Table Of ContentPraise for The Village Effect
“Do you like email, text messages, and social media? So do I. But as Susan Pinker shows
in this terrific book, electronic communication can never replace our deeply rooted,
fundamentally human need for face-to-face interaction. Drawing on cutting edge
research in social neuroscience, and supplementing the science with case studies and
sharp observations, Pinker makes a hardheaded case for a soft-hearted virtue. Read this
book. Then talk about it—in person!—with a friend.”
—Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human
“Intimate, face-to-face contact with partners, family, and friends is an ancient and deep
human need. How do group-living primates like us make the transition to an online
world in the evolutionary blink of an eye? Can they? Pinker shows how this is
happening. And—even more important—she shows us how this should happen, with a
valuable prescription based on the best science. Pinker writes with authority and verve,
and she offers an integrated treatment of online and offline interactions. She sketches
our modern digital interactions on the ancient parchment of our minds.”
–Nicholas Christakis, professor of social and natural science, Yale University, and co-
author of Connected
“We have a biological drive for social interaction. We long to belong. Susan Pinker’s
new book reveals the type of social contact that makes us tick. Written with verve,
warmth, and style, it presents new science about what matters—raising healthy kids,
leading a long and engaged life, being successful at work and play. This is a gem of a
book!”
—Andrew N. Meltzoff, co-director, University of Washington Institute for Learning &
Brain Sciences, and co-author of The Scientist in the Crib
“Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect is a bold, intelligent foray into what social isolation
does to each of us in an age of technology. She offers keen insights into how social
engagement enhances romance, parenting, career, family and friendship. Most
impressively, Susan Pinker explores how gender and social forces play into our daily
lives.”
—Susan Shapiro Barash, author of The Nine Phases of Marriage and Toxic Friends
“In this provocative and engaging new book, Susan Pinker shows how intimate social
contact is a fundamental human need and argues that Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of
social media fail to meet this need, diminishing the lives of children, teenagers, and
everybody else. Pinker is a great storyteller and a thoughtful scholar, and she expertly
blends together personal stories and scientific research about marriage, cancer, obesity,
happiness, longevity, religion, menstrual synchrony, solitary confinement, and much
more. This is an important book, one that will shape how we think about the
increasingly virtual world we all live in.”
—Paul Bloom, Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology, Yale University, and
author of Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
“Why would a weekly meal with friends add as many years to your life as quitting
smoking? Why is face-to-face so much better than Facebook? Susan Pinker has the
answers. With her usual flair and expertise, she combines the latest neuroscience and
social psychology with stories of villagers in Sardinia, nuns in America, and the dating
scene in Montreal. It’s a fascinating explanation of why we need regular contact with
people, not just screens—and why time spent with your neighbors will enrich and
extend your life in ways you never imagined.”
—John Tierney, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Willpower
“In a time when we rely increasingly on virtual forms of communication and
networking, The Village Effect is an important reminder of the value we derive from our
real, personal networks—and what we lose when we replace them with the social
networks of the online age. Susan Pinker has written a fascinating, nuanced study of
that most fundamental need: the need for human connection. No matter how far
technology evolves, she reminds us, some things can never be replaced.”
—Maria Konnikova, New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind: How to Think Like
Sherlock Holmes
“ ‘Hell is other people,’ declared the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Not so, says
Pinker. With a raft of surprising data, this compulsively readable book reminds us that
loneliness and isolation are our blights—other people are the source of our happiness.
This lively and meticulously researched book shows that direct and frequent human
contact are at least as important to our survival as clean air or good nutrition.”
—Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It
Matters Today
Copyright © 2014 by Susan Pinker All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of
Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Pinker, Susan
The village effect : how face-to-face contact can make us healthier, happier, and smarter / Susan
Pinker
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6957-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-67960454-9
1. Social interaction. 2. Interpersonal relations. 3. Interpersonal communication. 4. Eye contact.
I. Title.
HM1111.P56 2014 302—dc23 2014008307
www.spiegelandgrau.com
Jacket Design: Greg Mollica
Jacket lllustration: Felix Sockwell
v3.1
You cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibers
connect you with your fellow-men, and along those
fibers, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions
as causes, and return to you as effects.
