UNIT11

1	When do you feel happy, and what do you do to become happy?  Social scientists used to have a simple answer to the question of how to become happy: surround yourself with people who are not satisfied with their lives and who are unhappier than you.  You compare yourself with these people, and the contrast will cheer you up.
2	Nicholas Christakis, 47, a researcher at Harvard University, challenges this idea.  By using data from a study that tracked about 5,000 people over 20 years, he suggests that happiness, like colds, can spread from person to person.  When a person who is close to you becomes happy, you do too.  This person has to be close to you both socially and physically.  His study shows when a person has a happy friend who lives within a mile, the chance that this person will also become happy increases by 15%.
3	More surprising is that the effect can go beyond the two friends and reach a third person.  For instance, when a friend of your friend becomes happy, you can become happy, even when you do not know that third person directly.
4	This means that surrounding yourself with happy people will make you happy, make the people close to you happy \\ and make the people close to them happy.  But social networks do not pass on only the good things in life.  Christakis found that smoking and obesity can be socially infectious too.  If his theory is correct, then the saying gYou can judge a person by his or her friendsh might carry more weight than we think.
