Is Happiness Contagious? - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com - The Diigo Meta page

• 28 Jun 09
  

  Lei Tang
  • “epidemic” reflects a shared environmental influence, like each newspaper receiving the same press release
• 25 Apr 09
  

  Yukon syl

  happiness research psychology reasoning

  • There are (at least) three reasons why happiness is correlated within social networks.
  • Interestingly, the same issue of the BMJ contained a very careful article by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason Fletcher making precisely this point. They employ a pretty cheeky research strategy: if you want to show that a research design is silly, show that it leads to silly conclusions.
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • researchers can too easily draw false conclusions about contagion
• 16 Dec 08
  

  Ann Feeney

  socialnetworks happiness

• 09 Dec 08
  

  Joshua Macy

  contagious freakonomics

  • They use Fowler and Christakis’s approach on another dataset, and show that it leads to the unlikely conclusion that height, headaches, and acne are also contagious. The more likely explanation, of course, is that all are subject to similar environmental influences. For instance, the same jackhammer causing your headache is likely causing mine.

Would you like to comment?

Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.