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来源Slipstream - Social Reinforcement as a Path to Better Health - NYTimescom Better Health, With a Little Help From Our Friends 朋友帮小忙，身体更健康 IS your social network making you fat? Are your friends and family influencing you to smoke and drink more, or to sleep less? 你的社会关系让你增肥了吗？你的朋友、家人在影响你吸烟吸得更多、喝酒喝得更多或者睡得更少？ And if our relationships contribute to behaviors that erode our health, can social networks be harnessed to improve it? 假如我们的社会关系促成了伤害我们身体的行为的话，那么可不可以把社会关系网理理顺,借之以改变呢？ These are seminal questions in “network science” — an emerging field that examines how behavioral changes spread through social networks. By social networks, I don’t mean virtual, will-you-“friend”-me? simulations, but old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood relationships. You know, people you actually see in person regularly — friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors. “网络科学”是可发展的问题——一个检验行为改变是如何在社会关系网中传播的新兴领域。通过社交网，我不是电脑上虚拟的那种，你会和我“交朋友”吗？假冒的，没有旧交情，没有亲如血肉般关系。事实上你也清楚，你看人是很有规律的——朋友，亲戚，同事，邻居。 “It’s a very old thing that we do, like ants, arranging ourselves to live in social structures,” says Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a Harvard professor who studies health and social networks. “Really, humans have arranged themselves into networks for hundreds and thousands of years.” “就像是蚂蚁一样，我们做着件非常古老的事，把自己安排融入进社会组织，”哈佛大学研究“健康与社交网络”的教授 Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis说道，“实际上，人们已经把自己编排进了一个有着成百上千年的关系网。 Dr. Christakis and his research partner, James H. Fowler, an associate professor at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, created an international uproar in 2007 when they published a study on obesity. In it, they reported that fat could be catching — spreading through social ties. One of the study’s findings was that a person’s chance of becoming obese increased 57 percent if the person had a friend who became obese. Another surprising finding of the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, was that one’s chance of becoming obese was influenced not only by the weight gain of friends but also by friends of friends who gained weight. Christakis博士和他的研究伙伴——圣迭戈市加利福尼亚大学医学院副教授 James H. Fowler，在发布了一份关于肥胖的研究报告后，国际社会一片哗然。在这份研究报告中，他们说肥胖可能会传染——通过社交网络传染。其中的一项研究成果表明，如果一个人有个朋友变胖了的话，那么这个人变胖的可能性就增加了57%。刊登在《新英国医学杂志》上的另一项惊人成果则是，一个人变胖的可能性不仅仅手朋友增肥的影响，同样也受到朋友的朋友增重的影响。 Since then, the researchers have examined how other health-related behaviors and conditions — drug use and sleeplessness among teenagers, smoking and happiness — spread through social networks. And they have published a book explaining their work, titled “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.” 其后，研究人员还调查了其他的与健康有关的行为和情形——麻醉药的使用、青少年失眠情况、吸烟、快乐——是如何通过社交网络传播的。他们出了一本书来解释他们的工作成果，书名为《联系：我们社会网络的神奇力量及其如何重塑我们的生活》。 Now Dr. Christakis and Professor Fowler, as well as other scientists, are turning their attention to a new research area: how to harness social networks to promote public health. 现今，Christakis博士和Fowler教授和其他的科学家一样，正在关注一个新的研究领域：如何治理社交网络以提升公众健康水平。 Of course, we already know that people can and do change their health habits when they seek out and participate in new social groupings. Weight Watchers, anyone? 当然，我们已经知道，在找到并加入一个社交小圈子时人们确实会改变他们的健康习惯。胖子，有没有？ But how do we extract information from existing social networks to improve public health? 但我们如何在现存的社交网络里获得信息改善公众健康呢？ One method is to identify social connectors, people who spend time with more friends than average — and are thus exposed to more germs and are more likely to be among the first to contract contagious diseases like the flu. If health officials could find and track those social butterflies, they could tap into an early-detection system for epidemics and figure out whom to vaccinate first in order to slow the spread of disease. 一种方法是去鉴别出社交中的关键人物，这种人和他呆在一起的朋友要比普通人的多——但也因此暴露于更多的细菌之下，更有可能染上传染性的疾病，比如说流感。如果健康中心可以找出并跟踪这些”交际花“，那么他们就能开发出一套流行性疾病预测系统。并且，解决了为减缓疾病传播速度该先给谁接种疫苗的问题。 Last winter, Dr. Christakis and Professor Fowler tried just such a strategy — monitoring people’s friends — to track the spread of H1N1 flu at Harvard. They monitored 744 undergraduates who were either selected at random or were named as friends by the randomly selected students. Then they followed the undergrads, using their electronic medical records, to identify which students went to the university health service complaining of flu symptoms. 去年冬天，Christakis博士和Fowler教授尝试了这样一个计策——监视人们的朋友——借此来跟踪哈佛地区H1N1流感病毒的传播。他们监视了744名大学生，这些学生要么是随机挑选出来的，要么是被随机挑出来的学生指定作为朋友的。