What types of creatures are we? Are we cruel and competitive or kind and cooperative? Physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis, Director of Yale’s Human Nature Lab, joins us to discuss the evolutionary origins of human social behavior, our capacity to harm but also our inclination to nurture, educate, and love.
Nicholas A. Christakis is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. He works in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Dr. Christakis has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of more than 200 articles and several books, including Blueprint: Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. In 2009, TIME Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Robert Perkinson is a professor at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and Director of the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series.
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This transcript was originally created by Rev.com, and edited by Willow Hutchison. Includes minor changes for clarity.
Christakis, Nicholas. “Nicholas Christakis: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society”. Produced by the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series. Better Tomorrow Speaker Series, July 29, 2023.
Robert Perkinson: Aloha! I’m Robert Perkinson, the coordinator of the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series and a professor here at the University of Hawai’i.
Today, we’re diving into some fascinating research that sheds new light on some big questions: How do humans become the social creatures we are? How much do our genes influence not just our biology, but our social behaviors—like our love lives, friendships, and even how our civilizations are shaped?
And really, what kind of beings are we? Are we naturally kind and cooperative, or more competitive and predatory? These are questions philosophers have been exploring since the very beginning of philosophy.
Today, we’re lucky to have Nicholas Christakis as our guest. Thanks so much for being here, Nicholas!
Nicholas Christakis: Thanks for having me!
Robert: Nicholas brings insights from an incredible range of fields—from anthropology to neuroscience and more. He’s visiting us from Yale, where he directs the Human Nature Lab.
Today we're going to be talking about exciting research that casts new light on really foundational quandaries. How do human beings become the social animals that we are? To what extent have our genes shaped not only our biologies, but our social behaviors, our love lives, our friendships, even the shape of our civilizations? And what sort of creatures are we anyway? Are we kind and cooperative, or are we predatory and competitive? These are the sort of questions that philosophers have wrestled with since the birth of philosophy. But today our guest, Nicholas Christakis, welcome.
Nicholas: Thank you so much for having me.
Robert: He really brings to bear insights from a dizzying array of fields, from anthropology to neuroscience and more. He's visiting us from Yale, where he's director of the Human Nature Lab. His teams over the years have made all sorts of breakthrough discoveries in network science, for example, on the social contagiousness of a whole range of seemingly individual behaviors ranging from depression on the one hand, to generosity on the other. He's the author of several books, including the bestselling Blueprint, which we'll be talking about mostly today. It's very nice to have you here with us.
Nicholas: Thank you so much for having me.
Robert: I thought I'd start by just talking a little bit about the book and then going through the larger body of your research. What made you decide to step out of the findings of your lab and to write a book that has such a grand scope as Blueprint does?
Nicholas: Well, there are personal motivations, which are that I'm an optimist and I marvel at human beings. In addition to being an optimist, I'm sort of really impressed with our species. I think we're a pretty incredible species. And I very much wanted to counter a kind of narrative that's very ascendant amongst scientists, but is also very centered amongst people on the street, which is a narrative that focuses on the evil parts of human nature, our propensity for violence and selfishness and tribalism and hatred. And I think that this dark side of human nature gets far too much attention, and I think the bright side has been denied the attention it deserves. So I wanted to write about the origins of love and friendship and altruism and kindness and teaching and all of these wonderful qualities, which in any case, as I mentioned a moment ago, we're more in keeping with my own disposition.
Robert:Well, and it's a lovely book in spirit for that reason, I found, because it is sometimes in gloomy and caustic and divisive times to sometimes lose sight of all the ways that we still sacrifice for one another and help each other and generally cooperate. What in a nutshell is the main take home of the book? Just so people have a sense of it as we begin and then we'll dig in deeper.
Nicholas:Well, the basic argument is that it's clear that natural selection, by modifying our genes, has shaped the structure and function of our bodies. Everyone knows this, and has also shaped the structure and function of our minds and hence our behaviors. But the argument I make in Blueprint is that natural selection has also shaped the structure and function of our societies. It's shaped how we live together. It's endowed us with all of these properties. And there are eight key properties that I call the social suite that include love and friendship and cooperation and teaching and social networks. These are the eight things that we are sort of genetically programmed [which] is not exactly the right word, but that's the essence of it. In other words, these are qualities that are encoded in our genes that we are impelled to manifest, that we express between people. So I'm not focused on social qualities.
For example, you could be brave by yourself. You could be brave in fighting against an animal or coping with a natural disaster. That's an individualistic quality, but you can't really befriend yourself. You have to befriend another human being. So the qualities that I'm interested in, these social qualities or these properties are qualities that we express interindividually, things like friendship and love, for example, or cooperation. You can't really cooperate with yourself. You need another human being to cooperate with, and it's all of those qualities that allow us to live socially that I'm focused on. And here's the thing, if every time I came near you in the ancestral past, if a human being came near another human being and that other person lied to you or injured you or took your things or killed you, you would be better off-
Robert: With the pumas.
Nicholas:That's exactly right. Exactly. We would've evolved to live in a solitary fashion, but that's not the kind of animal we are. We live socially. Therefore, the benefits of a connected life must have outweighed the costs, evolutionarily speaking.
Robert:And so therefore, in your estimation, despite whatever horrors humans have created have undertaken collectively against one another, still ought to be in the grand ledger outbalanced by our capacity by cooperation.
Nicholas: Yes. And the grand ledger, I think absolutely they are. That's correct.
Robert:Well, let's talk a little bit about your own individual and social journey to the topic. I was struck by the scope of research in this book, but also your own education and career. You're a physician in public health, a doctorate in sociology. Actually, what compelled you to accrue many more graduate degrees than you needed? Or maybe you need them all.
Nicholas:Well, I grew up in a household where my mother was seriously ill. She was diagnosed with a type of cancer that back then in 1968 was fatal. She lived for 19 years until I was 25. And all of her sons, whatever other interests they may have had, all became doctors. So from the time I was a teenager, I wanted to be a doctor. And actually initially I wanted to be a reconstructive surgeon. I wanted to reattach severed extremities, and I went to medical school to do that. But very quickly I realized that that was not going to be for me to be a surgeon. And previously I had also had an interest in the biological sciences, that I had interest in the social sciences. I had a variety of interests. And in the summer of 1987 when my mother was very sick, I knew I couldn't be in medical school.
I was at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and I grew up in Washington, DC. I knew I wouldn't be able to help in her terminal phase if I was fully engaged in medical school. So I decided to take a year off for medical school and get a master's in public health degree, which had a much more controllable schedule. And that rekindled that experience of getting an MPH where I was taking classes in epidemiology and the history of medicine and medical ethics and so forth, rekindled my interest in the social sciences. And then I knew that if I was going to be a professor, as I had hoped and do serious science, I knew that a medical degree was not enough. So I needed to get a PhD in something. And then again, for serendipitous reasons, which probably I shouldn't go into, I wound up picking sociology. I finally completed my medical training and my formal education in 1995 when I was 33. So I did a lot of school.
Robert:But it's nice that you've been able to take advantage of that research so widely. It's also interesting, I think that your own individual story turns out to be social. We tend to think of individuals making choices that determine the course of their career but they really aren't.
Nicholas: No, we're all of us creatures of serendipity in life and social influences.
Robert: And then what brought you from medicine to network science?
Nicholas:Well, what happened was my first job was at the University of Chicago, and I was jointly appointed between the Department of Medicine and the Department of Sociology. And for my clinical practice, I had kind of returned to my concern for caring for the terminally ill. So I'm a hospice doctor. I was trained as a hospice doctor, and that's what I did clinically. I took care of people who were dying. And part of that was motivated by a kind of moral compunction because I don't know if the listeners know this, but Americans die badly. They still die badly years, decades on. But roughly 50% of Americans die in pain, for example, which is appalling in our great nation that we have that type of exit from like we're a rich country, we have excellent healthcare.
And about a third of Americans lose all or most of their life savings in caring for the first person to die in the family. So people are impoverished when the first person in their family dies. So there are all of these adverse parts of death in America that really animated me when I was a young doctor and I wanted to do something about it. So my first job was as a hospice doctor, and the initial research I was doing was all about how to improve the care of the dying when I was in my 30s.
Robert: And was hospice still sort of new at this point?
Nicholas:Hospice was very new. There did exist hospices in the United States in the '90s, but it was becoming more professionalized rapidly. There were some revisions in the Medicare benefit for hospice. There was a lot of ferment in this field. I really wanted to help care for people who were dying and also improve the care of the dying more generally. So in my lab at the time, I was doing a lot of research on improving end of life care, different kinds of projects, trying to figure out how to have better public policy, better clinical delivery, the epidemiology of death, that kind of stuff. And I sort of began to get kind of depressed, and I was just relentlessly immersed in death and dying. Clinically, I was taking care of people who were dying. I practiced on the south side of Chicago, which was a very predominantly poor African-American part of the city. And the conditions were not great actually.
Robert: And people are dying young in some cases.
Nicholas:Well, some, yes. Well, this is another whole story, and we could talk about that if you're interested. And so in my lab I was studying clinical improvements and how to take care of the dying and so on. And I had gone to England where I visited St. Christopher's Hospice where the modern hospice movement started. And I had met with this very famous woman who had started it called Cicely Saunders. And as part of my time there, I met a man who told me that the Bureau of Vital Statistics in England, they used to joke was called hatch, match and dispatch. Birth, marriage and death.
Hatch, match, dispatch. And so I come home after that and my beloved wife, Erica, comes to me and she says, "Can't you study anything else other than death and dying"? And I couldn't study birth. I mean, I had no expertise, but I thought, well, maybe I could study match, maybe I can study marriage.
So I shifted my research agenda to start studying the widowhood effect, why when one person dies, their spouse's risk of death goes up dramatically for the first six months, especially in men.
Robert: Right. We're just in there. Right.
Nicholas:Men have more of a widowhood effect than women do. So I started studying that. And then something very unexpected happened one day in the late 1990s. We used to have these old cell phones that were the size of bricks. And I had gone to a patient's home and the woman was dying of dementia and her daughter had been caring for her, and she was exhausted from caring for her mother. And the daughter's husband was very distressed and depressed about his wife's predicament. And the husband had a close friend. I'm actually maybe garbling the precise sequence of relationships at the moment, but that's the gist of it. And I was driving home from having done this home visit, and I get a call from this person and I suddenly realized an obvious fact, which was that the woman who was dying was creating ripple effects of illness, not just to her spouse or her daughter, but to the daughter's husband's best friend who's calling me about his friend's predicament.
And so I suddenly realized in that moment that these things that I had been studying, the widowhood effect, which was just the effect of illness in one person on the illness in another, was a special case of social network, of broader social network phenomenon.
Robert:And I guess that's kind of a good introduction to what social network science is. What's your best way of explaining the field?
Nicholas:Well, what's interesting is most people nowadays, because of social media, have seen these images of networks. You have to remember in the 1990s, there was a science, the study of social networks that goes back a hundred years. And so I had been taught about social networks in graduate school, but people on the street didn't have the visual impression of what networks were. So it's like networks have two elements, have individuals, the people and the ties that connect them and the pictures of them have little dots and lines.
Robert:Right. And they can be visualized in all sorts of interesting ways. Now, especially new visualization techniques are probably better.
Nicholas:That's true. But the point is that now the person on the street has seen such images.
Most people, when I'm talking about networks, have a visual image of what a network looks like. They're on billboards. They can map their networks on Facebook. They can see it. Back then though this was a great novelty. So yeah, so I had learned about networks as part of my training, and then I kind of began to see that these dyadic effects between a husband and a wife or two partners, whatever their sex, was a special case of a broader phenomenon. And so then I was off and running. And basically for the last 22 years, that's what I've been studying is human social interrelationships in the form of networks.
