The Happiness Industry (22 page)

At the same time that behavioural economics has been highlighting the various ways in which we are social, altruistic creatures, social media offers businesses an opportunity to analyse and target that social behaviour. The end goal is no different from what it was at the dawn of marketing and management in the late nineteenth century: making money. What's changed is that each one of us is now viewed as an available instrument through which to alter the attitudes and behaviours of our friends and contacts. Behaviours and ideas can be released like ‘contagions', in the hope of ‘infecting' much larger networks. While social media sites such as Facebook offer whole new possibilities for marketing, the analysis of email networks can do the same for human resource management in workplaces. The project initiated by Elton Mayo in the 1920s, of understanding the business value of informal relationships, can now be subjected to a far more rigorous and quantitative scientific analysis.
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One of the outcomes of this fine-grained level of social analysis is the discovery that different social relationships have very different levels of economic value. Once marketing campaigns
are being mediated by individuals, in their informal social lives, it quickly becomes plain that certain individuals – well-connected influencers – are more useful instruments of communication than others. In the workplace, the socially connected employee will come to appear more valuable than the more isolated one. The business logic which emerges from this is to be highly generous towards a small minority of already well-connected people, and pay far less attention to everybody else. Celebrities have long had gifts lavished upon them by companies, hoping to have their brands boosted by association. The same process is beginning to apply to social networks: the people who are least in need of this corporate generosity are the most likely recipients of it, and vice versa.

The ideology of this new ‘social' economy depends on painting the ‘old' economy as horribly individualistic and materialistic. The assumption is that, prior to the World Wide Web and the Californian gurus that celebrate it, we lived atomized, private lives, with every relationship mediated by cash. Before it became ‘social', business was a nasty, individualist affair, driven only by greed.

This picture is, of course, completely false. Corporations have been trying to produce, manage and influence social relationships (as an alternative to purely monetary transactions) since the birth of management in the mid-nineteenth century. Businesses have long worried about their public reputation and the commitment of their employees. And it goes without saying that informal social networks themselves are as old as humanity. What has changed is not the role of the ‘social' in capitalism, but the capacity to subject it to a quantitative, economic analysis, thanks primarily to the digitization of social relationships. The ability to visualize and quantify social relations, then subject them to an economic audit, is growing all the time.

While the expert practitioners of ‘social analytics' are best placed to do this, there is also a growing tendency and opportunity for individuals themselves to view their social lives in this mathematical, utilitarian sense. As this happens, the moral dimension of friendship and reciprocity starts to recede, and the more explicitly utilitarian dimension moves to the foreground. Something like pay-it-forward ceases to influence us because we want to fit in with social norms, and more because of the psychological kick we get out of it ourselves. People start to think of altruism in terms of incentives. Viewing social relations and giving in this tacitly economic way introduces an unpleasant question: what's in it for me? One of the most persuasive answers emerging is that friendship and altruism are healthy, for both mind and body.

The medical ‘social'

In February 2010, I found myself sitting in a large hall, with a huge golden throne on my left, and the future leader of the UK Labour Party, Ed Miliband, to my right. We were watching images on a screen that reminded me of the fractal videos that used to be sold by the ‘herbal remedy' salesmen in London's Camden Market in the early 1990s. Also present was a number of government policy advisors, all straining to appear as shambolically relaxed as possible, a status game which goes on in the corridors of power, played to indicate that one is at home there (the game was won under the subsequent government by David Cameron's closest confidant, Steve Hilton, who was notorious for wandering into meetings barefooted).

There were about ten of us in the room, one of the more
baroque offices in the government's Cabinet Office, and we were all staring at this screen, transfixed by the movement of individual lines and dots that were being displayed. Standing next to the screen, clearly enjoying the impact that his video was having on this influential audience, was the American medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Christakis was on a speaking tour, promoting his book
Connected
, and had been invited in to present some of his findings to British policy-makers during the dying days of Gordon Brown's government. As a sociologist with an interest in policy, I'd been invited along.

Christakis is an unusual sociologist. Not only is he far more mathematically adept than most, but he has also published a number of articles in high-ranking medical journals. The fractal-like images we were watching on the screen that day represented social networks in a Baltimore neighbourhood, within which particular ‘behaviours' and medical symptoms were moving around. Christakis's message to the assembled policy-makers was a powerful one. Problems such as obesity, poverty and depression, which so often coincide, locking people into chronic conditions of inactivity, are contagious. They move around like viruses in social networks, creating risks to individuals purely by virtue of the people they happen to hang out with.

There was something mesmeric and seductive about the images. Could entrenched social problems really be represented by graphics of this sort? Christakis's technical prowess was certainly alluring. In the grand tradition of American GIs bringing chewing gum and nylon stockings to the British during World War Two, his high-tech social network analysis seemed novel and irresistible. The behaviourist promise, that policy might be grounded in hard science, will always get a hearing among senior decision-makers.

What I found slightly surreal that day, aside from the massive gold throne, was the freakish view of this particular inner-city American community that we were privy to. Like the social analytics companies, which try to spot consumer behaviour as it emerges and travels, here we were in London observing how the dietary habits and health problems of a few thousand relatively deprived Baltimore residents were moving around, like a disease. It felt as if we were viewing an ant colony from above. Indeed, the fact that these flickering images represented human beings, with relationships, histories and agendas, was almost incidental.

