electrodynamics by Richard Feynman and built on the anti-matter work by Paul Dirac, did it really start to be understood by physicists). He called the inherent probabilistic causality of quantum mechanics "acausal." This is how Jung introduced the concept in his essay: