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