I See your Contagious Social Capital (And Raise you Sudo make me a Sandwich)

It’s my general policy to be nice to other people. I have maintained this policy for a while. Being nice will solve about 90% of your life’s problems. Naturally, it’s not for everyone, but for me it has served pretty well.

So I think it’s time to synthesize these two ideas. We have learned about how having a network creates “social capital,” resources that you can use and turn into job possibilities, sales clients, etc. In my case, I expect “favors and niceness” as my return on investment. However, I never stopped to think about how my actions towards people would affect my network as a whole.

If I was nice to one person in my advisement group of 12 students, how would the others become affected? Of course, the students who were most respected would clearly have the greatest effect on my network. This was always part of my problem; I often made friends with people who didn’t have many, so clearly I did not invest wisely. If I had, though, the social contagion that would run through the network would have greatly boosted the amount of niceness I received.

My goal in this is to say, if you ever have the choice to make an enemy or a friend, make a friend. Because A: You don’t want that kind of animosity flowing through your network, and B: being friends affects your friend’s friends, too. To illustrate this, BEHOLD.

This is your network:

----- You -----

This is your dyad:

You ----- Friend

This is a good triad:

You ----- Friend

   |                 |

Friend’s Friend

This is a potentially awkward triad:

You ----- Friend

  |               |

Friend’s Enemy

What do you do? Do you take your friend’s enemy as your enemy, or as your friend?

In my opinion, It’s simply in your best interest to be nice to both. Even though your friend may hate this person, it seems unlikely that they will look poorly upon you for being nice, even to their enemy.  My argument is that this occurs in less than 50% of the cases. In addition! Even if you lose your first friend, the second friend you gain will make up for it. 1 – 1 + 1 =  1. So the maths says you can’t actually come out behind in all this. I’m all about the maths.

So, whenever you get the chance, don’t be afraid if your network has a lot of these.

You ----- Friend

   |              |

Friend/ Friend’s Enemy

Just a thought based on my experience. I had SO MANY OF THESE in high school. I had all of them, I think. All the awkward triads.

I think my point is, for these kinds of triads, don’t worry so much about the hatred contagion running between these two people, because love trumps hate, like, every time, man.

Does anyone have any examples of where they tried to make friends with their friend’s enemy and it went horribly wrong? Or sometime they didn’t expect to become friends with a friend’s enemy but it happened anyway?