Do you think it’s not worth stopping to chat with a neighbor or talking in a park while walking your dog? You are wrong, research and professionals show that interacting with regular strangers and cultivating weak interactions has many benefits. Those little moments that you dedicate to your acquaintances do not fall on deaf ears.
The importance of having friends is known to everyone and there are many studies that demonstrate the benefits for happiness and health, but less is said about the importance of the so-called ‘weak ties’, that is, the acquaintances with whom we keep brief talks, with whom we do not cultivate a deep friendship, but which also seriously contribute to our emotional well-being, according to science.
The term ‘weak ties’ was coined by sociologist Mark S. Granovetter in his publication The Strength of Weak Ties, where it is confirmed that interaction with acquaintances contributes a lot to emotional well-being and happiness, contributes to have more and more diverse information, enhances innovation and even helps improve one’s professional career, among many other benefits.
The research and social psychology experts we have consulted say that these weak ties contribute to better physical, mental and relational health, that they make us feel happier even when they are not deep, that they provide a broader perspective on the world that surrounds us, that help give momentum in the workplace and that also serve as practice for communication skills with others.
Having a chat on the street while walking the dog, talking in the park with other parents, a brief elevator chat with a neighbor, discussing a game or news with another regular customer at your usual bar… all of these are weak ties that They benefit health and contribute to happiness, although they may seem banal. According to Granovetter, weak ties are people you know, but not very well. They are simply acquaintances.
“Sharing the same space at a given time, living in the same building, working in the same place, going to the same bar where you go to have a beer and say hello,” are examples of liquid relationships, as he explains in conversation with La Vanguardia. Guillermo Fauce, doctor in psychology, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and president of the Psicología Sin Fronteras foundation. “It becomes a weak relationship when you put a name to the person,” he summarizes.
For Ignacio Ramos Vidal, professor of social psychology and member of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Seville, a weak tie “is, for example, one in which relationships do not occur with a very high frequency, they do not necessarily have to be reciprocal, “They are sporadic, with people who are not part of our immediate social circle.” “At least you have to have the ability to recognize the person,” summarizes Ramos in conversation with La Vanguardia.
Weak ties, liquid relationships, shallow ties… acquaintances ultimately play a role in our health and happiness that has been given little prominence, but it is proven that they are important in some areas of life, in addition to that “there are no solid relationships if there has not been a weak one first,” adds Fauce.
Furthermore, “social relationships are a key element in our health”, in which three totally related areas are established according to Fauce, “physical, social and emotional or psychological health (…) and without these three legs, there is no health” .
“There is no doubt that weak relationships influence happiness,” says Ramos, because on the one hand, social relationships avoid social isolation “which we know from scientific evidence affects both mental and physical health.” On the other hand, “social support contributes to well-being and also cushions the stress and psychological tension that we suffer due to circumstances.” “All of this is minimized if we have a social context in which we can rely,” he explains.
Another study that confirmed the importance of liquid relationships was carried out by Gillian M Sandstrom and Elizabeth W Dunn in 2014 under the title Social Interactions and Well-Being: The Surprising Power of Weak Ties of weak ties). The researchers did several analyzes with students from which it was deduced that “they experienced greater happiness and a feeling of belonging on the days when they had interacted with more classmates than usual” and after expanding the scope of the study, which included interactions with both strong and weak, they once again elucidated that “social interactions with the most peripheral members of our social networks contribute to our well-being.”
“The current results highlight the power of weak ties, suggesting that even social interactions with the most peripheral members of our social networks contribute to our well-being,” this study determines.
The sociologist at John Hopkins University who coined the term in the 1970s already determined that low-intensity relationships generate greater innovation compared to those that are more constant and similar.
In the interview with La Vanguardia, Ramos highlights this benefit and adds that “having these weak ties, that is, being able to go beyond our closed, highly cohesive circle of people who are very similar to us, is important because it allows us to access non-redundant information, to information that is unlikely to flow through our immediate environment.”
“The more you compare, the more you talk to others and the more you externalize, the more open you will be to the world, the more part of the world you will feel and it will have a very positive effect on your social health, which is essential for health” . “If not, discomfort, conflict, isolation occurs and this generates an emotional and relational impact,” adds Fauce.
“Weak ties have a peculiarity and that is that many times we tend to tell our secrets or intimate confidences to people with whom we have a relationship of little intensity or more sporadic, and this has a counterintuitive explanation. The thing is that since it is a person who is not part of our immediate circle, we feel less judged and we feel, for example, that there is less probability that this confidence or secret will transcend and that gives us a certain feeling of security and freedom,” says Ramos.
More recently, a team of researchers from Harvard, Stanford, MIT and LinkedIn conducted the largest experimental study to date on the impact of social networks on the labor market in 2022 and have elucidated that weaker social connections have a greater beneficial effect in labor mobility than stronger ties.
A work that represents the first large-scale, longitudinal and experimental evidence on the causal effects of strong and weak ties on labor mobility and which has been published in the journal Science with the title A causal test of the strength of weak ties .
In their study, the researchers conducted a set of experiments on LinkedIn over 5 years with 20 million people around the world, during which 2 billion new links and 600,000 new jobs were created.
Older people, young people and adolescents, immigrants who have recently arrived in a place, people who telework and spend a lot of time alone are some of the profiles for which establishing weak ties takes on special importance.
“Many of the programs being done against the epidemic of unwanted loneliness are going in this direction,” says Fauce, from neighbors helping each other to “building collective community spaces so we can simply have a coffee or watch a movie together.” In short, rebuild the community and look for meeting spaces for society,” he explains.
Through Psicología Sin Fronteras, its president explains that “we are intervening, for example, with migrants who are arriving in the Canary Islands and many of the programs are focused on people breaking that isolation” upon their arrival. “It’s one of the first things we do,” she insists.
“We are in the century of unwanted loneliness and in particular it is growing a lot among adolescents and young people because they have many connections and few relationships,” explains Guillermo Fauce, who insists during the interview on how they have affected, for better and for worse, the Virtual social networks in bonding and relational health.
Basing liquid relationships on the Internet is a double-edged sword, because on the one hand it is true that they help “bring relationships closer and overcome barriers that may exist, such as shyness or fear” and for that, tools such as social networks, WhatsApp, etc., although they have the danger of turning relationships virtual and making them even more ephemeral.
“It has to be combined, WhatsApp is very powerful when it comes to breaking down barriers to communicate with someone from outside and that is good because before you had to write a letter and wait”, “the problem is if we reduce all communication to just that, apostille Maw.
Both the two experts in social psychology with whom we have spoken and numerous studies endorse and insist on the crucial importance of strong ties for the well-being and physical, psychological and relational health of people.
In this regard, there is also a Harvard study titled The Study of Adult Development that began in 1938 and is still ongoing today, which confirms the importance of having strong and deep social connections and states that those who have solid human relationships They age healthier and live longer.
The key is in the combination of both, on the one hand because strong ties cannot be established without having previously been weak, as Fauce commented to this newspaper and on the other because some of the great benefits that liquid relationships bring us are different, such as opening to the world, improving contacts, the feeling of belonging to the group and even to download secrets.
