Christakis Quotes

If we are connected to everyone else by six degrees and we can influence them up to three degrees, then one way to think about ourselves is that each of us can reach about halfway to everyone else on the planet.

We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend's friend's friend became happy, you became happy.

Because of our tendency to want what others want, and because of our inclination to see the choices of others as an efficient way to understand the world, our social networks can magnify what starts as an essentially random variation.

Plagues reshape our familiar social order, require us to disperse and live apart, wreck economies, replace trust with fear and suspicion, invite some to blame others for their predicament, embolden liars, and cause grief. But plagues also elicit kindness, cooperation, sacrifice, and ingenuity.

A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.

At the core of all societies, I will show, is the social suite: (1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity (2) Love for partners and offspring (3) Friendship (4) Social networks (5) Cooperation (6) Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”) (7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism) (8) Social learning and teaching

Indeed, playing games and laughing together are far more educational than drilling kids on their ABCs on the way to daycare.

Pretending is an essential language of childhood.

But a lie is halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

Early learning is fundamentally social in nature.

Christaki welled up as their father hugged his daughter. He looked away, not wanting to intrude on this private moment, a rare demonstration of paternal love.

Unlike war or famine or natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes during which people can gather together, an epidemic is a collective catastrophe that must be experienced separately.

even if masks reduced the transmission rate of the virus by only 10 percent, our models indicate that hundreds of thousands of deaths would be prevented around the world, creating trillions of dollars in economic value. This is a big effect of a small thing.

Most human virtues, I would argue, are social virtues. To the extent that we care about love, justice, or kindness, we care about how people enact these virtues with respect to other people. No one is interested in whether you love yourself, whether you are just to yourself, or whether you are kind to yourself. People care about whether you show these qualities to others. And so friendship lays the foundation for morality.

that routine childhood vaccinations might provide kids with cross-immunity against SARS-2. In particular, the tuberculosis vaccine BCG (not currently used in the United States) has received substantial attention due to its nonspecific protective role that could have an effect on novel viruses.36 Other

For a few years after we either reach herd immunity or have a widely distributed vaccine, people will still be recovering from the overall clinical, psychological, social, and economic shock of the pandemic and the adjustments it required, perhaps through 2024. I’ll call this the intermediate pandemic period. Then, gradually, things will return to “normal”—albeit in a world with some persistent changes. Around 2024, the post-pandemic period will likely begin.

Young children are important because they contain within themselves the ingredients for learning, in any place and at any time. Parents and teachers are important, too. And that’s because they still control the one early learning environment that trumps all the others: the relationship with the growing child.

In fact, like other personality traits, personal happiness appears to be strongly influenced by our genes. Studies of identical and fraternal twins show that identical twins are significantly more likely to exhibit the same level of happiness than are fraternal twins or other siblings. Behavior geneticists have used these studies to estimate just how much genes matter, and their best guess is that long-term happiness depends 50 percent on a person’s genetic set point, 10 percent on their circumstances (e.g., where they live, how rich they are, how healthy they are), and 40 percent on what they choose to think and do.31

Sadly, 12 percent of Americans listed no one with whom they could discuss important matters or spend free time.

Playing grocery store is actually better for brain development than a math work sheet with cartoon shopping carts? It has to be some kind of trick. Yet after decades of research, the benefits of play are so thoroughgoing, so dispositive, so well described that the only remaining question is how so many sensible adults sat by and allowed the building blocks of development to become so diminished.

Most of us are already aware of the direct effect we have on our friends and family; our actions can make them happy or sad, healthy or sick, even rich or poor. But we rarely consider that everything we think, feel, do, or say can spread far beyond the people we know. Conversely, our friends and family serve as conduits for us to be influenced by hundreds or even thousands of other people. In a kind of social chain reaction, we can be deeply affected by events we do not witness that happen to people we do not know. It is as if we can feel the pulse of the social world around us and respond to its persistent rhythms. As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.

While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

The first kibbutzim were founded in Palestine in 1910, and, by 2009, there were 267 kibbutzim scattered throughout modern Israel. These groups account for only 2.1 percent of the country’s Jewish population but 40 percent of the national economic agricultural output and 7 percent of the industrial output.

I have held the hands of countless dying people from all sorts of backgrounds, and I do not think I have met a single person who didn’t share the exact same aspirations at the end of life: to make amends for mistakes, to be close to loved ones, to tell one’s story to someone who will listen, and to die free of pain.

There was the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. The plague of Justinian in 541 CE. The Black Death in 1347. The Spanish flu in 1918. There were gods of plagues in ancient times—not only the Greek god Apollo, but the Vedic god Rudra and the Chinese deity Shi Wenye. Plague is an old, familiar enemy. And so, in 2020, a plague once again appeared.

Whereas cells in men have just a single, maternal X chromosome, cells in women have both a maternal and a paternal X chromosome. Female cells inactivate one of the two X chromosomes, resulting in a mosaic of cells with distinct combinations of gene variants. This variety could result in an immunity advantage compared to the more fixed expression in males.51

Epidemics generally take advantage of the deepest and most highly evolved aspects of our humanity. We evolved to live in groups, to have friends, to touch and hug each other, and to bury and mourn one another. If we lived like hermits, we would not be victims of contagious disease. But the germs that kill us during times of plague often spread precisely because of who we are.

A group can be defined by an attribute (for example, women, Democrats, lawyers, long-distance runners) or as a specific collection of individuals to whom we can literally point (“those people, right over there, waiting to get into the concert”). A social network is altogether different. While a network, like a group, is a collection of people, it includes something more: a specific set of connections between people in the group. These ties, and the particular pattern of these ties, are often more important than the individual people themselves. They allow groups to do things that a disconnected collection of individuals cannot. The ties explain why the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And the specific pattern of the ties is crucial to understanding how networks function.

We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.

helping the public grasp during the early part of the epidemic what is likely to happen later is essential. But this is also one of the reasons it’s so difficult to sound the alarm. If we say that many people will be sick and that our world will be changed “soon,” people will look around and conclude that everything seems normal enough, so no interventions are necessary, thank you very much. And it seems normal the next day too, so the Cassandras are seen as merely alarmists.

why should we settle for unimaginative goals (as we find in so many early education settings) like being able to identify triangles and squares, or recalling the names of colors and seasons? Recognizing visual symbols is something a dog can do. Surely we can aim higher than those picayune objectives and demand preschool classrooms based on a more advanced understanding of developmental processes, an understanding that is bounded only by the limits of a young child’s growing brain, not by a superintendent’s checklist of what needs to be covered before June rolls around.

Om ett slumpmässigt urval av en befolkning vaccineras för att förhindra spridning av en infektion krävs det närmalt sett att man vaccinerar mellan 80 och 100 procent av befolkningen. ... Ett effektivare sätt är att inrikta sig på naven i nätverket, det vill säga de personer som befinner sig i nätverkets centrum eller de som har flest kontakter. [...] I själva verket kan man uppnå samma nivå av skydd genom att vaccinera omkring 30 procent av alla människor om man vaccinerar dem med hjälp av den här metoden som genom att slumpmässigt vaccinera 99 procent av befolkningen om man gör ett slumpmässigt urval!

Children are intuitive scientists and armchair philosophers, brimming with such startling observations that it’s hard to believe they’ve come from people barely out of diapers. . . . But, along with their Talmudic wisdom and intellectual acuity, preschoolers can surprise, equally, with their undeveloped motor skills, atrocious impulse control, and venal self-interest. Like teenagers, whom they closely resemble developmentally, preschoolers are a complicated mix of competence and ineptitude. The problem with American early education is how often the grownups misread, and even interchange, those two attributes completely, and at such critical moments for learning.

It was this situation that led mathematician Chris Hauert and his colleagues to consider another possibility in an important evolutionary model published in Science in 2002. In Axelrod's study and in most previous theoretical models, individuals were forced to interact with each other. But what if they could choose not to interact? Rather than attempting to cooperate and risking being taken advantage of, a person could fend for herself. In other words, she could sever her connections to others in the network. Hauert called the people who adopt this strategy "loners." Using some beautiful mathematics, Hauert and his colleagues showed that in a world full of loners it is easy for cooperation to evolve because there are no people to take advantage of the cooperators that appear. The loners fend for themselves, and the cooperators form networks with other cooperators. Soon, the cooperators take over the population because they always do better together than the loners. But once the world is full of cooperators, it is very easy for free riders to evolve and enjoy the fruits of cooperation without contributing (like parasites). As the free riders become the dominant type in the population, there is no one left for them to take advantage of; then, the loners once again take over -- because they want nothing to do, as it were, with those bastards. In short, cooperating can emerge because we can do more together than we can apart. But because of the free-rider problem, cooperation is not guaranteed to succeed.

Young children are for the most part just and moral. They love preachy stories because they do in fact understand that actions have consequences. Yet they turn to adults for the mercy and subtlety that they themselves can’t yet summon. And who can blame them? They are still little and vulnerable, uncompromising to a fault. . . . they want an adult’s protection from their own rough justice. This, I think, is the one true story of early childhood, the yin and yang of being a small person. It’s confusing emotional terrain for children to inhabit, and we must guide them gently through it. Is it intimacy you want, or freedom? Protection or power? Childhood is a kind of enslavement, but it’s a liberation, too. Young children’s emotions are all about this basic conflict. Feed me. Hold me. Comfort me. Fix me. I hate you! I can do it myself.

Do preschoolers need all the trappings of elementary school . . . ? The faux academic overstimulation? The enforced choices? The cult-like obsession with readiness? I would say, mostly, they do not. And I think some of these trappings, such as the notorious print-rich environments we encountered with their busy totems to industriousness, can actually interfere with the task of becoming a good communicator and a literate person. We spend a lot of energy on creating print-rich environments but that’s not at all the same thing as creating a language-rich environment. Consider again the hope that Finland offers; its guidelines for preprimary (preschool) education remind us that: “The basis for emerging literacy is that children have heard and listened, they have been heard, they have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed things with them, and they have asked questions and received answers.” For our young children, what else is there to wish for?

our species should really be known as Homo dictyous (‘network man’) because – to quote the sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler – ‘our brains seem to have been built for social networks’.

Our brains evolved over millennia to process things that happened in real time. Until the advent of media, everything by definition happened in real time, because we didn’t have the capacity,” Christakis explained in an interview. “We’ve shown in previous studies that block play promotes language development and attention.… [Children are] cognitively more engaged in that activity than they are in passively viewing a video.” One way to understand

The central challenge of our time is to master working in the many-to-many dialogue space. To navigate this complex and typically unstructured terrain, principles that have been implemented in what John Warfield and Alexander Christakis have called “the science of generic design” can serve as our compass.

Seeing people only as members of groups is, he says, “inherently reductionist and dehumanizing, a collectivist and ideological abstraction of all that is original and creative in the human being, of all that has not been imposed by inheritance, geography, or social pressure.” Real, personal identity, he argues, “springs from the capacity of human beings to resist these influences and counter them with free acts of their own invention.” 5

People in crowds often act in thoughtless ways—shouting profanities, destroying property, throwing bricks, threatening others. This can come about partly because of a process known to psychologists as deindividuation : people begin to lose their self-awareness and sense of individual agency as they identify more strongly with the group, which often leads to antisocial behaviors they would never consider if they were acting alone. They can form a mob, cease to think for themselves, lose their moral compass, and adopt a classic us-versus-them stance that brooks no shared understanding.

an experiment in which participants played in three online worlds: Blueprint, Nicholas Christakis (Little Brown, 2019), p. 108.

In the winter, people are indoors and are more densely packed.

This is also the reason, incidentally, that immunizing the elderly, while it will reduce their deaths, does not have much effect on the actual course of the epidemic. Immunizing working-age people helps break chains of transmission through social networks and can be much more effective in preventing deaths on a population level

Ordinarily, pathogens evolve to be less deadly, since it does not suit their interests to kill their hosts. A dead host cannot easily spread the germ to others, so causing milder illness is “better” for the pathogen from a Darwinian point of view.

