Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks

Summary

Este vídeo nos lleva a través de la revelación de cómo las redes sociales afectan nuestra vida, desde la obesidad hasta las emociones. El doctor Nicholas Christakis, especializado en atención al final de la vida, descubre que las conexiones humanas son más amplias y complejas de lo que se pensaba. Explora cómo la obesidad, las emociones y otros comportamientos pueden propagarse a través de estas redes, y cómo nuestras基因s podrían influir en la forma en que formamos estas conexiones. Finalmente, argumenta que las redes sociales son esenciales para el bienestar y que debemos valorarlas y fortalecerlas.

Takeaways

• 👨‍⚕️ La historia comienza con el doctor como especialista en cuidados paliativos observando el impacto de la enfermedad terminal en personas y sus familias.
• 💔 El efecto viudez, conocido también como 'muerte del corazón roto', sugiere que la pérdida de un cónyuge puede duplicar el riesgo de muerte del otro en el primer año.
• 👨‍👩‍👧 La fatiga del cuidador puede afectar también a los seres queridos del cuidador, como se ve en el caso de una hija cuidando a su madre y su esposo enfermo por la fatiga de su esposa.
• 🌐 El doctor se dio cuenta de que los efectos de la pérdida y el estrés no se limitan solo a las parejas y que las redes sociales tienen un alcance más amplio que el de las relaciones personales cercanas.
• 🔗 Las redes sociales son complejas y están intrínsecamente ligadas a nuestras vidas, lo que nos lleva a cuestionar su propósito y cómo afectan nuestras vidas.
• 📊 En un estudio, se observó que la obesidad puede propagarse de persona a persona, formando grupos de personas con sobrepeso.
• 👭 La posibilidad de que la obesidad se propague se ve incrementada por la influencia de los amigos y conocidos, incluso de aquellos que no se conocen directamente.
• 🤔 Hay varias explicaciones para la propagación de la obesidad, incluyendo la influencia directa de las personas, la tendencia de asociarse con personas similares (homofilia) y factores externos que afectan a grupos de personas.
• 📊 Los datos muestran que la obesidad puede aumentar la probabilidad de que las personas cercanas a una persona obesa también se vuelvan obesas.
• 🧬 La estructura de las redes sociales puede cambiar con el tiempo, y la obesidad no es una epidemia centrada en una sola persona, sino que puede propagarse de diferentes maneras en la red.
• 😃 La investigación también se expandió a otros fenómenos sociales, como el comportamiento de fumar y beber, el voto, el divorcio, la altruismo y las emociones.

Q & A

¿Cuál fue el trabajo del narrador hace 15 años?

El narrador era médico de hospicio en la Universidad de Chicago, atendiendo a personas que estaban muriendo y a sus familias en el sur de Chicago.

¿Qué es el efecto viudez mencionado en el discurso?

El efecto viudez es una idea antigua en las ciencias sociales que sugiere que la pérdida de un cónyuge puede duplicar el riesgo de muerte de la otra persona en el primer año.

¿Cómo cambió la perspectiva del narrador sobre el efecto viudez después de atender a una paciente con demencia?

El narrador se dio cuenta de que el efecto viudez no se limitaba a los cónyuges y que no estaba restringido a pares de personas, sino que podía extenderse a redes más amplias de relaciones sociales.

¿Qué relación se estaba investigando en el laboratorio del narrador?

En el laboratorio, el narrador investigaba la relación entre la obesidad y su posible propagación de persona a persona, similar al efecto viudez.

¿Cuál fue el resultado inicial de la investigación sobre la obesidad?

El resultado inicial mostró que las personas con un índice de masa corporal (IMC) por encima de 30, consideradas obesas clínica y coloreadas en amarillo, se agrupaban en clusters dentro de la red social.

¿Cómo se midió el impacto de la obesidad en las redes sociales en el estudio?

Se midió el aumento en la probabilidad de que una persona sea obesa dada que un contacto social suyo es obeso, y se observó que la influencia se extendía hasta tres grados de separación.

¿Cuáles son las tres posibles explicaciones para el clústering de la obesidad según el estudio?

Las tres posibles explicaciones son la inductancia (una persona que adelgaza puede hacer que los demás lo hagan también), la homofilia (las personas se relacionan con individuos similares a ellos) y el confounding (ambos están expuestos a algo que los afecta de la misma manera).

¿Qué descubrieron los investigadores sobre la propagación de la obesidad en las redes sociales?

Descubrieron que si un amigo se vuelve obeso, aumenta el riesgo de obesidad del otro en un 57% en el mismo período de tiempo.

¿Cómo se relaciona la investigación con la obesidad con la teoría de que las emociones se pueden contagiar?

La investigación sugiere que no solo la obesidad, sino que otros fenómenos como las emociones pueden propagarse a través de las redes sociales, lo que indica una forma de comunicación primitiva y contagio emocional.

¿Qué otro fenómeno除了 la obesidad y las emociones se menciona en el discurso como algo que se puede propagar en las redes sociales?

Se mencionan otros fenómenos como el comportamiento de fumar y beber, el comportamiento electoral, el divorcio y la altruismo.

¿Qué conclusión se puede sacar sobre la importancia de las redes sociales según el narrador?

El narrador concluye que las redes sociales son fundamentales para la propagación de cosas buenas y valiosas, y que el mundo necesita más conexiones para mejorar en áreas como la salud, las emociones y otros fenómenos sociales.

Outlines

00:00

👨‍⚕️ El efecto viudo y las redes sociales

El doctor habla de su experiencia como médico de hospicio y cómo comenzó a observar el efecto viudo, una idea antigua que sugiere que la muerte de un cónyuge puede duplicar el riesgo de muerte del otro en el primer año. Descubre que el efecto no se limita a las parejas y se extiende más allá. Esto lo lleva a ver el mundo de manera diferente, como un conjunto de conexiones entre personas. Comienza a estudiar cómo estas redes sociales afectan nuestras vidas, centrándose en la obesidad como su primer tema de investigación.

05:02

🔴 La propagación de la obesidad

Investigan si la obesidad es una epidemia que puede propagarse de persona a persona. Presentan datos de 2,200 personas en el año 2000, mostrando que hay agrupaciones de personas obesas y no obesas. Exploran la posibilidad de que la obesidad pueda ser inducida por otros, la homofilia (gente similar se asocia) y la confusión por factores externos. Descubren que si un amigo se vuelve obeso, aumenta el riesgo de obesidad del otro en un 57%. La obesidad puede propagarse a través de la imitación de comportamientos o cambios en las normas sociales sobre el tamaño del cuerpo. Luego, buscan visualizar esta propagación a través de una animación que muestra cómo la obesidad se disemina en la red social a lo largo de 30 años.

10:05

🌐 Las redes sociales como seres vivos

El doctor ve las redes sociales como seres vivos que pueden ser estudiados bajo un microscopio. Explora la propagación de fenómenos como el tabaquismo, el consumo de alcohol, el comportamiento electoral, el divorcio y la altruismo. Luego, se interesa en las emociones y la contagiosidad emocional. Se pregunta si las emociones pueden propagarse de manera sostenida a través de las redes sociales. Crean imágenes de redes sociales donde las personas se colorean en amarillo (felices), azul (tristes) y verde (intermedio), mostrando agrupaciones de personas felices y tristes a tres grados de separación.

15:07

🧬 Las redes sociales y la genética

El doctor plantea la idea de que las redes sociales están codificadas en nuestros genes y que es fundamental entenderlas para resolver problemas actuales. Explora la estructura de las redes sociales y cómo la gente se ubica en ellas, comparando con estructuras regulares como la red cuadrada. Descubre que la cantidad de amigos, si los amigos se conocen entre sí y si una persona está en el centro o en el borde de la red, están parcialmente determinadas por los genes. Argumenta que las redes sociales tienen valor como capital social y que las propiedades emergentes de las redes son más que la suma de sus partes. Finalmente, sugiere que las redes sociales son esenciales para la propagación de cosas buenas y valiosas y que el mundo necesita más conexiones.

Keywords

💡red de sociales

Una red social es una estructura de interconexión entre individuos o entidades, donde las conexiones pueden ser personales, profesionales o de cualquier otro tipo. En el vídeo, se explora cómo las redes sociales afectan nuestra vida, como la propagación de la obesidad y las emociones, y cómo están incrustadas en nuestra existencia, formando una parte fundamental de nuestra interacción y comunicación.

💡efecto viudez

El efecto viudez se refiere al aumento del riesgo de muerte de una persona después de la muerte de su cónyuge. En el vídeo, se menciona que este efecto puede duplicar el riesgo de muerte de la esposa en el primer año después de la muerte del esposo, ilustrando cómo las redes sociales pueden influir en nuestra salud y bienestar.

💡obesidad

La obesidad es un estado de más del peso con un aumento de la acumulación de grasa en el cuerpo que puede ser dañino para la salud. El vídeo discute la posibilidad de que la obesidad pueda propagarse de persona a persona a través de las redes sociales, como un virus, evidenciando cómo un problema de salud puede ser también un problema social.

💡homofilia

La homofilia es el término que se usa para describir la tendencia de las personas a asociarse con individuos similares a ellos en características como edad, raza, clase social, entre otras. En el vídeo, se sugiere que esta tendencia puede contribuir a la formación de grupos de personas con características similares, como el tamaño corporal.

💡confounding

El confounding es un término estadístico que se refiere a la distorsión de la relación entre dos variables por la influencia de una tercera variable. En el contexto del vídeo, se discute cómo factores externos, como un club de salud, pueden estar relacionadas con la obesidad de dos personas de manera que no es solo una influencia directa de una persona a otra.

💡emocional contagio

El contagio emocional es la propagación de emociones de una persona a otra dentro de una red social. El vídeo explora la idea de que las emociones, como la felicidad o la tristeza, pueden extenderse más allá de las interacciones individuales, afectando a un grupo más amplio de personas en la red.

💡superorganismo

Un superorganismo es una colección de individuos que actúan de manera coordinada y que muestran comportamientos que no se pueden entender solo estudiando a los individuos aislados. En el vídeo, se argumenta que las redes sociales pueden verse como superorganismos donde las propiedades emergentes de la red son más que la suma de sus partes.

💡capital social

El capital social hace referencia a los beneficios que surgen de las redes de relaciones sociales entre las personas. Estas redes pueden proporcionar apoyo, información y recursos que son valiosos para los individuos y la comunidad. El vídeo sugiere que las redes sociales son una forma de capital social que tiene propiedades y beneficios que emergen de la estructura de las redes mismas.

💡estructura de red

La estructura de red se refiere a la forma en que los nodos (personas, en este caso) están conectados entre sí en una red. El vídeo explora cómo diferentes estructuras de red pueden tener implicaciones para la propagación de fenómenos como la obesidad y las emociones, y cómo estas estructuras pueden ser heredadas.

💡genes

En el vídeo se menciona que hay una correlación genética con la estructura de nuestras redes sociales, como el número de amigos que uno tiene, si los amigos de uno se conocen entre sí y si uno está en el centro o en el borde de la red. Esto sugiere que nuestras tendencias sociales pueden ser en parte heredadas y que nuestras redes sociales están influenciadas por nuestra genética.

Highlights

The widower effect, or 'dying of a broken heart', can double a spouse's risk of death within the first year.

The realization that the widower effect is not limited to spouses and can extend to social networks.

Social networks are vast and intricate, prompting questions about their purpose and impact on our lives.

Obesity can spread through social networks, with friends' obesity increasing one's risk by 45%.

The study of obesity's spread through social networks, showing clusters of obese and non-obese individuals.

The possibility of three mechanisms causing obesity clustering: induction, homophily, and confounding.

Evidence of induction in obesity spread, where a friend's obesity increases one's risk by 57%.

Emotional contagion as a form of primitive communication, spreading behaviors and norms.

The visualization of obesity's spread over a 30-year period within a social network.

Social networks as living entities with memory, movement, and resilience.

The study of emotions in social networks, showing clusters of happy and unhappy individuals.

The idea that emotions have a collective existence within social networks.

Genes play a role in social network structure, influencing the number of friends and network density.

The concept of social networks as a form of social capital with emergent properties.

The analogy of social networks to a superorganism, where collective behavior influences individual outcomes.

The necessity of spreading good and valuable things to sustain social networks.

The call for more connections in the world to enhance goodness through social networks.

Transcripts

For me, this story begins about 15 years ago,

when I was a hospice doctor at the University of Chicago.

And I was taking care of people who were dying and their families

in the South Side of Chicago.

And I was observing what happened to people and their families

over the course of their terminal illness.

And in my lab, I was studying the widower effect,

which is a very old idea in the social sciences,

going back 150 years,

known as "dying of a broken heart."

So, when I die, my wife's risk of death can double,

for instance, in the first year.

And I had gone to take care of one particular patient,

a woman who was dying of dementia.

And in this case, unlike this couple,

she was being cared for

by her daughter.

And the daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother.

And the daughter's husband,

he also was sick

from his wife's exhaustion.