Of course the policy opportunities here are tremendously exciting, especially in an age of government austerity. If medical practitioners can change the behaviour of just a few influential people in a network for the better, potentially they can then spread a more positive ‘contagion'. The question is whether policymakers could ever possibly hope to attain this kind of sociological data en masse, without some form of mass surveillance of social life. While we grow increasingly accustomed to the idea of a private company, such as Google, collecting detailed data on the everyday behaviour of millions, the notion that the government might do the same remains more chilling.

While marketers desperately seek to penetrate our social networks in order to alter our tastes and desires, policy-makers have come to view social networks as means of improving our health and well-being. One important aspect of this is the discovery that a deficit of social relations – or loneliness – is not only a cause of unhappiness, but a serious physiological health risk as well. The ‘social neuroscience' pioneered by Chicago neuroscientist John Cacioppo suggests that the human brain has evolved in such a way as to depend on social relationships. Cacioppo's
research suggests that loneliness is an even greater health risk than smoking.
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Practices such as ‘social prescribing', in which doctors recommend that individuals join a choir or voluntary organization, are aimed at combating isolation and its tendency to lead to depression and chronic illness.

The positive psychology movement, which has grown rapidly since the early 1990s, has done a great deal to highlight the psychosomatic benefits of reciprocal social relations. While positive psychologists like to speak in terms of ‘flourishing' and ‘optimism', lurking behind much of the rhetoric is the ongoing rise in diagnosis rates of depression. While the gurus of this movement may be all smiles, many of their readers and listeners are wrestling with a sense of pointlessness, loneliness and deflation, for which they are desperately seeking a remedy.

Once again, the logic of monetary market exchange is vigorously attacked in positive psychology. The words which recur over and over in positive psychology texts and speech are gratitude, giving and empathy. In a world that seems cold, calculating and careless, positive psychology invites its follower to adopt a more ethical stance, based around empathy and generosity. The fact that this stress upon social reciprocity is entirely in keeping with the current spirit of capitalism (clearly manifest in marketing) goes unremarked-upon. But what really leaps out from this new ethical orientation is the way in which it is ultimately justified: giving makes the giver feel happier. Equally, the mental habit of feeling grateful delivers positive mental benefits. The advice is to stop thinking so much of oneself – but the justification is ultimately a self-centred one.

As was clear from the Christakis seminar in the Cabinet Office throne-room, social networks are now recognized as tools of health policy. They are ways in which the pleasures and pains of
our minds and bodies can be influenced. The utilitarian project has historically been dependent on some rather crude carrots and sticks – punishments to deliver pain, money and physical pleasures to deliver happiness. Now, thanks to the growing reach of medical research and policy, it is the people we socialize with who are becoming the latest instruments of psychophysical improvement. We now know that socially isolated people experience more physical pain following a hip operation than those who are more socially connected.
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Adopting a positive outlook is known to aid recovery from medical illness and reduce the risk of it arising.

Driven particularly by neuroscience, the expert understanding of social life and morality is rapidly submerging into the study of the body. One social neuroscientist, Matt Lieberman, has shown how pains that we have traditionally treated as emotional (such as separating from a lover) involve the same neurochemical processes as those we typically view as physical (such as breaking an arm). Another prominent neuroscientist, Paul Zak (known in the media as Dr Love), has focused on a single neurochemical, oxytocin, which he argues is associated with many of our strongest social instincts, such as love and fairness. Scientists at the University of Zurich have discovered that they can trigger a sense of ‘right and wrong' by stimulating a particular area of the brain.
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Social science and physiology are converging into a new discipline, in which human bodies are studied for the ways they respond to one another physically.

It would seem a little perverse to suggest that policy-makers ignore this evidence of the impact of social networks and altruism on health. And if positive psychology can generate just a little more mutual concern, through self-help and cognitive tips, then why not? Yet there is still a danger lurking in this worldview,
which is the same problem that afflicts all forms of social network analysis. In reducing the social world to a set of mechanisms and resources available to individuals, the question repeatedly arises as to whether social networks might be redesigned in ways to suit the already privileged. Networks have a tendency towards what are called ‘power laws', whereby those with influence are able to harness that power to win even greater influence.

A combination of positive psychology with social media analytics has demonstrated that psychological moods and emotions travel through networks, much as Christakis found in relation to health behaviour. For example, through analysing the content of social media messages, researchers at Beihang University in China found that certain moods like anger tended to travel faster than others through networks.
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A negative frame of mind, including depression itself, is known to be socially ‘contagious'. Happy, healthy individuals can then tailor their social relationships in ways that protect them against the ‘risk' of unhappiness. Guy Winch, an American psychologist who has studied this phenomenon, advises happy people to be on their guard. ‘If you find yourself living with or around people with negative outlooks,' he writes, ‘consider balancing out your friend roster'.
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The impact of this friend-roster-rebalancing on those unfortunates with the ‘negative outlooks' is all too easy to imagine.

There is something a little sad that the fabric of social life is now a problem which is addressed within the rubric of health policy. Loneliness now appears as an objective problem, but only because it shows up in the physical brain and body, with calculable costs for governments and health insurers. Generosity and gratitude are urged upon people, but mainly to alleviate their
own mental health problems and private misery. And friendship ties within poor inner-city neighbourhoods have become a topic of government concern, but only to the extent that they mediate epidemics of bad nutrition and costly inactivity. This is all an attempt to grasp the social world without departing from mathematical, individualist psychology. While this may offer genuine medical aid to needy individuals, trying to understand society in purely psychological terms is also a recipe for narcissism. And the man who initiated it was nothing if not a narcissist.