Being friended is healthier than friending, study shows
Scientists find online popularity tied to longevity
Think online social networks have no bearing on your real life? Think again. Scientists who studied Facebook activity and mortality rates of registered California voters found that people who received many friend requests were far less likely to die over a two-year period than those who did not.
Initiating friend requests, however, seemed to have no effect on death rates whatsoever.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hint at deeper complexities in the relationship between humans’ health and their social networks — whether those networks are online or in person.
Studied link for years
Senior author James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California, San Diego, has spent years studying the link between human well-being and real-world social networks, including how happiness and even obesity may spread through them. But he and his colleagues wondered if perhaps online networks could also be connected to health.
“We’ve known for a long time, for decades now, that offline social networks, especially social integration, (were) related to longer life,” said lead author William Hobbs, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University who performed the research while at UC San Diego. “But we didn’t know if that extended to online interactions, too.”
To try to get at this question with a large and reliable sample, the team of scientists took 12 million Facebook users and matched them to California vital statistics as well as the voter registration database.
The data was anonymized, and the scientists checked how many had died over two years of follow-up. (All individuals in the study were born between 1945 and 1989, and all comparisons were made between people of about the same age and same gender.)
The scientists found, to their surprise, that there was no correlation between how many friend requests people sent and their longevity. But there was a clear link between the number of friend requests they accepted, and how long they lived. People who received and accepted the most friend requests (in the top tenth of the sample) were 34 percent less likely to die in the study period than those who received and accepted the least friend requests (in the bottom tenth).
The scientists also found that those who posted a lot of photos indicating realworld interactions also had a lower risk of death — a sign that face-to-face interactions were linked to higher health. Other activities were more complicated: Writing wall posts and sending messages in moderation seemed to be linked to lower mortality, but writing very few or very many was not.
Cause uncertain
To be clear, both scientists pointed out, this study only shows a correlation — there’s no way to tell, at the moment, what the cause may be. It could be that healthier people get stronger networks, not the other way around. There could also be another undetermined factor.
“In some sense, this reinforces what was already well known from these other studies,” Fowler said, “which is that, if you’re going to start somewhere by making someone healthier, you want to start with their closest friends.”