Social Networks and Happiness

It seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you:

We found that social net­works have clus­ters of happy and unhappy peo­ple within them that reach out to three degrees of sep­a­ra­tion. A person’s hap­pi­ness is related to the hap­pi­ness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends — that is, to peo­ple well beyond their social hori­zon. We found that happy peo­ple tend to be located in the cen­ter of their social net­works and to be located in large clus­ters of other happy peo­ple. And we found that each addi­tional happy friend increases a person’s prob­a­bil­ity of being happy by about 9%.