[bdkoepke]

Ugh, seems like another article that derives causation from correlation.

Specifically: "We have evolved for it, to the extent that those surrounded by a tight-knit group of friends who regularly gather to eat—and, crucially, gossip—live an average of 15 years longer than loners."

Perhaps the reason that people with a large group of friends live much longer is that people who are in better health tend to have more active social lives. If you have some sort of disorder or are extremely obese could it be that you're less likely to be able to spend time with lots of other people?

[jonnathanson]

Yep. Give me five minutes, a pen, and some paper, and I can jot down a list of at least fifty potential confounding variables. I trust that someone, somewhere has strong and well-structured data, hinting at a causal relationship and a direction of causality. If so, I'd like to read that source.

Now, I'm not naive. I know that it would be damned near impossible to structure a longitudinal test that a) identifies all the significant variables, b) isolates the most appropriate ones, and c) controls for the least appropriate ones. But absent that sort of test, I'd like to read the tests that we have.

There may indeed be a connection between socialization and multi-factor health outcomes. Maybe even a causal link. I'm certainly willing to consider that. But let's avoid blanket arguments such as 'We've evolved to be social creatures, therefore, we need friends as much as food and water.' There are a lot of interesting ideas in this article, and the article weakens those ideas when it relies on folksy generalizations.

[Houshalter]

I assume the researchers were smart enough to think of that. Don't judge a study based on a one sentence description from a journalist.

[bdkoepke]

I was commenting more on the way that the journalist portrayed the research than the research itself.

Another example: "But, however powerful the economic and social forces behind the disappearing neighbour—and however positive many of its results—according to reams of new research, the transformation is also poisoning our politics and, quite literally, killing us."

These are the kinds of articles that cause people to have an anti-science attitude. "One week coffee is good for me and the next week it causes cancer". It also makes it very difficult to address these kinds of problems because you have one side where people are running around like chicken little and another side that may actually agree that the issues is a problem but they have much more moderate solutions than the majority.

[nsainsbury]

The average quality of papers from the field of psychology is abysmal. It pays to be sceptical here.

[Swizec]

Even simpler than that. Healthy people are more attractive and more attractive people are more successful[1], which in turn makes them more successful socially because people like to associate with people who are more successful than themselves for various reasons[2].

[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

[bdkoepke]

Yeah your probably right, the halo effect probably plays a roll as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect.