Guest Lecture: How Social Connection Is Embodied by Prof. Nicholas A. Christakis

Title

How Social Connection Is Embodied

Abstract

Natural selection has shaped our species to be social and has endowed us with important capacities, such as love, friendship, and cooperation. Our biology reflects this. Our bodies respond to, and foster, social interactions in myriad ways. Here I provide an overview of work in our lab regarding this phenomenon. I discuss how our bodies respond to social isolation, including via circulating biomarkers in our blood. I review evidence that we have evolved the capacity to pick particular people as suitable mates. I show how our genes also shape how many friends we have, where we are located within social networks, and even who we pick as friends (i.e., the people who become a kind of “functional kin” to us). In a line of other work, using a large sample of isolated villages in Honduras, I show how the social networks we form depend on, and affect, our gut microbiome. Commensal microbes circulate in our social networks and these microbes in turn produce chemicals in our bodies that can shape both our behavior and our health. Finally, I discuss ongoing work in which we are exploring the fascinating topic of human social chemosignaling. Humans evolved to produce and detect odors that signal important social phenotypes, suggesting that we can smell out people who are suitable friends to us, or modify the behavior of the people around us by the volatile organic compounds our bodies emit. Human society is deeply biological.

Bio

Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University and Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science and the Human Nature Lab. A physician and social scientist, his research examines how social networks shape human behavior, health, and collective outcomes, drawing on network science, biosocial science, computational social science, and large-scale experiments. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. Christakis is the author of more than 220 scientific articles and several books, including Connected, Blueprint, and Apollo’s Arrow. In 2009, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.