And I was driving home one day,

and I get a phone call from the husband's friend,

calling me because he was depressed

about what was happening to his friend.

So here I get this call from this random guy

that's having an experience

that's being influenced by people

at some social distance.

And so I suddenly realized two very simple things:

First, the widowhood effect

was not restricted to husbands and wives.

And second, it was not restricted to pairs of people.

And I started to see the world

in a whole new way,

like pairs of people connected to each other.

And then I realized that these individuals

would be connected into foursomes with other pairs of people nearby.

And then, in fact, these people

were embedded in other sorts of relationships:

marriage and spousal

and friendship and other sorts of ties.

And that, in fact, these connections were vast

and that we were all embedded in this

broad set of connections with each other.

So I started to see the world in a completely new way

and I became obsessed with this.

I became obsessed with how it might be

that we're embedded in these social networks,

and how they affect our lives.

So, social networks are these intricate things of beauty,

and they're so elaborate and so complex

and so ubiquitous, in fact,

that one has to ask what purpose they serve.

Why are we embedded in social networks?

I mean, how do they form? How do they operate?

And how do they effect us?

So my first topic with respect to this,

was not death, but obesity.

It had become trendy

to speak about the "obesity epidemic."

And, along with my collaborator, James Fowler,

we began to wonder whether obesity really was epidemic

and could it spread from person to person

like the four people I discussed earlier.

So this is a slide of some of our initial results.

It's 2,200 people in the year 2000.

Every dot is a person. We make the dot size

proportional to people's body size;

so bigger dots are bigger people.

In addition, if your body size,

if your BMI, your body mass index, is above 30 --

if you're clinically obese --

we also colored the dots yellow.

So, if you look at this image, right away you might be able to see

that there are clusters of obese and

non-obese people in the image.

But the visual complexity is still very high.

It's not obvious exactly what's going on.

In addition, some questions are immediately raised:

How much clustering is there?

Is there more clustering than would be due to chance alone?

How big are the clusters? How far do they reach?

And, most importantly,

what causes the clusters?

So we did some mathematics to study the size of these clusters.

This here shows, on the Y-axis,

the increase in the probability that a person is obese

given that a social contact of theirs is obese

and, on the X-axis, the degrees of separation between the two people.

On the far left, you see the purple line.

It says that, if your friends are obese,

your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher.

And the next bar over, the [red] line,

says if your friend's friends are obese,

your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher.

And then the next line over says

if your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese,

your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher.

And it's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends

that there's no longer a relationship

between that person's body size and your own body size.

Well, what might be causing this clustering?

There are at least three possibilities:

One possibility is that, as I gain weight,

it causes you to gain weight.

A kind of induction, a kind of spread from person to person.

Another possibility, very obvious, is homophily,

or, birds of a feather flock together;

here, I form my tie to you

because you and I share a similar body size.

And the last possibility is what is known as confounding,

because it confounds our ability to figure out what's going on.

And here, the idea is not that my weight gain

is causing your weight gain,

nor that I preferentially form a tie with you

because you and I share the same body size,

but rather that we share a common exposure

to something, like a health club

that makes us both lose weight at the same time.

When we studied these data, we found evidence for all of these things,

including for induction.

And we found that if your friend becomes obese,

it increases your risk of obesity by about 57 percent

in the same given time period.

There can be many mechanisms for this effect:

One possibility is that your friends say to you something like --

you know, they adopt a behavior that spreads to you --

like, they say, "Let's go have muffins and beer,"

which is a terrible combination. (Laughter)

But you adopt that combination,

and then you start gaining weight like them.

Another more subtle possibility

is that they start gaining weight, and it changes your ideas

of what an acceptable body size is.

Here, what's spreading from person to person

is not a behavior, but rather a norm:

An idea is spreading.

Now, headline writers

had a field day with our studies.

I think the headline in The New York Times was,

"Are you packing it on?

Blame your fat friends." (Laughter)

What was interesting to us is that the European headline writers

had a different take: They said,

"Are your friends gaining weight? Perhaps you are to blame."

(Laughter)

And we thought this was a very interesting comment on America,

and a kind of self-serving,

"not my responsibility" kind of phenomenon.

Now, I want to be very clear: We do not think our work

should or could justify prejudice

against people of one or another body size at all.

Our next questions was:

Could we actually visualize this spread?

Was weight gain in one person actually spreading

to weight gain in another person?

And this was complicated because

we needed to take into account the fact that the network structure,

the architecture of the ties, was changing across time.

