The Spread of Happiness on Social Networks

"Happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people...up to three degrees removed from them in the social network.

So your happiness depends not just on the happiness of the people you know but also on the happiness of the people that they know and also in turn in the happiness of the people that they know...

There is a spread of happpiness in the network. And we also find that happy people have higher network centrality. That means they tend to be more likely in the middle of the network, have larger networks, and are located in larger clusters of happy people.

So it's not just you know more people if you are happy but you know more people who are happy if you are happy."

Nicholas Christakis
One of Time's 100 Most influential People for 2009