Making Friends in New Places (and Stressful Situations)
Something every college student has experienced—the mad rush to meet-and-greet your hallmates, classmates, professors, etc., within the first few weeks of school. Especially for people who haven’t seen or talked to each other all summer, there is a lot of effort that is put into catching up and renewing bonds. The New York Times’ Education Life section posted an article in July in anticipation of young adults heading off to college this fall, and it addresses this struggle and the reasons behind the sudden burst of friend-making activity that goes on at the start of the semester.
It appears that humans are actually compelled to create ties with the people around them in high-stress, fast-paced environments. There is a window of time of about 3 weeks at the start of a semester where students often have looser social inhibitions…which leads to slightly less awkward random introductions and slightly less uncomfortable mixers. But whether this compulsion to quickly gain friends is some kind of survival trait or not, who knows? This kind of behavior actually traces back to our earliest ancestors, who would have the same makeup of friends: a couple of besties, a group of immediate buddies, and a far larger group of friends/acquaintances. But regardless of the why, many different scientists and mathematicians have constructed algorithms to lay out the patterns behind social networking. As Christakis puts it, there seem to be “mathematical and sociological rules” that go unspoken, but somehow dictate who and how we make friends.
Christakis also puts emphasis on the side effects of friend networks in such large communities like colleges, especially in the case of the H1N1 outbreak on the Harvard College campus. Those studying the outbreak realized just how fast a flu virus could pass from a single carrier and be magnified among a large population because of all the interconnecting ties in that kind of network. And it was also relatively easy to predict which nodes/students would be more likely to contract the illness based on the amount of ties with carriers, or even friends of carriers. It’s not hard to extrapolate this fast-spreading side effect to any other type of network: gossip dispersion, viral videos, fashion trends, news, and more.
Making Friends in New Places – New York Times, Education Life
By Nicholas A. Christakis
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/making-friends-in-new-places.html