While our site provides public pages where everyone can share stories and resources, MIGHTY is unusual in its mission to have each member form and lead his or her own small, private team committed to following and supporting the leader’s personal goal. Why a small team? Why not encourage unlimited-size message boards on losing weight, quitting smoking, etc., or encourage each member simply to blog about their goal to the universe? “Human beings are profoundly social, and the social context that can have the most powerful impact on human behavior is the small group – small enough for each member to know and interact with every other member regularly,” MIGHTY founder Joan Greco explains.
New, innovative research is confirming this premise. Most recently two social scientists, studying Framingham Heart Study data covering thousands of individuals and tens of thousands of relationships spanning 32 years, found that healthy behaviors, such as quitting smoking or losing weight, can pass from friend to friend almost like a virus. The impact wasn’t based on proximity to masses of people behaving a certain way – it was based on the closeness of the connection one felt with particular individuals. (Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Little, Brown 2009) The research has been covered by The New York Times Magazine, USA Today, Wired, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among others.
Other studies provide additional support for the power of small teams. Particularly intriguing are the experiments by psychologists Stephen Garcia and Avishalom Tor, demonstrating that competitors tried harder when up against a smaller group of contenders, even when the odds of winning remained unchanged. (Garcia, S., & Tor, A. (2009). “The N-Effect: More Competitors, Less Competition”, Psychological Science.
The powerful impact of small groups was anticipated by author Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell describes how the organization of multiple small groups can take a particular behavior over the tipping point into a social epidemic, using examples from business, religion, book sales, and the military. Gladwell quotes one businessman who observed, “Peer pressure is much more powerful than the concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to live up to what is expected of them.” (Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, Little, Brown (2000), pp. 169-192.)
If the desire to live up to a group’s expectations is “many, many times more powerful” than the power of a boss, imagine how much more powerful it must be than efforts at personal improvement based on individual “will power” alone. The goal of MIGHTY is to harness this social force to improve people’s lives.