Nicholas Christakis
Physician & Social Scientist, Harvard
Nicholas A. Christakis is a physician, sociologist, and director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science. His most recent book is Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (March 2019). Follow him on Twitter @NAChristakis
Disagreements should not equal censorship.
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3 min
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Our opponents’ objections to our ideas often contain insight as to how we can better refine them.
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2 min
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As humans, we teach each other. But do we take for granted our freedom to do so?
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7 min
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Sometimes, academic expression can make people uncomfortable. But this tension is a feature, not a bug.
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7 min
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When it comes to leadership, we’re quite picky on who we let govern us.
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6 min
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In general, birds of a feather do tend to flock together.
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8 min
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This is the psychology of why friendships (and marriages) fail.
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5 min
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In his lecture, Nicholas Christakis explains why individual actions are inextricably linked to sociological pressures. Whether you’re absorbing altruism performed by someone you’ll never meet or deciding to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, collective phenomena affect every aspect of your life.
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57 min
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You copy the people to whom you are connected primarily and you come to copy them along a whole variety of traits.
When people are free to choose anything they want, they usually choose what their friends have chosen, says internist and sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Mimicry is a fundamental part of human […]
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3 min
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It turns out we’re not the only species that assembles ourselves into networks, says sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Consider the slime mold.
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3 min
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Social media tools may push a society toward democracy, but they don’t fundamentally alter an individual’s capacity for social relationships.
When the telephone was invented, there were similar fears that human interaction would suffer, but neither it, nor the internet, changes fundamentally human traits like love and friendship.
Twitter or no Twitter, our social networks are basically as small and close as they were in ancient Rome.
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6 min
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To succeed in business, you don’t want to be too densely interconnected with entities that resemble you—or too diffusely linked to entities that don’t resemble you.
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7 min
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Influencing tastes across social networks is a tricky business: a love of “Love Actually” spreads differently than a love of “Pulp Fiction.”
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5 min
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Social networks “magnify whatever they’re seeded with”—from germs to altruism to a diet of muffins and beer.
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5 min
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Like atoms in a molecule, we’re all linked together. Studying the complex matrix that results can illuminate everything from bucket brigades to Bernie Madoff.
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7 min
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The social networks we form add up to a giant “human superorganism.”
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3 min
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A conversation with the Harvard physician and social scientist.
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32 min
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