Robert:And the range of findings are really extraordinary. And I'm sure I only know a portion of them, but I was struck partly by the range of behaviors that can be contagious, that we think of as individual. There's some things that are easy to imagine that are self-evidently contagious or influenced by others. Musical tastes.
Nicholas: Fashions.
Robert: Food, fashion.
Nicholas: Germs like COVID.
Robert:But in your estimation, you found suicide, obesity, even back pain. What are some of them that surprised you and how do we even really understand that?
Nicholas:Well, there are two broad ways in which we are affected by the social ties around us. Actually, there's more than two. But the two key ways are contagion effects like you just mentioned, and also connection effects. So contagion effects are just the basic realization that when I affect you, that effect doesn't stop with you. You can go on to affect others, and therefore, I indirectly could come to affect many people. I quit smoking. It changes the probability that my friends will quit smoking. And so they might quit, or at least some of them might quit. And those individuals in turn might affect their friends. So when I make a positive move in my life, it can ripple out for me and affect, depending on the outcome, a few or dozens or sometimes hundreds of other people.
So we have done many studies and many experiments over the years, large field trials with tens of thousands of people. For example, we've done research showing that we can go into villages in the developing world in India or in Honduras for example, and teach a few people something, and then trace out how the knowledge that we've given those people spreads and affects the knowledge and behavior of the whole village just from the targeted individuals.
Robert:And can it therefore make sense to map before you design or undertake an intervention to figure out who the influencers are, so to speak, in any given network?
Nicholas:Absolutely. So you could do that. You don't necessarily have to do that. But from a scientific point of view, if you're trying to trace out the contagion effects, it helps to know the structure of the ties. Another way that everyone listening will appreciate is COVID. So for example, you may be early in the epidemic, you might not have COVID and your friends might not have COVID, but your friend's friend's friends might have the virus. And the fact that those individuals unknown to you, who are four degrees of separation from you, are ill means that the virus is inexorably going to wind its way through the network and reach you. So your fate is connected to the fate of these people that you don't even know, that are far away from you in the network. And it's not just with viral illnesses that that's the case. It's with so many things that that's the case.
So germs flow within networks, money flows within networks, emotions flow within networks, knowledge and ideas flow within networks, behaviors flow within networks, to differing extents, depending on the phenomenon. But the general principle that there is a flow through the network is absolutely the case. But understanding it, studying it, exploiting it, it's not easy. It takes effort. All of those are contagion effects. But there's another way we're affected by networks as well. We're not just affected by what's flowing through the network. We're actually affected by the structure of the network. I can give a metaphor for that, which I think is helpful.
And that's the metaphor of carbon. And as most people learned in high school chemistry, there are at least a couple of forms of carbon. You can arrange the carbon atoms one way and you get graphite, which is soft and dark, or you take the same carbon atoms and arrange them another way and you get diamond, which is hard and clear. And there are two key intellectual ideas there. The first is that these properties of softness and darkness and hardness and clearness aren't properties of the carbon atoms. They're properties of the collection of carbon atoms.
Robert: Right. Again, not the individual, but as a group.
Nicholas:That's right. And second, which properties you get depends on how you connect the carbon atoms to each other. Take the same carbon atoms, connect them one way, you get one set of properties. Connect them another way, you get a completely different set of properties. And it's the same with human groups. You can take a group of people and connect them one way and they're really sweet to each other or take the same people with their same inclination to be nice, but connect them another way and they're mean to each other, which means that the properties of niceness and meanness aren't only properties of individuals. They're properties of groups that can arise from the pattern of connections. I'll give you one more example. Sociologist colleague of mine by the name of Peter Bearman, and one of his colleagues did a paper where they looked at suicidal ideation in girls, which is a big problem nowadays. We have a rising mental illness.
Robert: Kind of worsening problem.
