You are what your friends are →
In Romania there’s this popular saying: “Tell me who you befriend so that I can tell you who you are”. You might have heard this saying in various forms in your home country.
Photo Copyright: -Antoine-
Is my behavior influenced by my friends? I did some empirical observations on Facebook, my primary social network.
I often immerse myself in the stream of items (photos, videos, links, etc.) shared by my friends on Facebook. Depending on what they share, my mind wanders and creates stories about my friends, automatically tagging them: Cool guys, Business guys, Crazy guys, Party animals, Geeks, Lovers, etc. Based on those classifications, my intentions and my emotional state, I comment and like their shared items. It’s obvious, my actions depend on what my friends share and how my mind classifies my friends.
Clive Thompson wrote a comprehensive article about this topic in the New York Times. If you read Clive’s “Are Your Friends Making You Fat” you’ll find out that:
- behaviors can be “contagious”
- good behaviors - like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses
- happiness is more contagious than unhappiness
- this network thing can cut both ways, subverting our ability to have free will, but increasing, if you will, the importance of us having free will
What we are is more than what we think we are. The fact that we’re able to explore the aspects that affect our behavior is a great opportunity to design ourselves at new levels of consciousness.
