Nicholas A. Christakis Quotes

The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.

Science of Society

I love to study people, and that's basically what sociology is.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

It's not rocket science. It's social science.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

I admit that the eyes of the intellectually and culturally lively tend to glaze over at the mere mention of sociology, often with ample justification.

There is no social question, there are social questions.

I recognized that … there was a science of society as well as botany.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

I don't want to become a serious, annoying sociologist. I try to regard sociology as a part of everyday life.

It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.

I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments.

I tend to write society as I see and understand it.

I'm very interested in what makes people tick; people are so weird and complicated.

I love to see what real human behavior looks like. I've always envisioned my job as just observing and noting that and, for the purposes of my work, just cutting out the boring parts.

I am trained as a psychologist, and I think of all human issues in terms of psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary theory.

The twentieth century may well find historical status as the epoch in which man began to study himself as a scientific phenomenon.

I'm interested in the relationships of people. I'm interested in the darker moments within us. All those aspects of human behavior, I'm fascinated by. But in the times we're in, those are hard movies to make. So if I can do it at HBO, fine.

You meet people, and you're like, 'I don't know how I feel about you,' and someone does something surprising that changes your mind. We're interesting creatures; we're nuanced, complicated and layered, and we make all sorts of choices.

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

I'm very lucky to work at bitly, with a data set that allows us to explore human social behavior at the scale of human social behavior.

A lot of people seem to think that data science is just a process of adding up a bunch of data and looking at the results, but that's actually not at all what the process is.

Our kind of research might be one of the first projects to go. Our work is not urgent; it's not the cure for cancer or Alzheimer's. But we have a way of understanding human life that you can't get anywhere else, and it lays the foundation for important, actionable things.

I'm someone who likes to explore the complexities in people.