Quantifying excess deaths is a statistical technique often employed by modern scholars studying epidemics, but it was first proposed by a founder of epidemiology, William Farr, in London in 1847. Farr defined this quantity as the number of deaths observed during an epidemic in excess of those expected under normal circumstances.

Finally, the quantification of excess deaths allows us to summarize the overall impact of the pandemic on people’s health. The virus kills some people directly, by infecting them, and others indirectly, by, for example, prompting people to delay going to the hospital for other conditions and thus needlessly dying, or by increasing suicides as a result of depression due to job loss or social isolation.

In 1970, he explains, the average age at which a child began to watch television regularly was four years. Today, it is four months. Preschoolers now spend four and a half hours per day, on average, watching TV, which represents a startling 40 percent of their waking hours. He

So, at every level of observation, we are missing something—the big picture or the small parts—and there is always a cost to observing only one.

Cutting-edge research shows how Rifkin motivates other people to give. Giving, especially when it’s distinctive and consistent, establishes a pattern that shifts other people’s reciprocity styles within a group. It turns out that giving can be contagious. In one study, contagion experts James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis found that giving spreads rapidly and widely across social networks. When one person made the choice to contribute to a group at a personal cost over a series of rounds, other group members were more likely to contribute in future rounds, even when interacting with people who weren’t present for the original act. “This influence persists for multiple periods and spreads up to three degrees of separation (from person to person to person to person),” Fowler and Christakis find, such that “each additional contribution a subject makes . . . in the first period is tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence.

little kids love downtime in which they stare at the ceiling, but busy-ness and overprogramming are so fetishized in certain parent communities that they’ve come to be seen as child-rearing virtues in their own right, detached from any underlying developmental rationale. I couldn’t count the number of times a parent of one of my preschoolers worried that his child wasn’t enrolled in enough activities. Sometime in recent history, we began to see slow, unhurried experiences as subpar. For some parents, a child not signed up for karate class and music lessons is somehow seen to be neglected, even pitied. But the more we overprogram our children, the more we lose our own sense of their needs, not to mention our sanity, and how to provide for them.

Child’s play . . . falls into a huge category of supposedly natural behavior that is actually quite hard to accomplish without intention and assistance.

in a high-quality program, adults are building relationships with children and paying a lot of attention to children’s thinking processes and, by extension, their communication. They attend carefully to children’s language and find ways to make them think out loud. Sometimes

Research19 by social scientists James Fowler of University of California, San Diego, and Nicolas Christakis of Harvard University suggests that happiness tends to spread up to three degrees of separation from you—to those close to you, your colleagues and acquaintances, and even strangers you will never know. This is how you create a culture of happiness in your workplace, home, or community.

The moment we acquire names and labels for things, it’s hard to resist using them, and it’s a fair question to ask if our greater sensitivity to children’s problems might be imposing hidden burdens on them.

The basis for emerging literacy is that children have heard and listened, they have been heard, they have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed things with them, and they have asked questions and received answers.31 For our young children, what else is there to wish for?

K.G. Andersen et al., “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Nature Medicine 2020; 26: 450–455; P. Zhou et al, “A Pneumonia Outbreak Associated with a New Coronavirus of Probable Bat Origin,” Nature 2020; 579: 270–273.

In other cases, the reasons for forgetting are more prosaic, more epidemiological, more related to numbers: the particular pandemic disease was not fatal enough (2009 H1N1 influenza), or it did not afflict enough people because it was not infectious enough (MERS), or it burned out too fast (SARS-1), or it afflicted a confined subgroup of the human population (Ebola), or it was brought low by a vaccine (measles and polio), or by treatment (HIV), or by eradication (smallpox), allowing most people to simply push the disease out of their minds. While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

The CDC defined a close contact of a person with coronavirus as someone who was “within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes starting from 48 hours before illness onset until the time the patient is isolated.” This is a somewhat arbitrary criterion, given that the virus can spread much farther than six feet.57

Nonetheless, it captures most circumstances of transmission.