In addition, because obesity is not a unicentric epidemic,

there's not a Patient Zero of the obesity epidemic --

if we find that guy, there was a spread of obesity out from him --

it's a multicentric epidemic.

Lots of people are doing things at the same time.

And I'm about to show you a 30 second video animation

that took me and James five years of our lives to do.

So, again, every dot is a person.

Every tie between them is a relationship.

We're going to put this into motion now,

taking daily cuts through the network for about 30 years.

The dot sizes are going to grow,

you're going to see a sea of yellow take over.

You're going to see people be born and die --

dots will appear and disappear --

ties will form and break, marriages and divorces,

friendings and defriendings.

A lot of complexity, a lot is happening

just in this 30-year period

that includes the obesity epidemic.

And, by the end, you're going to see clusters

of obese and non-obese individuals

within the network.

Now, when looked at this,

it changed the way I see things,

because this thing, this network

that's changing across time,

it has a memory, it moves,

things flow within it,

it has a kind of consistency --

people can die, but it doesn't die;

it still persists --

and it has a kind of resilience

that allows it to persist across time.

And so, I came to see these kinds of social networks

as living things,

as living things that we could put under a kind of microscope

to study and analyze and understand.

And we used a variety of techniques to do this.

And we started exploring all kinds of other phenomena.

We looked at smoking and drinking behavior,

and voting behavior,

and divorce -- which can spread --

and altruism.

And, eventually, we became interested in emotions.

Now, when we have emotions,

we show them.

Why do we show our emotions?

I mean, there would be an advantage to experiencing

our emotions inside, you know, anger or happiness.

But we don't just experience them, we show them.

And not only do we show them, but others can read them.

And, not only can they read them, but they copy them.

There's emotional contagion

that takes place in human populations.

And so this function of emotions

suggests that, in addition to any other purpose they serve,

they're a kind of primitive form of communication.

And that, in fact, if we really want to understand human emotions,

we need to think about them in this way.

Now, we're accustomed to thinking about emotions in this way,

in simple, sort of, brief periods of time.

So, for example,

I was giving this talk recently in New York City,

and I said, "You know when you're on the subway

and the other person across the subway car

smiles at you,

and you just instinctively smile back?"

And they looked at me and said, "We don't do that in New York City." (Laughter)

And I said, "Everywhere else in the world,

that's normal human behavior."

And so there's a very instinctive way

in which we briefly transmit emotions to each other.

And, in fact, emotional contagion can be broader still.

Like we could have punctuated expressions of anger,

as in riots.

The question that we wanted to ask was:

Could emotion spread,

in a more sustained way than riots, across time

and involve large numbers of people,

not just this pair of individuals smiling at each other in the subway car?

Maybe there's a kind of below the surface, quiet riot

that animates us all the time.

Maybe there are emotional stampedes

that ripple through social networks.

Maybe, in fact, emotions have a collective existence,

not just an individual existence.

And this is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon.

Again, a social network,

but now we color the people yellow if they're happy

and blue if they're sad and green in between.

And if you look at this image, you can right away see

clusters of happy and unhappy people,

again, spreading to three degrees of separation.

And you might form the intuition

that the unhappy people

occupy a different structural location within the network.

There's a middle and an edge to this network,

and the unhappy people seem to be

located at the edges.

So to invoke another metaphor,

if you imagine social networks as a kind of

vast fabric of humanity --

I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance --

this fabric is actually like

an old-fashioned American quilt,

and it has patches on it: happy and unhappy patches.

And whether you become happy or not

depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch.

(Laughter)

So, this work with emotions,

which are so fundamental,

then got us to thinking about: Maybe

the fundamental causes of human social networks

are somehow encoded in our genes.

Because human social networks, whenever they are mapped,

always kind of look like this:

the picture of the network.

But they never look like this.

Why do they not look like this?

Why don't we form human social networks

that look like a regular lattice?

Well, the striking patterns of human social networks,

their ubiquity and their apparent purpose

beg questions about whether we evolved to have

human social networks in the first place,

and whether we evolved to form networks

with a particular structure.

And notice first of all -- so, to understand this, though,

we need to dissect network structure a little bit first --

and notice that every person in this network

has exactly the same structural location as every other person.

But that's not the case with real networks.

So, for example, here is a real network of college students

at an elite northeastern university.

And now I'm highlighting a few dots.

