Popular People Live Longer - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/sunday/popular-people-l...

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SundayReview | OPINION

Popular People Live Longer

By MITCH PRINSTEIN JUNE 1, 2017

I often hear from teenagers that one of their greatest goals is to obtain more
Instagram followers than anyone they know. Even some adults appear obsessed
with social media, tracking the number of retweets on their Twitter profiles or
likes on Facebook. This type of status-seeking might be easily dismissed as
juvenile or superficial, but theres more to it.

Recent evidence suggests that being unpopular can be hazardous to our

health. In fact, it might even kill us. Yet most dont realize that theres more than
one type of popularity, and social media may not supply the one that makes us
feel good.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University,

consolidated data from 148 investigations published over 28 years on the effects
of social relationships, collectively including over 308,000 participants between
the ages of 6 and 92 from all over the world. In each study, investigators
measured the size of participants networks, the number of their friends, whether
they lived alone, and the extent to which they participated in social activities.
Then they followed each participant for months, years and even decades to track
his or her mortality rate.

The results revealed that being unpopular feeling isolated, disconnected,

lonely predicts our life span. More surprising is just how powerful this effect
can be. Dr. Holt-Lunstad found that people who had larger networks of friends
had a 50 percent increased chance of survival by the end of the study they were
in. And those who had good-quality relationships had a 91 percent higher survival
rate. This suggests that being unpopular increases our chance of death more
strongly than obesity, physical inactivity or binge drinking. In fact, the only

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comparable health hazard is smoking.

The human bodys sensitivity to popularity may reflect the effects of natural
selection over thousands of years. Anthropologists believe that it was humans
ability to form and comprehend more complex vocal sounds the rudiments of
language, and the foundation of our identity as a social species that enabled us
to survive, ultimately outlasting our hominid neighbors like the Neanderthals,
Denisovans and Homo floresiensis. As social beings, we protected one another,
shared resources and collaborated to gain advantages over other species.

This may be why we remain so attuned to popularity today, even when were
not consciously thinking of it. Research in psychology and neuroscience has
begun to reveal a number of automatic physiological responses to unpopularity.
For instance, our popularity may have an effect on our DNA.

George Slavich and Steve Cole, experts in the field of human social genomics
at the University of California, Los Angeles, have described our genomic material
as being exquisitely sensitive to social rejection. They study what happens
immediately after weve been left by a romantic partner, excluded from a social
event, rejected by a stranger or even simply told that we may be judged by others
we care about. Within 40 minutes, they and other researchers have found, these
experiences affect the expression of individual genes, determining which parts of
our DNA are turned on or off (called epigenetics). Even imagining that we might
lose our connection to the herd, they have found, can change how DNA behaves.

This process may affect only a few dozen out of at least 20,000 genes, but
even that small number seems significant. According to Professors Slavich and
Cole, those affected genes play an important role in our immune systems. Some
are linked to the bodys inflammation response, which is critical for healing
wounds or fighting bacterial infections. The professors suggest that this
cellular-level response to rejection may be natures mechanism to help those who
were unpopular. Millenniums ago, individuals who had no peers to protect them
were vulnerable to injury or attack. Those whose bodies preemptively activated a
pro-inflammatory response that prepared them to heal from any impending
wounds were the most likely to survive.

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no peers to defend them no longer had a great need to be protected from viruses
who would infect them? so their bodies conserved energy by reducing their
vigilance to infection.

Being unfriended on Facebook doesnt make you more vulnerable to attack

by saber-toothed tiger, but our bodies may still be responding as they did 60,000
years ago. Today humans suffer from a wide range of diseases related to chronic
inflammation, like cancer, asthma and Alzheimers. Were also very likely to catch
the common cold.

Thats most likely why our concern for social standing begins so early and
persists throughout our lives. Dozens of studies reveal that childrens popularity
can be measured reliably by age 3, and it remains remarkably stable not just
through the next dozen years of primary and secondary education but also across
contexts, as they move from community to community and into adulthood.

Yet this same research reveals that there is more than one type of popularity,
and most of us may be investing in the wrong kind. Likability reflects kindness,
benevolent leadership and selfless, prosocial behavior. Research suggests that
this form of popularity offers lifelong advantages, and leads to relationships that
confer the greatest health benefits.

Likability is markedly different from status an ultimately less satisfying

form of popularity that reflects visibility, influence, power and prestige. Status
can be quantified by social media followers; likability cannot.

Anyone who has been to high school will recognize the distinction and
recall that those high in one category are often low in the other. Research
suggests that despite the great temptations to gain status, those who achieve it
ultimately experience greater unhappiness and dissatisfaction, while those who
are likable have far greater satisfaction and success.

We may be built by evolution to care deeply about popularity, but its up to

us to choose the nature of the relationships we want with our peers.

Which means that it wouldnt kill you to step away from Twitter once in a
while.

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the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of the forthcoming
Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World, from which this
essay was adapted.

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