Youre basically saying that our small little social networks, the personal networks, can determine so much about the rest of our lives. And when so many of us, at least in this country, are kind of made to believe that we can do this on our own, its. You know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you can do this, youre basically saying it really is true who you know and how they influence you has everything to do with whats going to happen with your life. Okay, thats right, but the first thing i would emphasize is that people. Okay, so most people, when they hear the words social networks nowadays think, you know, Online Networks like facebook and myspace and orkut, even, in brazil, and so forth. But actually, the kinds of social networks that james fowler, my coauthor, and i are interested in are the real oldfashioned social networks that human beings have been making actually for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. So i have friends, i have relatives, i have neighbors, i have colleagues and coworkers, and they in turn have relatives and friends and colleagues and coworkers, and as a result of that, we assemble ourselves into these very ornate, almost baroque structures. They look like tangled Christmas Tree lights you know, these incredibly intricate structures where every light might be a person and the wires represent connections. And well assemble ourselves into these very expansive, elaborate, and complex structures, and then we proceed to live out our lives embedded in these structures, such that im connected to the people i know directly, and they are in turn connected to still other people, who are in turn connected to still other people. And as a result of this, i come to be indirectly connected to strangers, people i dont know, and it turns out that because things can spread in social networks, i can come to be affected by those people. So if your friends friend, or your friends friends friend, for example, quit smoking or gains weight or becomes happy or acts kindly or votes, those types of behaviors that these strangers to us display or practice can ripple through the network and come to affect us. Hinojosa and so why is this important . What does it matter that we know these things . Because a lot of people are probably saying. Well, yeah, there was this great shampoo commercial on a bazillion years ago. Thats right. Hinojosa you know, if you tell two friends and then theyll tell two friends, and then it just kind of pops up and the whole screen is filled with people who are now using this shampoo because you talked about it. Thats right. Hinojosa so i think this is something that we know, but why is it important to understand it . Okay, so we know it in two levels. First of all, most people are. Would take it as selfevident that we are affected by our. The people to whom were directly connected, but it is quite another thing to demonstrate that we are also affected by the people to whom were indirectly connected. Strangers to us can affect us. If i tell you your taste in clothes might depend on the taste in clothes that your friends have, or whether you quit smoking might be affected by whether your best friend quits, most people would accept that, although its interesting to quantify that and to see to what extent is that the case. But if i were to tell you that actually, your taste in clothes or your propensity to quit smoking could be affected also by people that you dont know, then it becomes a little bit more interesting to be able to demonstrate how that happens, first and second. Hinojosa but ill tell you that my Immediate Reaction is just like, i dont know how i feel about that. Right, okay. Hinojosa im not so sure. I mean, i like this community feeling, but the fact that they actually may have an influence in determining my decisions . Okay, good, so first. One little twig, and then wel come back to that point. And the second thing is is that people are affected not only about. Not only with respect to things like their taste in music or fashions, or things that people might think of as being kind of, um, phenomena or desires that are affected by others, but even in things that they might think of as very deeply personal, like their body size or their beliefs or their emotional state. So there are two moves here. First, were saying that its not just that youre affected by the people to whom youre directly connected, youre also affected by these other people that are strangers. And second, youre not just affected by these kind of routine things you think, oh, what music i listen to youre even affected when it comes to things like your emotions or your body size or things like that. And the reason that thats interesting, among several reasons that thats interesting, is, as youre suggesting, its a little creepy. It suggests that, you know. Hinojosa so you recognize the creepiness of it. I do recognize the creepiness, but i also want to say that its not. We dont want to set up a kind of false dichotomy, like either we have free will or theres destiny, and, like, you know, we have no control over our lives. Both are the case. And many people have read our work and said that it delivers a kind of whack to free will, that what our work does is it suggests that actually people are less in control of their own lives than they think. Were all part of this human superorganism part of this creature that is social networks and, as a result, we have less agency. We have less ability to determine our own destiny. And thats true. Its true that our work supports that claim, but equally its true that our work lifts up the notion of free will, because what our work shows is that when you make a positive change in your life when you lose 20 pounds or you quit smoking or you become happy or you act kindly it doesnt just benefit you, and in fact, it doesnt just affect your friends, it affects dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of other people. So these ripple effects go both ways; not only are