Sublime

The more friends you had, the bigger were the bits of the brain known to be involved in social skills

For some time now, philosophy and psychology have existed as very separate disciplines, the latter more concerned with observing or fixing pathologies than studying how we might most happily live out our short lives. Then, recently, visionaries in both fields have again found common ground.

This matters, argues economist Robert Frank, because ‘our beliefs about human nature help shape human nature itself’.

provision of eight social benefits

Increasing social isolation can have serious negative consequences not just for our wellbeing (as we saw in chapter 1), but also for our cognitive abilities, creating a downward spiral that feeds on itself.

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.

that extraverts have more friends in every layer than introverts do, as well as more friends overall. As we might anticipate, they also had emotionally less close relationships with each individual in each layer, even when we control for network size.