The Reverend Henry Melvill, 1856
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
People Who Need People
1. Swimming Through the School of Hard Knocks
How Social Bonds Can Rejig the Outcome of Chronic Disease
2. It Takes a Village to Raise a Centenarian
Longevity as a Team Sport
3. A Thousand Invisible Threads
Face-to-Face Contact and Social Contagion
4. Who’s Coming to Dinner
Food, Drink, and Social Bonds
5. Baby Chemistry
How Social Contact Transforms Infants’ Brains
6. Digital Natives
Electronic Devices and Children’s Language Development, School
Progress, and Happiness
7. Teens and Screens
How Digital Technology Has Transformed Teens’ Lives
8. Going to the Chapel
Face-to-Face Social Networks, Love, and Marriage
9. When Money Really Talks
Social Networks, Business, and Crime
10. Conclusion
Creating the Village Effect
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Image Credits
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Introduction
People Who Need People
One June day in 2009, a rock musician named John McColgan was told
that he needed a new kidney and he needed it fast. Every day in the
United States, twelve people died waiting for a kidney, and when John’s
name was added to the kidney transplant waiting list, the list was
86,218 names long. At the time he was living in Canada, though, where
the list included only 2,941 people.1 Still, he took the news badly.
John is a drummer, an energetic and sinewy man with a smoothly
shaved head. Though he had been diagnosed with progressive kidney
disease when he was in his mid-twenties, he’d had few symptoms and
until that moment hadn’t spent much time worrying about his health. At
forty-eight he was often on the basketball court with men a decade
younger, and he liked nothing better than to shoot a few hoops with his
seventeen-year-old son. John skateboarded around town in summer,
snowboarded in winter, and did pushups and crunches every day on the
floor of his living room, not to mention all the drumming, a workout in
itself. Before turning thirty he had played with Linda Ronstadt and Kate
and Anna McGarrigle, and a short time later he backed up Big Mama
Thornton and opened for superstars such as James Brown and Stevie Ray
Vaughan. Still, when money was scarce, he wasn’t above digging
irrigation ditches and working renovation jobs. John’s gas tank was
often empty, his rent overdue. But his exuberance onstage and his
lightheartedness offstage gave him the eternal charm of a schoolboy; he
always got by with a little help from his friends.
John was rich in one important way: he had amassed a committed
circle of friends, most of whom knew one another and regularly crossed
paths—a feature of the most powerful and effective social networks. A
large bank balance wouldn’t have helped him much in this situation in
any case, as it’s illegal to buy or sell organs for transplantation
everywhere in the world except Iran and Singapore.2 And in the current
crisis, family couldn’t help him—his father had died at fifty of polycystic
kidney disease, a genetic disorder he’d passed on to his son, and his
mother had died a few years earlier of cancer. After months of dialysis,
John realized he couldn’t simply wait for his turn for a new kidney. He
had to go looking for one.
By the time I met up with John less than eighteen months later, the
transplant ordeal was behind him. I’d known him for at least twenty
years and the change in him was stark. He seemed frail; the buzzed hair
around the back of his bare skull was as short as a day’s growth of beard,
and his skin looked transparent in what little light filtered in through the
high, grimy windows of the Montreal café where we met. He told me
that four people he knew had offered to give him a kidney.
The first was his ex-wife, Amy. But her drug addiction had savaged
her health along with their marriage. Though she had recently kicked
the habit, her organs had paid the price. His wife’s sister had also
offered, but John decided that would just be too complicated. (When I
asked Jessie, a mother of three small children and a professional dancer,
why she would take this huge risk, she was taken aback. “Well, you
know John. Everyone loves him. Why wouldn’t I give him my kidney?”)
Then a longtime friend, Kate, walked up to John at a gallery opening
and blurted out that she wanted to help. She told me later that as soon
as she offered her kidney, she felt scared. She then called the transplant
nurse to ask what would be the worst thing that could happen if she
went ahead. The nurse told her that one person in three thousand dies
during the operation, and that the surgeon might accidentally knick her
spleen. “Then I thought, I’m not going to die. That’s just not going to happen
to me.”
Still, the testing was grueling and it didn’t stop even after they found
that her blood type and tissues were compatible with John’s. “During
that year I went back more than five times. I gave sixteen vials of blood.
They took various cells to test my compatibility. Then they tested my
health. They did ultrasounds and CAT scans. I had a mammogram,
which found a cyst, so they did a biopsy. Then I did a twenty-four-hour
urine test, twice.”
She also underwent a long interview during which the transplant team
examined her motives. “I could tell they were suspicious because I