you affected by others, but you affect others. Hinojosa so does that mean that, essentially, all of us have the capacity to be leaders . Because, you know, for example, i go out and i do a lot of public speaking, and people who come then say, wow, thats a fascinating story. I feel inspired. And one of the reasons why i love doing this is because when you know that you have actually inspired someone, another human being, to perhaps believe in themselves, its an extraordinary thing. And what i like to say is that that means that everybody has the capacity to do that to somebody else. So, in a sense, you have the capacity to be a leader because you dont realize that if you do lose weight or you do quit smoking or you decide to run every day, that somewhere out there, somebody is going to feel that positive vibe and do the same thing. Okay, so i think its important that we distinguish different kinds of leadership and influence. So the kind of influence that someone that is a public figure might have, or that gives a speech might have, is rather different than the kind of personal, interpersonal influence that we were talking about right now. So i might, for example, make a pronouncement or lecture to my students or write an article that is read widely in the newspaper, or send a tweet out to twitter followers, for example. Hinojosa because you do. You tweet, you twitter. Well, we tweet from the book, connected book is our tweet handle, but i dont personally tweet. I mean, i tweet, but i dont have, like, a Nicholas Christakis account. James and i share that account. But my point is that thats a different kind of interpersonal influence than the kind were speaking about right now. So the kind that im interested in is the kind of facetoface kind of way in which we affect each other. So its the difference between the effect that, sort of, president obama has on his daughters versus the effect president obama has on all kids in the country, right . So the president can get up and everyone will Pay Attention to him and hell make some kind of pronouncement. He might have a weak effect over hundreds of thousands of people, or he could have a very strong, powerful, direct effect over someone he knows personally, facetoface. And so both are important, but, um. I can actually illustrate this with a little analogy, okay . Okay, so people have asked us how it is the case that there is. How there can be a kind of interpersonal influence when it comes to weight gain and obesity, for example, even though the models on the covers of magazines are as thin as they ever were. And that illustrates the difference between the two. So on the one hand, the thin model on the cover of a magazine has some kind of influence on us, but its totally swamped by the weight gain amongst the people that were directly connected to. So if all your friends are gaining weight, even if the ideal, lets say, as characterized by the, you know, cover models, is thin, still, thats not as powerful as the personal influence we experience by the people we know directly. Hinojosa so if somebody around you for example, a coworker or two coworkers suddenly kind of go up in weight, like maybe ten or 15 pounds, you look at yourself and youre like, hmm. Its not so bad, right, it changes your ideas. Hinojosa maybe its not so bad, i could maybe do this. Thats right, or the same kind of thing might happen. This is a bit more of an extreme example, but if you think about the behavior of people who are responsible for the care of prisoners. So we might have an ideal in this country that says we take care of prisoners, and we have a bill of rights, and we have habeas corpus, and we dont abuse prisoners. But if youre a prison guard and all the guards around you are abusing prisoners, even if you know the ideal, even if there are public figures that are making pronouncements, youre more affected by these personal connections than these abstract ideals. So both are important, but theyre different phenomena. The public figure making a pronouncement can have some effect, maybe a weak effect over many people, but for a given individual, were much more affected by these facetoface interactions. And this is what i meant earlier when we said that we live out our lives in these complex structures. To me, its nothing short of amazing. We form, actually, Something Like ant colonies, but on a phenomenal scale. We have these little relationships and we make this very intricate pattern of ties, that as a result of that connects us to all these people we dont know personally and who nevertheless affect us. And james and i dont think its a coincidence. We think that we as a species have actually evolved to do this, have evolved to have social networks, and have evolved to have particular kinds of social networks. Hinojosa all right, so a couple of things, because you brought up the issue of guards, and its one that ive been looking actually very closely at, the issue of guards and people in detention. And you do say that what can happen is that there can be this, and i find you to be this eternal optimist. laughs yeah, yeah, yeah. Hinojosa were happy for optimists, were happy theyre out there. But you also say, you know, other things that can spread in these social networks can be anger. Yes. Fascism. Hinojosa fascism. Fear. Yes. Hinojosa violence. Yes. Hinojosa suicide. Yes. Hinojosa so help us out here. How do we. How do we go to the altruism, the losing weight, the quitting cigarettes, and thats what takes over all of this other negative stuff . Okay, so the crucial thing to understand. There are a couple of crucial ideas here. The first idea is that, um, networks are agnostic. They will magnify whatever they are seeded with. The network itself doesnt give rise to these phenomena. The network is like a magnifying glass Something Else impinges on the system and causes people. Causes this thing to take off, and the network then magnifies it. So if you can imagine, for instance, that theres a person. A group of people on an