Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Social Connection and the Future of Well-Being
Last week, I happened upon this several year old article called the Social Context of Well-being about how social connection and social capital influence well-being. Written by a couple big name academics--John Helliwell and Robert Putnam--the pair suggest that being socially connected has a startlingly high impact on overall well-being, which in total, suggest that one of the most effective ways to improve well-being is to find ways trust and connectedness.
Below, I've tried to distill their core argument into a couple of key quotes:
The core idea here is very simple: social networks have value. They have value to the people in the networks: ‘networking’ is demonstrably a good career strategy, for example. But they also have ‘externalities’, that is, effects on bystanders. Dense social networks in a neighbourhood—barbecues or neighbourhood associations, etc.—can deter crime, for example, even benefiting neighbours who do not go to the barbecues or belong to the associations. Social capital can be embodied in bonds among family, friends and neighbours, in the workplace, at church, in civic associations, perhaps even in Internet-based ‘virtual communities’…. High levels of social trust in settings of dense social networks often provide the crucial mechanism through which social capital affects aggregate outcomes.
How much value do these connections have?
Our new evidence confirms that social capital is strongly linked to subjective well-being through many independent channels and in several different forms. Marriage and family, ties to friends and neighbours, workplace ties, civic engagement (both individually and collectively), trustworthiness and trust: all appear independently and robustly related to happiness and life satisfaction, both directly and through their impact on health. Moreover, the ‘externalities’ of social capital on subjective well-being (the effects of my social ties on your happiness) are neutral to positive, whereas the ‘externalities’ of material advantage (the effects of my income on your happiness) are negative, because in today’s advanced societies, it is relative, not absolute, income that matters. In that sense, the impact of society-wide increases in affluence on subjective well-being is uncertain and modest at best, whereas the impact of society-wide increases in social capital on well-being would be unambiguously and strongly positive.
They buried the conclusion in a bit of jargon, but basically, they're arguing that if we want happier, healthier people, we should focus a lot more on creating trusting and connected societies and a lot less on economic growth, because being connected seems to be so much more valuable. What's particularly notable, I think, is that many of the well-being connections correlate with weaker social relationships--for example, club membership and regular volunteering "were each the happiness equivalent of a doubling of income." Being socially connected correlates with improved physical health and other improvements to well-being.
The good news about this is that in many ways, we actually are moving into a more socially connected world, despite a fair amount of conventional wisdom that digital technologies isolate us. For example, a recently released working paper by Stefan Bauernschuster and colleagues finds that "virtually all estimates… for all social capital measures point in the positive direction" between digital technology use and increased social cohesion. This is true for adults as well as children in their study; social media is creating more social cohesion and social capital.
A recent Wall Street Journal essay notes that emerging practices around sharing physical goods and spaces like houses, cars and so on, by connecting strangers and promoting interaction, trust and social cohesion.
In other words, we're moving toward a future of increased social connection. What Helliwell and Putnam's article suggests--something I saw in a bunch of other research articles as well--is that facilitating more of these connections will be unambiguously positive for our heath and well-being.