Nicholas A. Christakis Quotes & Sayings

Social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous that one has to ask what purpose they serve. — Nicholas A. Christakis

We and others have done a bunch of work to show that if your real friends online say or do something, it affects you. But if your acquaintances online say or do something, it does not. People on average have about 106 Facebook friends, but only 5 or 6 real friends. — Nicholas A. Christakis

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent ... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience. — Nicholas A. Christakis

Just because we say networks are important doesn't mean that networks explain everything. We're just adding additional information. Networks don't work like a match - they work like a magnifying glass. — Nicholas A. Christakis

In fact, like other personality traits, personal happiness appears to be strongly influenced by our genes. Studies of identical and fraternal twins show that identical twins are significantly more likely to exhibit the same level of happiness than are fraternal twins or other siblings. Behavior geneticists have used these studies to estimate just how much genes matter, and their best guess is that long-term happiness depends 50 percent on a person's genetic set point, 10 percent on their circumstances (e.g., where they live, how rich they are, how healthy they are), and 40 percent on what they choose to think and do.31 — Nicholas A. Christakis

The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today's intellectual challenges. — Nicholas A. Christakis

Because of our tendency to want what others want, and because of our inclination to see the choices of others as an efficient way to understand the world, our social networks can magnify what starts as an essentially random variation. — Nicholas A. Christakis

There are very fundamental reasons we live our lives in social networks, and if we really understood the role they're playing in our society, we would take better care of social networks and find ways to take advantage of their power to improve our society. — Nicholas A. Christakis

One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers. — Nicholas A. Christakis

We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals. — Nicholas A. Christakis

If we are connected to everyone else by six degrees and we can influence them up to three degrees, then one way to think about ourselves is that each of us can reach about halfway to everyone else on the planet. — Nicholas A. Christakis

We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend's friend's friend became happy, you became happy. — Nicholas A. Christakis

Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes over centuries and even decades. — Nicholas A. Christakis

Everyday interactions we have with other people are definitely contagious, in terms of happiness. — Nicholas A. Christakis

If your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher ... If your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher ... If your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. It's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends that there's no longer a relationship between that person's body size and your own body size. — Nicholas A. Christakis

It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science. — Nicholas A. Christakis

I like to have met someone in real life before being their Facebook friend. — Nicholas A. Christakis

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics. — Nicholas A. Christakis

We will create life from inanimate compounds, and we will find life in space. But the life that should more immediately interest us lies between these extremes, in the middle range we all inhabit between our genes and our stars. — Nicholas A. Christakis

It is the spread of the good things that vindicates the whole reason we live our lives in networks. If I was always violent to you or gave you germs, you would cut the ties to me and the network would disintegrate. In a deep and fundamental way, networks are connected to goodness, and goodness is required for networks to emerge and spread. — Nicholas A. Christakis

What constrains or enables the capacity of human beings to work in groups is not so much the technology, but rather the capacity of the human brain to have and monitor social interactions. — Nicholas A. Christakis

We're not just social animals in the conventional way that people think. It's not just a bunch of us who hang out together. We have a very specific pattern of ties, and they have a particular shape and structure that is encoded in our genes. It means that human beings have evolved to live their lives embedded in social networks. — Nicholas A. Christakis

I'm not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. — Nicholas A. Christakis

It is well to look around at whom, and not just what, surrounds us. Population structure will change everything. Our health, wealth, and peace depend on it. — Nicholas A. Christakis

The reason we form networks is because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. It's to our advantage as individuals and a species to assemble ourselves in this fashion. — Nicholas A. Christakis

We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. — Nicholas A. Christakis

Whether we appreciate it or not, we live out our lives surrounded by an intricate pattern of social connections ... We're all embedded in this network; it affects us profoundly and we may be unaware of its existence, of its effect on us. — Nicholas A. Christakis

Social media and the Internet haven't changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes. — Nicholas A. Christakis

People have just assumed that ... if we call our Facebook acquaintances our friends, we must be influenced by them, too. But we're not. — Nicholas A. Christakis

It's important for students to take their studies seriously. — Nicholas A. Christakis

It's fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it's harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying. — Nicholas A. Christakis