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"  When Harvard University social scientist Nicholas Christakis and University of California, San Diego professor James Fowler published their groundbreaking study about the contagion of obesity in 2007, the duo was particularly amused by the difference between how American and European headline writers framed the findings. The paper, published in The New England Journal of Medicine to much fanfare, revealed that weight gain could spread like a cold or flu, &amp;quot;infecting&amp;quot; friends and family out to three degrees of separation. In other words, if your friend&amp;#039;s friend&amp;#039;s friend gains weight, it increases your risk of getting fat\u2014and the closer the degree of separation between you and the person beefing up, the more likely you&amp;#039;ll pack on some pounds as well. &amp;quot;American headline writers all said, `Are you gaining weight? Blame your fat friends,&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Christakis says. &amp;quot;The Europeans asked, `If your friends are gaining weight, are you to blame?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; The American viewpoint tends toward individualism and self-focus. We are, after all, a nation in which calling a politician a socialist is akin to calling him a child molester. But over the past few years, with the publication of their research and, last fall, of their mind-blowing book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Christakis and Fowler have been methodically turning American narcissism on its head, showing that everything from whether you vote, marry, divorce, have kids, smoke, gain weight, donate money, become depressed or happy or violent or lonely is consciously\u2014and subconsciously\u2014influenced by your social circle. &amp;quot;The arguments in our book give a whack to free will,&amp;quot; Christakis says. And, the authors write, &amp;quot;Recognition of this loss of self-direction can be shocking.&amp;quot; However, in this loss there&amp;#039;s a gain: We may be under the sway of others, but they are also under our sway. We have real power to change the lives of thousands of people, considering that our capacity for persuasion generally extends to three degrees, and that psychologist Stanley Milgram posited in the 1960s that the whole world is, on average, separated by only six degrees. It&amp;#039;s pretty heady stuff: When you smile at a neighbor or donate money to UNICEF, for example, your action travels like a wave, washing over thousands of other people, nudging them toward happiness and charity. Based on Christakis and Fowler&amp;#039;s research, here are some ideas for magnifying and maximizing your ability to pay it forward:  1. Have a Party People who are &amp;quot;central&amp;quot; to their social networks not only themselves have a lot of friends, but their friends also have more friends. And the more central your position in your social network, the better a vector you are for ideas, viruses, and habits. So the center is a bad place to be if swine flu is going around, but a great place to be if happiness or money is in the air. Christakis and Fowler call it the &amp;quot;centrality premium.&amp;quot; Assuming your goal is to pass around the good stuff rather than syphilis or suicidal ideation, your best bet is to maintain your current relationships while making new friends as well, allowing your influence to stretch as far as possible. (Also, bonus mitzvah: You could even make a match. In a study of American married couples, more than two thirds were introduced by a friend or family member.)  2. Lose Weight Since Christakis and Fowler published their study showing that obesity was socially transmissible among members of the famous Framingham Heart Study (it wasn&amp;#039;t just that birds of a feather flock together: People were actually making one another gain\u2014and, sometimes, lose\u2014weight), the finding has been confirmed in multiple other populations. So how do people infect each other with fat? One way is imitation. Brain scans show that when you watch someone else eat or run, your brain activity is the same as if you were eating or running yourself, priming you to do the same things. And people in experiments seated next to robust eaters will eat more than those seated next to light eaters. Social norms also play a role: If your friend gains weight, you might become less motivated to go to the gym because your friend&amp;#039;s example showed you that weight gain isn&amp;#039;t the end of the world. She&amp;#039;s heavier but still the same person you know and love. And now that 66 percent of the American population is overweight or obese, that&amp;#039;s a pretty well-established social norm. Happily, this effect could be turned on its head if people worked to establish an opposite social norm\u2014weight loss can spread just as easily as weight gain if you seed your network with fat-fighting habits. In Christakis and Fowler&amp;#039;s book, they suggest starting a running club containing friends of friends so that you&amp;#039;re surrounding yourself and your closest contacts with exercisers (and remember, when people see you run, it makes their brains think about running too). You can also make healthier food choices and eat with greater restraint. If you take a pass on the fries and eat more vegetables, your pals are more likely to make the same choices. And then, once you reach a healthier weight, you might shift the norms in your group.  If you&amp;#039;re thinking that sounds like a lot of work and maybe it would just be easier to ditch friends who gain weight to prevent them from corrupting you, Christakis says he and Fowler actually looked into this as a diet method and found that it didn&amp;#039;t work. People who cut ties with a fat friend didn&amp;#039;t lose weight, possibly because the toll of losing a friend counteracted weight-loss efforts.   