In fact, a study published in the scientific journal Nature revealed that a typical article in Wikipedia was almost as accurate as a typical article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. 33

If you take a group of carbon atoms and connect them one way, you get graphite, which is soft and dark and perfect for making pencils. But if you take the same carbon atoms and connect them another way, you get diamond, which is hard and clear and great for making jewelry. There are two key ideas here. First, these properties of softness and darkness and hardness and clearness are not properties of the carbon atoms; they are properties of the collection of carbon atoms. Second, the properties depend on how the carbon atoms are connected. It’s the same with social groups. This phenomenon, of wholes having properties not present in the separate parts, is known as emergence, and the properties are known as emergent properties. Connect people in one way, and they are good to one another. Connect them in another way, and they are not.

Another risk is that if the wrong kind of immune response is elicited, the body might attack itself in what is known as an autoimmune reaction. This happened with the flu vaccine in 1976, when many patients developed a kind of paralysis (from which most people recovered) known as Guillain-Barré syndrome.

The United States also has fewer hospital beds per capita than other industrialized countries; the U.S. has 2.9 beds per 1,000 people, whereas South Korea has 11.5, Japan has 13.4, Italy has 3.4, Australia has 3.8, and China has 4.2.

Singapore Health Department in April, for example, I was astonished to learn that they employed five thousand contact tracers in a population of about five million people. One person per thousand in their whole nation was employed for this purpose alone. At the time, Singapore had accumulated just 9,125 cases. In our country, this would translate into having 330,000 people engaged in this work.

When a disease is very deadly, it kills its victims so rapidly that the pathogen does not have much time to spread. This is why the super-deadly Ebola epidemics that kindle in Africa every few years tend to burn out.

Rushing to bring a vaccine to market could also cause other sorts of safety problems in its manufacturing. Infamously, this happened in the Cutter Incident during the early launch of the polio vaccine, in 1955. When the polio vaccine was made available, mass vaccination days were organized by local communities. More than 120,000 children received a batch of the vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus was incomplete. Within days, there were reports of children developing paralysis, and the mass immunization program was abandoned within a month. Investigation showed that two batches of the vaccine, manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, had the live virus, resulting in symptoms in forty thousand people, permanent paralysis in fifty-one, and death in five; and this does not include cases of the virus spreading to other children.

If I had to characterize the key difference between a high-quality and a low-quality preschool environment, it is this: in a high-quality program, adults are building relationships with children and paying a lot of attention to children’s thinking processes and, by extension, their communication.

The average daycare provider lives on the edge of poverty, with hourly wages below those of truck drivers, bartenders, animal care technicians, and even some middle-class teenage babysitters. Certified preschool teachers make a bit more money, but retirement plans are almost unheard of for preschool teachers not affiliated with a public school, and preschools have rarely provided health benefits or other nonsalary remuneration.12 In Mississippi, catfish skinners apparently make more money than daycare providers. In some parts of the country, childcare providers don’t even need a high school diploma, and the care of dead people in funeral homes is more tightly regulated than the oversight of living children in early education and care settings.13

So what is the scientific consensus on the components of a high-quality program? According to experts such as Yale emeritus professor Edward Zigler (a leader in child development and early education policy for half a century), the best preschool programs share several common features: they provide ample opportunities for young children to use and hear complex, interactive language; their curriculum supports learning processes and a wide range of school-readiness goals that include social and emotional skills and active learning; and they have knowledgeable and well-qualified teachers who use what are known as reflective teaching practices. Effective programs also demonstrate careful, intentional programming that is driven by more than just scheduling whims or calendar holidays or what’s in the teacher guide this week, and they also take seriously the active involvement of family members.

But reality matters. One analysis estimates that, if control measures such as physical distancing had been implemented just one week earlier in the United States, the nation would have seen 61.6 percent fewer reported infections and 55.0 percent fewer reported deaths by May 3, 2020.65 Although responsibility for the pandemic cannot be placed solely on the shoulders of any single person, group, or institution—and the United States was not the only country to downplay early-warning signs of the virus—one of the great tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic is that some of the worst outcomes could have been avoided had our predicament been acknowledged and acted upon at the appropriate time.

