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Category: Nicholas A. Christakis

Shaking up the social sciences….

Yale University’s Nicholas Christakis advocates for change in the social sciences in the pages of the NYT here. Christakis is co-director of Yale’s Institute for Network Science. Money quote:

For the past century, people have looked to the physical and biological sciences to solve important problems. The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today’s intellectual challenges.

I would submit that Krasnow’s own department of Computational Social Sciences represents just such an evolution.

jlolds computational social sciences, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, Nicholas A. Christakis July 23, 2013 1 Minute

Three-degrees of separation= happiness

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.

Jim

jlolds computational social sciences, James Fowler, Nicholas A. Christakis December 10, 2008 1 Minute

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Orcid ID

ORCID iD iconorcid.org/0000-0003-3214-946X
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