Nicholas:Yes, it's a worsening problem. This is an old paper that they did, and they looked at the structure of the friendships in groups of girls. So imagine that you have Becky and Becky can have two friends, Susie and Jane. And so you have, here's Becky, and here's Susie, and here's Jane. And now there are two possibilities. Susie and Jane can be friends with each other, or they might not be friends with each other. We still have Becky, Sue and Jane. The only difference is the pattern of structural connections. And it turns out that Becky is more likely to consider taking her own life if Susan and Jane are not friends than if they are friends.
Robert: You need those people to be checking on you with each other.
Nicholas:Exactly. Or another theory is that it's stressful to have your friends not be friends with each other.
Robert: Especially for adolescents.
Nicholas:Yes, exactly. But the point is it's not who Becky, Susan and Jane are, it's the pattern of connections that affects Becky's fate.
It's not whether, for example, ideas about how to take your life are flowing through the network. It's just the actual structure that might matter. So these two broad effects, contagion and connection, are fundamental aspects of human experience. And I'll say one more thing. The particular pattern of connections, if you think about it, most people, we've studied this actually, we've looked at historical evidence and we've also studied this. We've mapped networks all around the world. We've mapped networks among the hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. We've mapped them amongst the Nyangatom in Sudan, we've mapped them in India, we've mapped them in Honduras, we've mapped them in the United States. We've gone all over the world and we've mapped the structure of human social networks. And again and again, that structure is the same and is mathematically the same.
And people should appreciate this because for example, one of those stories I always tell is if you could have talked to my Greek grandmother who grew up in Southern Greece a hundred years ago when she was a girl, more than a hundred, and you asked her, "Well, when you were a little girl, when you were 10 or 11, how many friends did you have?" She would say, "I had one or two best friends, four or five of us girls that were close." And if you could ask my daughter-
Robert: She had a bunch of other acquaintances.
Nicholas:Yes. But if you could ask my daughter, Lena, the same question when she was 11 and she had an iPhone in her pocket, she would give you the same answer. "I have one or two best friends. There are four or five of us girls, we hang out." There's something very deep and fundamental about our proclivity to friendship, our capacity to have one best friend or two best friends. Most listeners know what I'm talking about when I say this, and a small group of intimate others. That's encoded in our genes, that practice.
Robert:I'll ask you one question kind of on the research and both the contagiousness and the structure of the networks. How do you control for all the possible confounding variables that, say in the case of Becky and her true friends, maybe Becky is depressed because she was not good at finding the right friends, or maybe someone who has bad eating and health habits tends to congregate and befriend people who are not.
Nicholas: Yes.
Robert: So how do you try to isolate those?
Nicholas:So there are ways that can be done statistically, but for the last 15 years, we've been doing experiments. So for example, on the connection issue, what you can do is you can create a laboratory online where you recruit real people to come into this online laboratory, and then you experimentally manipulate the structure. So for example, you could make a pattern of ties this way and a pattern of ties this way, and you drop people into this pattern or into this pattern. And now you introduce people to their immediate neighbors like "These are your friends." These are the people you're going to interact with. And not everyone in this group interacts with everyone else. Each person interacts with some different subset. And then you say, okay, now I'm going to give you something called the public goods game, which is a kind of a model, a kind of game that people can play that invites them to be nice or not.
They can either be nice to each other or they can abuse or take advantage of each other, and they start playing this game. And you can then experimentally change the structure of the network. You can make it this structure or this structure and see where humans fare better? And we've done that and we've shown in a number of ways how the structure matters. So you can do experiments is the answer. To manipulate people's real face-to-face interactions is difficult. But there's some exceptions. Things like alcoholics anonymous groups, military companies, in employment situations, you can form work groups. You could do some experiments. And there are some people [who] have done such experiments where they've experimentally manipulated the structure of human interactions, but it's harder to do that face-to-face.
So the experiments that we do face-to-face on a large scale say, okay, let's just accept the structure of interactions as we find it, for example, in 30,000 people in Honduras, which is what we've done, but let's experimentally see whether we can manipulate the flow of ideas in this system. So are there things we can do that optimize the ability of these villagers to breastfeed their children, to vaccinate their children, to use clean water and so on?
