2 . Almost everyone gossips. And a new study finds that people spend about 52 minutes per day, on average, talking to someone about others who are not present

But here’s the surprise: Despite the assumption that most gossip is trash talk, the study finds the majority of gossip is nonjudgmental chat.

“People love to talk about others,” says Jeremy Cone, a psychologist at Williams College. “Think about your own conversations with a family member or friend: You talk about everyday things that keep you connected. You share your daughter got her driver’s license or your uncle has a kidney stone. Much of it is just documenting facts.”

Of course, the study also finds that some gossip is negative or mean-spirited. About 15% of the gossip included some type of negative judgement.

But even negative gossip can serve a purpose, as more research has found.

“I think gossiping can be a smart thing to do,” says Elena Martinescu who has studied gossip in the workplace. “It allows people to keep track of what’s going on and form social connection with other people.”

Research has shown that gossip can help build group cohesion (凝聚力) and cooperation. “When you gossip, you can keep track of who is contributing to the group and who's being selfish,” Martinescu explains. “And by sharing this information, you can exclude those group members who are social loafers (游手好闲的人).”

“We also found negative gossip makes people likely to repair the aspects of their behavior that they were criticized for,” Martinescu says.

So, say, for instance, you were criticized for always arriving at work late. Hearing that gossip about yourself may motivate you to want to be on time.

Of course, this isn’t a license to be loose lips or to repeat baseless claims that can damage someone’s reputation unfairly. But confiding (吐露个人隐私) in your friends and colleagues and sharing impressions about another person — even when they’re negative — may be helpful.

5 . There are several ways from which to choose for you to keep your kids safe in your neighborhood. But the first step to keep your child safe in your neighborhood is to know your neighbors.

Knowing your neighbors can save you a lot of worry. It lets you know that the car that has just driven down the street belongs to “the yellow house on the corner”, or the truck that has just driven by the playground looks unfamiliar, but the guy in the passenger seat lives two doors down. It’s these simple things that keep you from going out of your mind whenever you see someone driving by where children are playing.

But you shouldn’t just know what they look like. The next step is to know them well. What do they do? How do they act?You might be OK with them driving by the playground since they live in the neighborhood, but are you OK with them being on the playground?Knowing your neighbors helps with several things. First you find out what kind of people they are. This helps you know if you should let your child go out in an area that they gather. Let’s face it: you don’t want your child to play around people or people’s children that curse (咒骂) or hit each other.   Sometimes you have to protect your child against your own neighbors.

Knowing them also makes them know you. Being neighbors is an interesting thing. You might not like them or have the same views as them, but we all usually protect those that we consider our own. If you know your neighbors, they know you. They will more probably look after the child of the nice lady down the street in the brick house, than the people in the house on the corner that no one ever sees.

6 . You may not realize it, but you are doing much more than just studying when you are at school. School is also the place where you learn to get on well with people. But this is not always easy. What can you do if you just don't like one of your classmates?

If you discover that you have problems getting on with your classmates or friends, the most important thing to learn is tolerance. Tolerance is the ability to realize and respect the differences in others. We cannot change the way that other people do, so it is important to learn to live happily with them.

Tolerance will make everyone get on better with each other. Getting to know someone may help you understand why he does things differently. Something different does not exactly mean that it is bad. Tolerance teaches us to keep a temperate and open mind.

You need to remember an old saying, “Treat others how you want to be treated.” If you tolerate something, it does not mean that you have to like it. No one is asking you to change who you are or what you believe in. Tolerance just means that you should respect the differences in others and not try to make them change.

It is important to practice tolerance, because it will make everyone's life easier. Learn to accept people for their different abilities and interests. The world is very different, and practicing tolerance in your own school and city can help make a difference.

8 . We’ve all been there: in a lift, in line at the bank or on an airplane, surrounded by people who are, like us, deeply focused on their smartphones or, worse, struggling with the uncomfortable silence.

What’s the problem? It’s possible that we all don’t have enough conversational ability. It’s more likely that none of us start a conversation because it’s embarrassing and challenging, or we think it’s annoying and unnecessary. But the next time you find yourself among strangers, consider that small talk is worth the trouble. Experts say it’s a valuable social practice that leads to big benefits.

It is easy to consider small talk as unimportant, but we can’t forget that deep relationships wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t casual conversations. Small talk is the grease (润滑剂) for social communication, says Bernardo Carducci, director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast. “Almost every great love story and each big business deal begins with small talk,” he explains. “The secret to successful small talk is learning how to connect with others, not just communicate with them.”

In a 2014 study, Elizabeth Dunn, professor of psychology at UBC, invited people to a coffee shop. One group was asked to interact (互动) with its waiter; the other, to speak only when necessary. The results showed that those who chatted with their server reported significantly higher positive feelings and a better coffee shop experience. “It’s not that talking to the waiter is better than talking to your husband,” says Dunn. “But interactions with peripheral (边缘的) members of our social network is important for our happiness and health.”

Dunn believes that people who reach out to strangers feel a greater sense of belonging, a link with others. Carducci believes developing such a sense of belonging starts with small talk. “Small talk is the basis of good manners,” he says.

9 . Most of us are already aware of the direct effect we have on our friends and family. But we rarely consider that everything we think, feel, do, or say can spread far beyond the people we know. Conversely(相反地), our friends and family serve as conduits(渠道) for us to be influenced by hundreds or even thousands of other people. In a kind of social chain reaction, we can be deeply affected by events we do not witness that happen to people we do not know. As part of a social network, we go beyond ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger.

Our connectedness carries with it fundamental implications(影响) for the way we understand the human condition. Social networks have value precisely because they can help us to achieve what we could not achieve on our own. Yet, social­network effects are not always positive. Depression, obesity, financial panic, and violence also spread. Social networks, it turns out, tend to magnify(放大) whatever they are seeded with.

Partly for this reason, social networks are creative. And what these networks create does not belong to any one individual—it is shared by all those in the network. In this way, a social network is like a commonly owned forest: We all stand to benefit from it, but we also must work together to ensure it remains healthy and productive. While social networks are fundamentally and distinctively human, and can be seen everywhere, they should not be taken for granted.

If you are happier or richer or healthier than others, it may have a lot to do with where you happen to be in the network, even if you cannot recognize your own location. And it may have a lot to do with the overall structure of the network, even if you cannot control that structure at all. And in some cases, the process feeds back to the network itself. A person with many friends may become rich and then attract even more friends. This rich­get­richer dynamic means social networks can dramatically reinforce two different kinds of inequality in our society: situational inequality and positional inequality.

Lawmakers have not yet considered the consequences of positional inequality. Still, understanding the way we are connected is an essential step in creating a more just society and in carrying out public policies affecting everything from public health to the economy. We might be better off vaccinating(接种疫苗) centrally located individuals rather than weak individuals. We might be better off helping interconnected groups of people to avoid criminal behaviour rather than preventing or punishing crimes one at a time.

If we want to understand how society works, we need to fill in the missing links between individuals. We need to understand how interconnections and interactions between people give rise to wholly new aspects of human experience that are not present in the individuals themselves. If we do not understand social networks, we cannot hope to fully understand either ourselves or the world we inhabit.