isolated island in the pacific, there are 100 people, and theyre all disconnected from each other, theyre all living as hermits, and then all of a sudden a sailor washes up on the shore and he has an infection. If he interacts with the first person on the island, if the people on the island arent interconnected, that first person gets sick and theres no epidemic. But if the people are interconnected into a network, all 100 of them will get sick. But if the sailor hadnt washed up on the shore, nobody would have gotten sick. The network doesnt give rise to the epidemic. Something seeds the network, and then because of the connections, instead of one person getting sick, 100 get sick. First point. Second point, networks will magnify both good and bad things. So they will magnify fascism or drug use or deadly germs, but equally, they will magnify happiness or altruism or love and so forth. And the argument we make in the book is that on balance, the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. In fact, what happens as humans is that we pay a price for our interconnection. By being connected to you, i am subject to you potentially being violent, you infecting me with a germ, you making me unhappy. But also, simultaneously, i get all these benefits. And the argument is that overall, the benefits of interconnection outweigh the costs. Hinojosa so when you talk about living a connected life. You know, i feel like theres an increasing movement to want to be disconnected, but disconnected from our computers, disconnected from those, you know, thousands of friends and followers on twitter and all that stuff. But to actually be disconnected. But youre saying its okay to disconnect from those social networks on the internet. What you really want to focus on is on your social networks that are this, this. Okay, so. Hinojosa i mean, everybody thinks, like, im so connected, right . Ive got friends all over the world, ive got people following me, thats important. Okay, so i want to draw, again, a distinction between these Online Interactions and the facetoface interactions, and its the latter that im especially interested in. And i also want to make sure that we dont confuse. Hinojosa i know youre interested in it, but you have to know, nicholas, there are a lot of people who think, like, look, what matters now is exactly that. Whats happening on your social media . I dont care about your friends at home, whats your social media . First of all, these people are not your friends, okay . So these hundreds of friends. Hinojosa laughs oh, my god theyre not. At best, theyre your acquaintances. And, in fact, i kind of resent the way facebook has coopted this word friend and applied it to all of these individuals who are actually not your friends. And, in fact, weve done some studies that show that amongst the, on average, 150 friends that people have on facebook, across the half billion people that are on facebook, actually only about five or six of them are your real friends. Most of these people are not your friends any more than you might have a couple of real neighbors where you live, but you have many neighbors in your community, and those other neighbors dont really affect you, but your immediate neighbors, or your real neighbors, might. Now, i think that its really important to understand the difference between these tenuous Online Interactions and the facetoface interactions, first point. And second point, i think its very important to, um, understand that the medium is not the relationship. So let me give you an example by this. If i could interview my greatgrandmother and ask her, when she was a little girl in greece, when she was eight or ten, how many friends she had, she would say, i had one best friend, you know, maria. And there were four or five of us girls that were a really tight community of girls. We always played together. I remember them really well, she would say to me. And if i could talk to my current daughter, who is 13, as i have, and ask her, lena, tell me about your friendships . She would say, i have my best friend, takina, and i have two or three other girls, jessie and claire and suzie, that are my friends, okay . So here we have my daughter, who has a cell phone in her pocket, who can skype with her friends at night, who has all this technology, and yet something very fundamental hasnt changed. She has the same sense of a best friend and the same sense of a close set of friends. So the technology has evolved hugely in 100 years, but the human spirit hasnt changed. In fact, what were arguing in the book is that theres something very deeply fundamental about Human Connection and about human influence that is so deep and fundamental that we can study it scientifically, that we can understand things about it that are not obvious, and that these things are not. Do not change just because we have new technologies. Hinojosa so does that mean that, for example, across the world, its the same kind of thing . You know, that suddenly, you know, the group of bangladeshi girls who maybe are quite poor, but they go to school, they have the same thing. They have this friend and these, you know. And do you see that actually replicated across the world . There are. Theres no doubt that human beings, i mean, vary crossculturally tremendously, in all kinds of ways the way we dress, the languages we speak, the beliefs that we have, and so forth. But there are other aspects of our humanity that tend not to vary so much. And one of the things that james fowler and i are so interested in is the very deep and fundamental way that social Network Interactions and social influence is encoded. The sense in which theres something so fundamental about our social relationships that, even though the details will vary from place to place, actually the fundamental reality doesnt change. And, in fact, as we show in the book and as we argue elsewhere in other work weve done, theres a very fundamental. Actually, there are sort of mathematical rules that describe how