3. Quit Smoking\u2014or, if You Don&amp;#039;t Smoke, Befriend a Smoker Smoking is like obesity in terms of how friends influence one another. Christakis and Fowler write that smoking cessation among groups of people resembles the synchrony of flocking birds or schooling fish (indeed, 15 years ago it seemed like everyone I knew smoked; now, though I know most of the same people, almost nobody smokes). However, the changes in the culture that have made smoking less acceptable\u2014disallowing it in offices, restaurants, and other public places\u2014have reduced smoking in the general population but also polarized smokers and nonsmokers. That, in turn, diminishes the pressure nonsmokers can put on the remaining smokers, since the two groups don&amp;#039;t hang out with each other as much. So, if you&amp;#039;re a smoker, keep in mind that if you quit, your friends are likely to follow suit. And if you don&amp;#039;t smoke, be nice to that guy in the office always huddling outside with his cancer sticks. Maybe you can rub your healthy habits off on him if he gets to know you and your free-breathing friends at that (smoke-free) party you&amp;#039;re throwing.  4. Vote If you&amp;#039;re a fan of democracy, one of the most important things you can do to help ours function is to turn up at the polls on Election Day. When you vote, your closest friends are 15 percent more likely to vote themselves, and their friends are, in turn, more likely to vote. You may think, Well, who cares if they vote\u2014the important thing is that they vote for the candidates and initiatives I believe in. But according to Christakis and Fowler, studies show that most people don&amp;#039;t pay that much attention to politics and don&amp;#039;t get their opinions from the media\u2014they look to &amp;quot;opinion leaders&amp;quot; in their social networks, who tell them what to think. Because of the principle of homophily (humans are attracted to people like themselves), your friends probably hold mostly the same beliefs you do. But if you educate yourself about the environment, health care, education, gay marriage, or whatever issue feels most important to you, tell your friends about it. And then vote, which, to come full circle, means you&amp;#039;re adding to the number of people who will show up and pull down the same levers (or punch the same chads) that you did, making your vote extra-votey.  5. Donate Surveys that ask people why they gave money to charity usually find that about 80 percent did so because they were asked to by someone they knew. And in one Stanford study of a corporate donation program to the United Way, people gave more money when their desks were closer to those of bigger donors. And now, Christakis and Fowler&amp;#039;s newest study, to be published this spring, shows how being generous to social contacts can set off a domino effect.  The researchers assigned 240 students to play six rounds of &amp;quot;cooperation games&amp;quot; with three other students, shifting the group with each round so students never played together twice. Each student was given some money, and the game involved deciding how much to &amp;quot;donate&amp;quot; to the group. They found that for every extra dollar one of the players gave in the first group, the other members would give an extra 20 cents in the next group, and then all the people in those groups would give an extra 5 cents, and so on. &amp;quot;You can see the effect of the kindness,&amp;quot; Christakis says. &amp;quot;You get these ripple effects.&amp;quot; Wouldn&amp;#039;t it be nice to start such a ripple?  6. Mentor Money isn&amp;#039;t the only valuable commodity you can donate. You can also give your time and your knowledge. One of the most fascinating points Christakis and Fowler bring up is how networks can be self-reinforcing: The rich can get richer, the happy can get happier, and the disenfranchised can become more disenfranchised. They suggest that instead of just looking at people&amp;#039;s race or gender or income level, we also need to look at social network inequality. People who only know other impoverished, uneducated, disconnected people have a tougher time getting a leg up in the world than, for example, the child of a senator. One way you could start chipping away at network inequality is to mentor young people from isolated, disadvantaged social networks. When you introduce them to your world, you offer an opportunity to revise their social norms, make connections that might lead to a better education or better job, improve their health status, and better their lives. Just by getting to know you. Because you&amp;#039;re awesome like that. And, seriously, your friends and family are enormously valuable assets.  7. Spread Love and Happiness When Christakis and Fowler looked at levels of happiness among members of the Framingham Heart Study, they found that having a first-degree friend who is happy increases the likelihood you are happy by 15 percent. If that person lives less than a mile away, the effect goes up to 25 percent. When they averaged out all the connections (from first to third degree), they found that each happy person you know increases your probability of being happy by 9 percent, while an unhappy friend decreases it by only 7 percent. A small difference, sure, but better than nothing. &amp;quot;If you were simply playing the averages, and you didn&amp;#039;t know anything about the emotional state of a new person you just met, you would probably want to be friends with her,&amp;quot; they write. &amp;quot;She might make you unhappy, but there is a better chance she will make you happy.&amp;quot; So go out and make a new friend. A smile is incredibly infectious. 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