他们用电子并按跟踪这些学生，借而识别出哪些去了大学保健处的学生诉说出了流感症状。 The method is based on “the friendship paradox” — the counterintuitive idea that your friends have more friends than you do. In other words, you’re more likely to be friends with popular people than with loners. And those popular people tend to be closer to the core of a social network. 这种办法是建立在“友谊悖论”的基础上——这种违反直觉的观点就是说：“你的朋友比你有更多的朋友”。换句话说，你更有可能和一个很讨喜欢的人做朋友，而不是不合群者。而这些受欢迎的人趋向于更接近社交网络的核心。 In the Harvard study, published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLoS One, the flu developed about two weeks earlier in the friend group than in the randomly selected group. The results, the study leaders say, indicate that public health officials could use friend monitoring like sentinel nodes in the human body, as an early-detection system for disease. 科学杂志《公共科学图书馆·综合》星期三刊印的哈佛大学的研究报告中显示，朋友群要比随机挑选出来的的小组早两个星期出现流感。研究小组的领导者所说的结果指出，公共健康中心可以用朋友监视，就像人体的前哨淋巴结所起的作用一样，作为疾病的预测系统。 Friend monitoring systems could also be used to identify flu trends faster than methods now used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — or on Google, for that matter — because the friend system pinpoints signs of an epidemic before it peaks in the general population, Professor Fowler says. Fowler 教授说，朋友监测系统可以用来识别出流感的走势，这要比现在疾病控制预防中心用的方法快的多——就这一点甚至比谷歌搜的还快——因为朋友监测系统可以在流行病在全体人群中爆发前准确的找到其征兆。 “This method, although we have studied H1N1, could be applied to anything that spreads — smoking, weight gain,” he says. “尽管我们是用它来研究墨西哥猪流感病毒的，但这种方法可能也适用于任何传播的东西——吸烟，增肥。”他说道。 Some researchers are also studying how a social network’s structure affects the speed at which people adopt and stick to health habits. 一些研究者也在研究：社交网络的组织形式是如何去影响人们接受并保留好的卫生习惯的速度的呢？ To that end, Damon Centola, an assistant professor of economic sociology at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., conducted an experiment with more than 1,500 people. He created a Web-based health forum where they had access to and could rate health information sites. 为了得出结论，麻省理工斯隆管理学院经济社会学教授Damon Centola领导指挥了一个有1500多人参加的实验。他开设了一个网页论坛，在这里他们有权并且可以为健康信息分级。 Professor Centola then randomly assigned participants to one of two social network designs: one was set up like a residential neighborhood, with clusters of overlapping ties among neighbors; the other was a casual network where people did not share social ties. Each participant was matched with other members, called “health buddies.” Although people could not contact their buddies directly, they received e-mail from the system about their buddies’ activities on the site. 之后，Centola教授随机的将参与者设计成两个社交网络：一个建成了如同一个住宅区，邻居间有着互相关联的群；另一个则是一个随便的网络，人与人之间并不分享社会关系。每个参与者都与其他成员配对，称之为“健康伙伴”。尽管参与者不能直接地和他们的伙伴联系，但他们将在论坛（前文提到的）上从系统中收到有关伙伴活动的电子邮件。 The neighborhood structure turned out to be much better than the random social network at prompting people in the study to join and participate in the health forum, according to Professor Centola’s report, published this month in the journal Science. More important, Professor Centola says, the more e-mails that people received about the activities of their health buddies, the more often they returned to the forum. IN the real world, he says, this means the amount of social reinforcement you give to people to improve their health habits may be more important than who is encouraging them to do so. In other words, a local community network of friends and neighbors may be more important than a remote celebrity spokesman in stopping the spread of, say, sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers. 根据Centola的报告，研究证明了这种邻里的构成方式在促使人们参与参加健康论坛上要比随机组成的社交网络要好，这篇报告出版在本月的《科学》杂志上。centola教授认为更重要的在于，人们收到越多关于他们健康伙伴的邮件，他们就会更加频繁的回到这个论坛上。这也就意味着，你给人的社会强化作用的效果改善了他们的卫生习惯，其意义要比只鼓励他们做要重要的多。换句话说，一个当地朋友间的交流网络，在停止青少年间性传染病的床波上，可能要比远处的名人宣讲有用的多。 “It makes a bigger difference how you connect people than who is there in influencing desirable behaviors,” Professor Centola says. “这使得你怎么与人联系和谁在那儿影响着性行为间有着更大的区别。”centola教授说道。 It also tells us that while weight gain among our friends and friends’ friends can make us fatter, our close connections may also lead us to better health choices, like going to the gym more often or stir-frying more vegetables. 研究告诉我们，朋友或者朋友的朋友变胖了我们也可能会胖点，但我们之间的亲密关系也会让我们有更好的健康选择，比如说多去去体育馆，多炒点蔬菜。 But if we are to make lasting changes in our health habits, Dr. Fowler says, we may need social reinforcement in which our friends, not to mention our friends’ friends, change their habits with us. Fowler博士说道：“假如我们持久的改变着我们的卫生习惯，那么我们也许我们要强化朋友间的社会关系，更不用说朋友的朋友了，让他们和我们一起改变卫生习惯。” |
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