Think online social networks have no bearing on your real life? Think again. Scientists who studied Facebook activity and mortality rates of registered California voters found that people who received many friend requests were far less likely to die over a two-year period than those who did not. Initiating friend requests, however, seemed to have no effect on death rates whatsoever.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hint at deeper complexities in the relationship between humans’ health and their social networks — whether those networks are online, or in person.
Senior author James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California, San Diego, has spent years studying the link between human well-being and real-world social networks, including how happiness and even obesity may spread through them. But he and his colleagues wondered if perhaps online networks could also be connected to health.
“We’ve known for a long time, for decades now, that offline social networks, especially social integration, (were) related to longer life,” said lead author William Hobbs, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University who performed the research while at UC San Diego. “But we didn’t know if that extended to online interactions too.”