human beings interact, and these rules, these mathematical descriptions, dont change much from place to place. Its true that if you go to some places, people will have slightly more friends than other places. Its true that in some places, peoples friends will be more likely to know each other than in other places. Its true if you go to some countries, intergender friendships are not permitted. You know, in saudi arabia, it would be very uncommon for a male to identify an unrelated female as a personal friend, something which we wouldnt think of as so weird in our country, for example. So theres variation, theres no doubt, but we are much more united in our common humanity in this fact of having friends and in this fact of affecting each other than we are divided by the details and how these inter. These phenomena vary from place to place. Hinojosa all right, so if you are a very outgoing person and you enjoy the facetoface and you do it well, then thats one particular kind of person. But what about those people who, you know, they have a hard time interacting, and facetoface is just difficult . Yes, yes, thats right. Hinojosa and i feel like, you know, in your work youre saying, look, if youre able to go and network with people, be facetoface, which is so important in terms of the professional world. What about the people who have a hard time just doing that . Okay, so thats. So thats very important to emphasize as well, and whats fascinating to us is that, as you describe, people vary in their interest and ability to have social interactions, which also is very fascinating. We all have evolved to have what is known as genetic fixation. We have particular traits that we all have. Two eyes, to pick a trivial example, for instance. We dont vary in the number of eyes we have thats a cartoon example, but just to pick one but we vary in how many friends we have, and we vary in our height, for instance. Some people are shorter, some people are taller. And this variation, how many friends we have, we also believe has significance. Weve quantified this a little bit. So, for instance, if you look at a random sample of americans and you ask them two very basic questions, who do you spend free time with . And who do you discuss important matters with . Which are standard, old questions that are asked in this field to identify who their social contacts are on average, people identify four andahalf such people. Hinojosa is that good . Is that normal . Thats typical. Hinojosa its kind of stayed the same in terms of the United States . It has stayed the same across time. It tends not to vary crossculturally. People, on average, have about fourandahalf personal connections, people that they identify when you ask questions like this. And this would include their spouse, if theyre married, or their significant other, a couple of. A best friend, a couple other friends, maybe a coworker, a minister. Their personal connections. But it varies even in our country. So about five percent have nobody. Five percent of americans will say theres nobody with whom they can discuss intimate or important matters with or spend free time with. And at the other tail of the distribution, about, i cant remember now, five or ten percent have eight people, so it varies. Now, some of it is by choice. Some of us are shy, were not interested in interacting with others. Some of us are gregarious, as you mentioned, we have social butterflies who interact with lots of people, but on average its about four and a half. And actually, weve done some work looking at this crossculturally from place to place, and this is pretty consistent, actually, which also says something, i think, fundamental about human beings. Hinojosa what about inequality . Okay, i mean, its a big issue, but if were all kind of connected, then shouldnt we. Shouldnt questions of poverty already have kind of been, you know, alleviated a little bit because we all know someone and we want to help uplift people . I mean. Okay, so i would have two answers to that question. First of all, Muhammad Yunus won the nobel prize for microfinance, this idea that we can make small loans to people in very poor countries and kind of improve their wellbeing, and one of his key insights was that even poor people have friends, and in fact, those friends. Hinojosa which was like, amazing, thats its like a key insight that even poor people have friends. Thats right. Hinojosa and actually. And poor people will pay you back. Thats right, and that the friendship connections have value. Theyre a kind of collateral. So you can monetize that collateral. So what you do is, you form a little consortium of people who come, lets say, with their friends, and you say, you are all jointly responsible for the repayment of this loan. So the first point is that everybody has friends, even the poorest person has friends, and that also is kind of fascinating, and again, it goes back to the point we were discussing earlier about our common humanity. Second, however, sort of as a related idea and in some ways opposite to what we just said, is this notion of inequality that you mentioned. So on the one hand, yes, its true everyone has friends; on the other hand, were accustomed in our society to thinking about inequality in terms of race, for example, black and white, or wealth, you know, rich and poor, or where youre located, urban or rural, for example. But when you take social networks seriously, you can begin to think about other kinds of inequality. For instance, whos in the middle of the network and whos on the edge of the network . Who has many friends and who has few friends . Who belongs to what clique . What region of the network are you a part of, and how does that place you at risk for certain outcomes regardless of your own personal attributes . So, for instance, lets say youre a person thats situated in a network surrounded by unhappy people. Maybe your friends are happy, but maybe their friends are unhappy, so youve got this shell of unhappy people thats