Robert:Explain how the interventions that were informed by network science were different from traditional public health interventions and what made them successful.
Nicholas:So what we are trying to do is we're not trying to invent new educational interventions. In other words, what we're trying to do is not figure out a better way to teach you to do something for yourself. We find other scientists who've prepared educational interventions, and those scientists have shown that if I teach Richard something, he's going to be more likely to do it. Or if I teach Susan something, she's going to be more likely to do it. What our experiments are looking at is, who should you teach within a village to maximize the spillover effects?
So our experiments are not about enhancing the actual public health. It's not about the actual public health educational intervention. We ideally want someone else to have already shown that this intervention works in the people that you give it to. What we're trying to figure out is like, okay, instead of giving it to everyone in the village, maybe you only need to give it to these 10 people. And because of where they're located in the network, they're structurally influential. And if you teach those people to do it, everyone else will copy them. We're not talking here about influencers like in social media.
Robert: Well, although I'm sure there are advertising implications of your research too.
Nicholas:There are, but the thing is, these influencers online, they're not actually the same. It sounds like the same thing, but it's not. They are exercising a kind of broadcast power. In other words, it's like they're sending a message to each of many people. We're talking about something more organic. For example, if you want to decrease bullying in schools or decrease absenteeism in workplaces or improve safety practices in hospitals, you want to get some doctors or nurses to behave in a certain way that changes the culture of those organizations. That's what we're doing and we've done it repeatedly.
Robert:Well, I was struck reading your work by how much we tend to try to treat problems individually.
And some of them might intuitively realize that treating depression or obesity or even diabetes individually might have some problems. But your work really suggests that all of these interventions really ought to be considered. I mean, are we treating a whole range of ailments and social problems individually when we ought to be addressing them socially?
Nicholas:Yes. Well, first of all, there are many ways you can address a problem socially, whether it's gun violence or poverty or diabetes or mass vaccination. Only some subset of those are truly network interventions. But absolutely, you're right. Many of these phenomena are not individualistic at all because we evolved to be social. We're social animals. We're influenced by other people for everything basically. And so therefore, I think that for many social problems, adopting a network perspective and designing interventions that take human interrelatedness seriously, gives us new tools to more effectively deal with those problems. It's like trying to change the culture in a classroom by interacting with one individual at a time. It's not the same as trying to have a collective. Here, I'll give you a simple example. Let's say I gave you 10 smokers and I gave you a hundred dollars, and you're going to try to get those smokers to quit.
And in one intervention you spend $10 on each smoker and you see them one-on-one. I'm going to spend $10 on you. I see you. The next person, I spend $10 on them and so on. That's one way of approaching the problem. Another way is you bring all 10 smokers into the room and you spend all a hundred dollars at the same time on some kind of group intervention. You should have the intuition that those two interventions, one of them might work better than the other. Maybe they work the same, maybe neither of them work, but it's like, oh, same amount of money, same smokers, different strategy for intervening might have different effects. Maybe when I treat the people one at a time out of the 10 smokers, I can get two of them to quit. But if I bring them into a group and spend all a hundred dollars at the same time, maybe I get five of them to quit.
Robert: What if you choose the person who's most charismatic?
Nicholas:Then I might be able to treat a thousand people with a hundred dollars. So I form 10 groups and I only spend $20 on each group. So I get two of the people to do something which the others want to copy, and then I can treat 500 people for the same money.
Robert:And what are some concrete examples of real world successes that have taken this network approach to behavioral modification?
Nicholas:Well, we just did a study in India, which we just published this past summer actually in 2022, looking at iron deficiency anemia in mothers and children. And iron deficiency anemia is a huge problem around the world in neonates and in women and newly pregnant women. Everything in the baby's body comes from the mother's body. So if the baby needs calcium or iron, guess where the baby gets it. And so women's bodies are very burdened by the act of producing a baby. So they're anemic often afterwards. Sometimes the babies are anemic and this can cause cognitive problems. It's a serious public health problem.
