Teenagers are often pressured into lighting up their first cigarette by their friends, but a new study finds that total strangers persuade smokers to quit. Whether you smoke depends not only on your friends and family, but also on the habits of two additional degrees of separation – your friends' friends' friends. "In a very deep way, people's smoking cessation decisions resemble flocking of birds," says Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. (source: newscientist.com)
|