around you. It might be the case that this puts you at risk for becoming unhappy in the future, and that this is a kind of inequality compared to someone else thats located somewhere else in the network. This is a kind of network inequality, a positional inequality, that has previously not gotten a lot of attention, but we think its important. Hinojosa all right, so can i change my life if i decide. If i change my social network . If i basically say, you know what . Im going to move away from all of these really depressed, overweight people. So no, wait, thats not what were recommending, to be very, very clear. Hinojosa no, no. Okay, and so weve looked at this a little bit. Okay, so this is a little complicated, but the gist of it is this. Heres the way to encapsulate that idea. Lets say for the sake of argument. Okay, so there are two things happening in networks. One is this notion of connection, how were connected to other people, and the other is the notion of contagion, whats flowing through the network. Two distinct phenomena. Whats the architecture of the ties around you, and then, given those ties, what kinds of things are moving through the network . You could have many friends or few friends, for instance, or you could have many friends who are infected with a germ, and the germ is spreading towards you, or many friends who are not infected with a germ, and the germ isnt spreading towards you. Hinojosa okay. Two different ideas whats the pattern of ties and whats flowing across them . In the case that you put on the table, for instance, of obesity, you might think that it might be beneficial to you to cut the tie to someone thats gaining weight, and it might interrupt some kind of input. Hinojosa sounds brutal. Yeah, it sounds brutal and it is brutal, because any benefit that accrued to you from cutting this tie would be counteracted by the cost you paid in losing a friend. So any benefit that accrued to you from interrupting the contagion is counteracted by the cost you pay by interrupting the connection. So these are distinct phenomena, so its not always obvious what might happen. Now, if all your friends are armed robbers, i think i can recommend you should disconnect from them, but its not so simple as this, first point. Second point, this. In some way, what james and i are arguing is that theres something so fundamental about human social networks and so deeply embedded in us as a species and as individuals, that we cannot by sheer strength of will just change our networks. You know, we live out our. Any more than i could suddenly wake up and decide, you know what . Im going to be a brazilian from now on. Im going to move to sao paulo and thats where im going to live for the rest of my life. Hinojosa the economys growing. Yeah, exactly, and im just going to have new friends there, im going to get a new house, im just going to move my life. No, im embedded, right, in a community, in a society, in a location. I have a home and i have connections and i have work and so forth. Its not easy to pick up and move, and its the same with networks. You cant just suddenly remove yourself from these social ties and teleport yourself to another part of the network, because youre embedded, and this embeddedness matters. Hinojosa all right, well, lets stay with the embeddedness, and the final thing that were going to leave our viewers with is. So, what do we do . So what does one do . Like, what. If one wants to improve ones life. Right. Hinojosa have more networking possibilities, improve your profession, improve your career, or improve your social life. Because i kind of feel like. Im like, you can do certain things but you cant do certain things. So what do you want our audience to say . All right, so i would turn that on its head and i would quote john f. Kennedy and i would say, ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country. So instead of saying, how can i, you know, um. Hinojosa benefit. Yeah, benefit from it, instead say to myself, oh, my goodness, if i make a positive change in my life, if im kind to others, if i quit smoking, if i make an effort to be a happier person, this doesnt just have benefits for me. It can benefit the people that i love and that im connected to and the people to whom theyre connected to, and dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of other people can come to be affected by the changes that we make. Hinojosa im going to go home and be really happy. Excellent, me too. Hinojosa and its going to infect everybody. Excellent, me too. Hinojosa dr. Nicholas christakis, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, maria. Thank you for having me. Hinojosa continue the conversation at wgbh. Org oneonone cn . . Wowowowowoc this is rainwater. Collected from the roof and sent through underground pipes into this 1500 gallon tank rainwater collected from the roof flows through the gutters and into the underground pipes. Then these hoses. Carry water from the cistern to the plants. Harvesting rainwater cuts down on runoff into the sewers could save an average of 50 on your water bill now that makes sense. Now that makes sense. [voiceover] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. Also by hillco partners, a texas Government Affairs consultancy. And by the Alice Kleberg reynolds foundation. Im evan smith, shes a comedian and an actress whose credits include mr. Show with bob and david, the Larry Sanders show and, most memorably, 24 and its miniseries reboot, 24 live another day. Shes mary lynn rajskub, this is overheard. [evan voiceover] lets be honest, is this about the ability to learn, or is this about the experience of not having been taught properly . How have you avoided what has befallen other nations in africa. You could say that he made his own bed, but you caused him to sleep in it. Now you saw a problem and, over time, took it on and. Lets start with the sizzle before we get to the steak. Are you gonna run for president
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