We need to start treating young children as essential apex creatures whose care and feeding affects the whole fiber of our society.

The virus spreads among people who are out and about at school and work; it is then brought home, where it kills the age extremes—infants and the elderly—who are at the end of the transmission chains. This is also the reason, incidentally, that immunizing the elderly, while it will reduce their deaths, does not have much effect on the actual course of the epidemic. Immunizing working-age people helps break chains of transmission through social networks and can be much more effective in preventing deaths on a population level (an idea that resembles what we discussed above with respect to targeting socially connected people for immunization).

A dead host cannot easily spread the germ to others, so causing milder illness is “better” for the pathogen from a Darwinian point of view. People who are very sick stay home in bed or die, and those who are only mildly sick continue with their lives, preferentially spreading milder strains of the pathogen.

TED talk by Nicholas Christakis

Vi blir faktiskt mer ledsna när våra familjemedlemmar är ledsna än om främmande människor är ledsna.

Alla har upplevt känslomässig överföring... . Men en ofta förbisedd aspekt av all denna överföring av känslor är att de inte bara sprider sig till våra vänner utan också till våra vänners vänner och ännu längre - även om vi inte ens är närvarande.

Diagnosen blev masshysteri. Diagnosen var inte populär bland folk i allmänhet, och många av dem som hade drabbats blev mycket upprörda. ... Personer som är drabbade av masspsykogent syndrom har naturligtvis alldeles verkliga symptom, oavsett om det handlar om skratt, dans, svimmningar eller illamående. ... Den förbluffande sanningen är att vår egen oro för oss sjuka - men också andras oro. [...] De [smittspårningsutredarna] sa: "Det är förståeligt att läkare och andra är tveksamma till att rubricera ett sjukdomsutbrott som psykogent på grund av den skam och ilska som denna diagnos ofta framkallar.

Ju fler vänner dina vänner har (oavsett deras känslomässiga tillstånd), desto mer sannolikt är det således att du är lycklig.

Att ha en stor social krets kan alltså göra dig lycklig, men om du är lycklig vidgar det inte nödvändigtvis din sociala krets. En position i mitten av nätverket leder till lycka - inte tvärtom. Ditt nätverks struktur och din plats i det har stor betydelse.

[P]å både individ- och gruppnivå är det mer effektivt att gå ner i vikt tillsammans med sina vänners vänner än tillsammans med sina vänner. Problemet är detta: Om du försöker gå ner i vikt tillsammans med dina vänner så är det mycket möjligt att du lyckas, men det pyttelilla klustret som består av dig och dina vänner är omgivet av en stor grupp människor som utövar påtryckningar för att ni ska gå upp i vikt igen.

Biologer har också kunnat konstatera att färgseendet, som upptar ungefär två tredjedelar av människans hjärnkapacitet, är optimalt kalibrerat för att observera skillnader i hudfärg. ... Och intressant nog är det de arter som inte har särskilt mycket ansiktsbehåring (till exempel människan, som ibland kallas "den nakna apan") som har denna förmåga, vilket tyder på att färgseendet har utvecklats i samspel med behovet av att kunna se andra gruppmedlemmars ansikten och bedöma deras sinnesstämning.

A key feature of awe, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt have argued, is that it quiets self-interest and makes individuals feel part of the larger whole. 12

Genes do amazing things inside our bodies, but even more amazing to me is what they do outside of them. Genes affect not only the structure and function of our bodies; not only the structure and function of our minds and, hence, our behaviors; but also the structure and function of our societies.

