The death of a loved one or common friend is capable of creating stronger bonds in social networks between those who suffer the loss , according to a recent study carried out by Facebook in collaboration with the University of California, San Diego ( USA) and just published in the journal Nature Human Behavior . Even two years after death, friends and acquaintances of that person are in closer contact with each other than before it occurred.
To carry out the study, the anonymous statistics of more than 15,000 groups of friends who had lost someone they knew were analyzed on Facebook and compared them with 30,000 similar networks in which no deaths had occurred. They measured the interaction by counting the comments, the posts and the photo tagging they carried out – what they did not analyze was the content of the messages.
The researchers studied close friends of the deceased person – those with whom he had interacted at least in the last six months of his life – and took note of how much those friends interacted with different types of people: good friends also of the deceased and less acquaintances. close – who had not contacted the deceased in the last six months.
30% more interactions
As soon as the death of the person occurred, in that same month, the best friends of the deceased interacted with each other approximately 30% more than usual, and with those who were only acquaintances of the deceased person, 15% more. That intensity in friend-friend communication gradually disappeared during the following year and in the case of friend-acquaintance in just a few months.
However, even two years after the death of the person, in both cases it was recorded that the interactions in the groups of friends who had lost someone were 3% higher than in those who had not lost anyone.
“What’s surprising is that it lasts so long,” explains William Hobbs, a sociologist at Northeastern University in Boston, who led this work at the University of California, San Diego, in collaboration with Moira Burke, a data analyst at Facebook.
They also found that not all deaths produced the same effect : interactions were more common when the person had died due to cancer or when they had suffered an accident; and less frequent when the causes of death were suicide or sexually transmitted diseases, among others.
