Quotes by Nicholas A. Christakis

About Nicholas A. Christakis:

Nicholas A. Christakis is an American sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic and biosocial determinants of behavior, health, and longevity. He is the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. He directs the Human Nature Lab, and he is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Until July 2013, he was Professor of Medical Sociology in the Department of Health Care Policy and a Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and an Attending Physician at the Harvard-affiliated Mt. Auburn Hospital.
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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, ...

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

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 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'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...

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 compone...

Nicholas A. Christakis

We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.

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

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

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 o...

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

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

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

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

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 ...

Nicholas A. Christakis

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

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, netw...

Nicholas A. Christakis

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameNicholas A. Christakis
  • DescriptionAmerican physician and sociologist
  • BornMay 7, 1962
  • ProfessionSociologist