Smoking ban lcid many studies have highlighted the incentive effect of smoking to the point that tobacco companies do not hesitate to place their products in films (read: No films without smoke). But quitting is also socially and culturally contagious. .

We have found by analyzing large social networks that whole groups of people do not know necessarily have stopped smoking at the same time, says Nicholas Christakis, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University. There’s a cultural change or state of mind (zeitgeist) in an entire social group of people associated with it without being personally acquainted and who quit smoking all together, said there.

The professor and his team have drawn their conclusions from the reconstruction of the social network of 12,067 individuals between 1971 and 2003. All family changes for participants – marriage, death or divorce proceedings – were listed. In addition, they indicated their contacts with their close friends, work colleagues and neighbors. Luckily, many of these friends and colleagues also participated in this study, allowing the authors to observe a total of 53,228 social relationships, family and work.

Most striking in this study is that people stop smoking group and not only, say the researchers whose study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. When you look at all these social networks over a period of more than 30 years reveals that the average size of ‘clusters’ of smokers remains roughly the same but their number has declined steadily says James Fowler of the University of California, co-author of the study.

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