What we did is we went to 50 very poor residential units in Mumbai, and we had an intervention that encouraged the women to use iron fortified salt. So just like we have iodine in our salt, just add iron to the salt. So you buy the same salt, you use it the same way, but now in all your food prep, there's iron in your diet. Costs a tiny, tiny amount more, a tolerable amount more. So the intervention involved educating women about the problems of iron deficiency and also encouraging them to buy this kind of salt that would be helpful.
And we mapped the networks of 2,500 female heads of household in 50 different residential units. And in some residential units we picked 20% of the women at random. In other residential units, we picked 20% of the women according to who had the most connections. And in a third residential unit, we picked them in this other sneaky way, which uses something called the friendship paradox. And then we gave them all the same intervention, and then we tested not just the impact upon the women who were given the intervention-
Robert: The whole network, the larger network.
Nicholas:The whole network, exactly. And we found that in these residential units where we use this sneaky way of picking particular women to educate, very large numbers of people adopted the iron fortified salt. Whereas in this other situation where we took the equal number of women at random, many fewer people did.
Robert: Wow, amazing. And so many implications for vaccination, for example.
Nicholas: Yes.
Robert: I can imagine. During COVID, did any countries try this?
Nicholas:Well, it is mathematically absolutely the case that if vaccines are scarce, you would preferentially wish to vaccinate popular people. But it is politically very difficult to do that.
Robert: Yes, I can imagine.
Nicholas: But it's worth thinking about for just a moment.
Robert: The people would think it's an amazing idea.
Nicholas:Yes, exactly. Well, but it's worth thinking about for a moment because we did have this debate in our country and we had variants of this debate. So first of all, if vaccine doses are scarce for a communicable disease, it makes no sense to give a vaccine dose to a hermit, someone who's socially isolated, interacting with nobody-
Robert: There's different reasons for that.
Nicholas:You're wasting the vaccine on that person. You want to give the vaccine to the people who are popular also because they are the conduits for the spread of the virus.
Robert: And more likely to get it.
Nicholas:More likely to get it, and more likely to transmit it. So inoculating them stops the spread of the virus. And this is for many respiratory diseases. This is the tension that also came up in a lot of our political debates, in a lot of our public health debates between whether we should vaccinate the young or the old. So the old were at greater risk of dying. So one argument is if the vaccine is scarce in order to save lives, we should give the vaccines to the elderly.
Robert: And that's the one that generally prevailed in the US.
Nicholas:That is the one that generally prevailed. And it's also to the person on the street, this seems very logical, but you actually could potentially have saved more lives by vaccinating the young who are out and about. And the elderly are what is called at the end of transmission chains. So by vaccinating people who have many social interactions, namely the young who go out to work and then come home, the number of interactions a younger person has is much higher than an elderly person.
Robert:Which I guess too is why the school closures debate remains unresolved even though it had quite negative effects for educational outcomes.
Nicholas: Yes, it did in the end, and we kind of expect that it would have.
Robert: But the family member mortality effects might've been significant.
Nicholas:Well, this is the thing. One thing that's misunderstood about school closures is that the reason we closed the schools in this particular virus, as everyone knows now, the young are spared. So we didn't close them to keep the young from dying. And in fact, for many respiratory viruses, the young are spared. Of course, there are other viruses which kill the young and spare the old. And of course everyone would've been clamoring to close the schools in that situation.
Robert: Sure.
Nicholas:But the reason you close the school is to reduce social mixing. If you think about it, when you close the school, you force the parents to stay home.
Robert: Right.
Nicholas:And you stop lots of people from congregating at the school yard twice a day to drop off and pick up kids. So the impact of school closures is primarily not about stopping the kids from getting infected. It's from stopping the transmission chains between kids. So in other words, I have the virus, I give it to my child, my child isn't sick from it, but gives it to your child, who also isn't sick from it, who gives it to you and you die. So stopping the school stops that transmission chain, even though both of our kids were fine, I've now caused your death via our children. And this was well understood even before. So there was a lot of false discourse.