If you look here at the dots,

compare node B in the upper left

to node D in the far right;

B has four friends coming out from him

and D has six friends coming out from him.

And so, those two individuals have different numbers of friends.

That's very obvious, we all know that.

But certain other aspects

of social network structure are not so obvious.

Compare node B in the upper left to node A in the lower left.

Now, those people both have four friends,

but A's friends all know each other,

and B's friends do not.

So the friend of a friend of A's

is, back again, a friend of A's,

whereas the friend of a friend of B's is not a friend of B's,

but is farther away in the network.

This is known as transitivity in networks.

And, finally, compare nodes C and D:

C and D both have six friends.

If you talk to them, and you said, "What is your social life like?"

they would say, "I've got six friends.

That's my social experience."

But now we, with a bird's eye view looking at this network,

can see that they occupy very different social worlds.

And I can cultivate that intuition in you by just asking you:

Who would you rather be

if a deadly germ was spreading through the network?

Would you rather be C or D?

You'd rather be D, on the edge of the network.

And now who would you rather be

if a juicy piece of gossip -- not about you --

was spreading through the network? (Laughter)

Now, you would rather be C.

So different structural locations

have different implications for your life.

And, in fact, when we did some experiments looking at this,

what we found is that 46 percent of the variation

in how many friends you have

is explained by your genes.

And this is not surprising. We know that some people are born shy

and some are born gregarious. That's obvious.

But we also found some non-obvious things.

For instance, 47 percent in the variation

in whether your friends know each other

is attributable to your genes.

Whether your friends know each other

has not just to do with their genes, but with yours.

And we think the reason for this is that some people

like to introduce their friends to each other -- you know who you are --

and others of you keep them apart and don't introduce your friends to each other.

And so some people knit together the networks around them,

creating a kind of dense web of ties

in which they're comfortably embedded.

And finally, we even found that

30 percent of the variation

in whether or not people are in the middle or on the edge of the network

can also be attributed to their genes.

So whether you find yourself in the middle or on the edge

is also partially heritable.

Now, what is the point of this?

How does this help us understand?

How does this help us

figure out some of the problems that are affecting us these days?

Well, the argument I'd like to make is that networks have value.

They are a kind of social capital.

New properties emerge

because of our embeddedness in social networks,

and these properties inhere

in the structure of the networks,

not just in the individuals within them.

So think about these two common objects.

They're both made of carbon,

and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it

that are arranged in one particular way -- on the left --

and you get graphite, which is soft and dark.

But if you take the same carbon atoms

and interconnect them a different way,

you get diamond, which is clear and hard.

And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness

do not reside in the carbon atoms;

they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms,

or at least arise because of the

interconnections between the carbon atoms.

So, similarly, the pattern of connections among people

confers upon the groups of people

different properties.

It is the ties between people

that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

And so it is not just what's happening to these people --

whether they're losing weight or gaining weight, or becoming rich or becoming poor,

or becoming happy or not becoming happy -- that affects us;

it's also the actual architecture

of the ties around us.

Our experience of the world

depends on the actual structure

of the networks in which we're residing

and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow

through the network.

Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case

is that human beings assemble themselves

and form a kind of superorganism.

Now, a superorganism is a collection of individuals

which show or evince behaviors or phenomena

that are not reducible to the study of individuals

and that must be understood by reference to,

and by studying, the collective.

Like, for example, a hive of bees

that's finding a new nesting site,

or a flock of birds that's evading a predator,

or a flock of birds that's able to pool its wisdom

and navigate and find a tiny speck

of an island in the middle of the Pacific,

or a pack of wolves that's able

to bring down larger prey.

Superorganisms have properties

that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals.

I think understanding social networks

and how they form and operate

can help us understand not just health and emotions

but all kinds of other phenomena --

like crime, and warfare,

and economic phenomena like bank runs

and market crashes

and the adoption of innovation

and the spread of product adoption.

Now, look at this.

I think we form social networks

because the benefits of a connected life

outweigh the costs.

If I was always violent towards you

or gave you misinformation

or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs,

you would cut the ties to me,

and the network would disintegrate.

So the spread of good and valuable things

is required to sustain and nourish social networks.

Similarly, social networks are required

for the spread of good and valuable things,

like love and kindness

and happiness and altruism

and ideas.

I think, in fact, that if we realized

how valuable social networks are,

we'd spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them,

because I think social networks

are fundamentally related to goodness.

And what I think the world needs now

is more connections.

Thank you.

(Applause)