The arc of our evolutionary history is long. But it bends towards goodness

relations.50 The idea of collective child-rearing was not unique to kibbutzim. It has been periodically attempted as a desired social disruption since antiquity. Plato believed that raising children communally would result in children treating all men as their fathers and thus more respectfully.51 Communist societies have also been associated with collective child-rearing; the family is seen as a threat to state ideology because it fosters a sense of belonging to a family unit, and totalitarian ideology requires that family allegiance be subordinated to allegiance to the party or state. Liberal political theory has also struggled with the issue of the family being an obstacle to an egalitarian society (for example, because child care and family life generally impose greater constraints on women).52 But attempts to fundamentally restructure or minimize the bond between parent and child have very rarely, if ever, endured.53 While mild forms of collective child-rearing are found in cultures all around the world (and in some other mammalian species, as we will see in chapter 7), they typically involve forms of alloparental care, whereby relatives share child-care duties. Dormitory sleeping arrangements for infants (of the kind initially attempted by the kibbutzim) are extremely rare. A 1971 survey of 183 societies around the world found that none maintained such a system.54 As in many utopian communities, the organization of child-rearing was motivated largely by adult imperatives. If men and women were to be treated truly equally, collective parenting might be seen as an obvious structural necessity, regardless of its implications for individual children and their development. Historian Steven Mintz noted in Huck’s Raft, his sweeping work on American childhood, that almost every innovation in child welfare in the United States, including orphanages and subsidized child care, has been driven primarily by adult concerns. Of secondary importance were philosophical and pragmatic convictions about what was best for children.55 As radical as communes may be in some key respects, they generally play by adult rules in regard to children, whose needs and concerns have never been, as far as I can tell, the primary motivation for any utopian community (even though some of them had amazing schools and treated children kindly). Setting up utopias seems to be like sex in at least one way: it is oriented to adult satisfaction.

The subjects were each placed in a functional MRI scanner and shown the same set of fourteen video clips (including a sentimental music video, a bit of slapstick comedy, a political debate), and the blood flow to various brain regions was individually measured as they viewed

psychologist David Premack refers to as the “Russian-novel problem”—that is, when looking at the history of two animals (or humans), it is often hard to know what caused what, since the two may have interacted in so many ways over such a long time, and they may also remember events differently and act according to this subjective experience.

But many other activities also called for greater independence, from home cooking, to home haircuts, to the performance of minor home repairs. Why risk having a plumber come over if he might have the virus?

Charles Mackay argued that people “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

according to Christakis and Fowler, we cannot transmit ideas and behaviours much beyond our friends’ friends’ friends (in other words, across just three degrees of separation). This is because the transmission and reception of an idea or behaviour requires a stronger connection than the relaying of a letter (in the case of Milgram’s experiment) or the communication that a certain employment opportunity exists. Merely knowing people is not the same as being able to influence them to study more or over-eat. Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, even when it is unconscious.

The sense of incredible realism that many people experience when interacting in virtual worlds with virtual people is known as presence.

Think of how exposure to a foreign culture can be both a bracing and a reassuring experience. What starts as a heightened sensitivity to differences in attire, smells, appearances, customs, rules, norms, and laws yields to the recognition that we are similar to our fellow human beings in numerous fundamental ways. All people find meaning in the world, love their families, enjoy the company of friends, teach one another things of value, and work together in groups. In my view, recognizing this common humanity makes it possible for all of us to lead grander and more virtuous lives.

we carry within us innate proclivities that reflect our natural social state, a state that is, as it turns out, primarily good, practically and even morally. Humans can no more make a society that is inconsistent with these positive urges than ants can suddenly make beehives.

The fundamental reason is that we each carry within us an evolutionary blueprint for making a good society.

The experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.”11

In his classic work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay argued that people “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”1 People in crowds often act in thoughtless ways—shouting profanities, destroying property, throwing bricks, threatening others.

Ensamhet sprider sig också mellan grannar, så att tio extra dagar med ensamhetskänslor leder till två extra dagar för personen på andra sidan staketet. Grannar och vänner som bor mer än en och en halv kilometer bort överför däremot inte ensamhetskänslor till varandra.

Den modell som bäst kunde förutsäga strukturen i de amerikanska senatorernas nätverk var faktiskt den som beskrev det sociala slickandet hos kor.

An analysis in South Korea showed that outbreaks were more common in Zumba classes than Pilates classes for a similar reason.49 Heavy, rapid, deep breathing or shouting may be a risk factor for transmission, whereas slow, gentle breathing is not. But being indoors itself plays an important role.