Sublime

Nicholas Christakis, a sociology professor and physician at Yale, has long argued that whom we are connected to is profoundly important and that it is possible to make prosocial behaviors (such as healthy eating or not smoking) contagious in a community.

Most of us know this to some degree. If we spend time with athletes we tend to get fit; if we spend time with criminals, it is only a matter of time before we break the law ourselves. In 2009, James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis published a

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature that interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

“If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about your social network—about your friends and family, and the strength of your bonds with them.”

In 2007 researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler published a study that revealed that our attitudes and behaviors have more impact on the people around us than we’d ever previously thought.