Nicholas A. Christakis

Scientist

1962-05-07

Quotes by 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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, need to match their institutional structures to today's intellectual challenges.

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