From records of the Framingham Heart Study, conducted from 1948 to the present in one New England city, Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler mapped out the connections between 12,000 friends and relatives. Fowler and Christakis used the contact information required to track participants for followup in the heart disease study. The authors found that friends had similar levels of obesity. The explanation could be that we have a tendency to choose friends who are similar to ourselves; or that friends are similarly affected by a shared environment. Another explanation is that what is considered an acceptable weight or portion size might be influenced by friends. This idea, of a social behavior being contagious, is not shared by all researchers.
From a book review at nytimes.com/2009/10/04
Examples of these network maps can be seen on YouTube: Prefuse: A Toolkit for Interactive Information Visualization
Jeffrey Heer, Stuart K. Card, James A. Landay
ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 421-430, 2005
PDF (1.2M) | WMV (32.8M) | YouTube
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