Nicholas A. Christakis Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Everyday interactions we have with other people are definitely contagious, in terms of happiness.

Nicholas A. Christakis

#8. I like to have met someone in real life before being their Facebook friend.

Nicholas A. Christakis

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.

Nicholas A. Christakis

#24. 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

#25. It's important for students to take their studies seriously.

Nicholas A. Christakis