英文阅读：戒烟也传染？
感冒会传染，吸烟会传染，可您知道吗?戒烟也可以传染。研究人员发现戒烟也是一种社会活动，也会“传染”。Smoking has always been a social habit, but researchers now believe that
quitting may be a social activity too.
It's no surprise that you're more likely to light up if your close friends
do. But Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler at
University of California San Diego report that quitting smoking may be
contagious as well. Even people who don't necessarily know each other, but are
connected in some distant way, tend to stop smoking at the same time. "People
tend to quit smoking in droves, and this coordinated quitting is literally like
a flock of birds changing direction," says Christakis. "So smoking is not an
individual behavior, but rather a collective process."
Here's how it works. Christakis and Fowler traced the social network of
5,000 individuals who were enrolled in the large, federally funded Framingham
Heart Study over a period of 32 years. The authors carefully worked out the
relationships among the subjects, many of whom were related by family, social or
professional ties. Then, they layered onto this network the number of cigarettes
each person smoked a day, from zero upward.
Back in 1971, when the Framingham study began, smokers and nonsmokers were
equally likely to be at the center of their social-relationship "nodes." By
2000, however, nonsmokers not only outnumbered the smokers, in all age groups,
but they had pushed smokers to the edges of any networks they belonged to -
smokers were no longer connected to as many other people. Such marginalization,
says Christakis, reflects the new perception by the network as a whole that
smoking isn't as desirable any more. "This shows that our health behaviors are
not just affected by our friends, but by our friend's friend's friend, because
behaviors in a network cascade throughout the network," he says.
The idea is that people pay it forward - with health. When one person
(we'll call him the index case) quits smoking, his closest contacts, such as
friends and family members, become 36% less likely to be smokers too. These
folks then influence their social circles, and so forth, until people several
degrees removed from the index case also become nonsmokers. In the study, even
people who did not mutually identify themselves as friends, but were in the same
social network, were affected by each other's behavior: people who labeled
themselves as friends of the index case, for example, but were not similarly
identified as friends by the index case, were still 20% less likely to smoke if
the index case decided to quit.
Such ripple effects among social groups may seem pretty obvious - people
naturally look to their friends to figure out what behaviors are socially
acceptable - but Christakis notes that the scope and size of the networks in
which these effects operate is much larger than previously thought. His
research, for example, shows that geographical distance between individuals in
the network doesn't seem to weaken behavioral influences. That means that
prevention and treatment programs for health-related behaviors such as quitting
smoking, losing weight and exercising could become more efficient by taking
advantage of the network effect. "The wonderful property of social networks is
that they augment what you seed them with, so if you can seed a network with a
smoking cessation program, you will get multiplicative power in getting
results." When it comes to getting healthier as a nation, it may take a village
after all - a well-connected one.
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