People were saying, "Well, the kids don't get COVID, so why are we closing the schools?" Well, we weren't closing them to keep them from getting it. But the problem with that, also on the other side, people said, "Well, we are imposing a very unfair burden on children to save the elderly." And that's true too. And we, as a society, should have had a more open and frank conversation about this. What are the costs of doing this policy? What are the benefits of doing this policy? And public health is always a cold, utilitarian calculus.
Robert: Right.
Nicholas:And then we would ideally have tried to estimate all that and said, "Yes, we're going to close the schools despite the cost because we're going to save lives," or "No, we're not going to close the schools because the benefit is smaller than the cost."
Robert:So what sort of studies and findings have you been able to undertake with higher computing power and the internet connectivity of us all that you couldn't have when you started researching social networks, say 20 years ago?
Nicholas:In the 1960s, there was a famous exchange among some social scientists about could you bring an army into the laboratory? Could you study the function of large groups of people? And the decision was, no, you can't, that you need different kinds of methods to study that. And in fact, even when I first started my training 20 or 30 years ago, even 20 years ago, if you asked the social scientists what powers they dreamed of having, they might've said, "Well, I would love it if we had a little tiny Blackhawk helicopter and it could fly on top of you and know where you are and who you're talking to and what you're saying and what you're buying. And if it could do that in real time nonstop, and if we could do that for a whole city of people, that would be unbelievable."
Robert: Which we have.
Nicholas:Which we now have. Right. Everyone has a phone in their pocket, which does all of that stuff. So we have data on a vast scale, so called big data revolution, or what we call massive passive data.
And the availability of that kind of data from multiple sources, from phone companies, from healthcare companies and other sources of administrative data, from social media companies, from people voluntarily surrendering their privacy, which happens all the time on websites and so on, all of that data can be taken now and can be used to understand in a very deep way, deep questions about human social order. How and why do we organize ourselves the way we do? And we can trace out the flow of things like... I'll give you one example, very ingenious.
Someone was very interested in the flow of money through the system, and he stamped, I don't know if some of you may remember this. Where's George? I encountered a bill.
Robert: I don't but I think I've heard of it.
Nicholas:Yeah. He stamped on dollar bills. He stamped, "Where's George?" And I can't remember the website. It was like www.wheresgeorge.com or something. I made that up. I don't remember.
If you got the bill, you're supposed to enter the serial number of the bill. And people happily did this. People were cooperating and he used this data to trace the flow, the movement of money, which could never have been done before. You needed all of this modern infrastructure, the internet and so on, to be able to do that. And we can trace out so many things now like shopping taste. When you buy something, does that affect, probably your friends will buy it. Well, I can first of all identify who your friends are. I can identify what you're buying and I can trace this out. Now, it's scary.
Robert: And lucrative work.
Nicholas:Well, lucrative, but there's some authoritarian governments which are using this for ill effect. But the technology is there to allow this.
Robert:So when it comes to these gigantic data sets of phone location, data for a city or Google Search habits and so on, you still have to have researchers coming up with all of the questions to ask of that data and try to crunch it in such a way that it can give meaningful answers.
Nicholas: Yes.
Robert:But do you already have people working on artificial intelligence to try to have computers parse the data or even ask questions of the data that you might not have thought of? Or is it-
Nicholas: You mean in my lab, are we using AI?
Robert: Yeah. Or is that around the corner still?
Nicholas:Well, I'm sure other people are doing that kind of work with AI. We do a different kind of work with AI. So my lab is not a computer science lab, so we can't invent like AlphaGo. But what we're doing in my lab is we're not trying to invent super smart AI to replace human cognition. We're inventing dumb AI to supplement human interaction. Let me give you an example. We're inventing simple AI agents, which when placed within a group of humans in what we call a hybrid system. So you have smart humans who've been infiltrated with some dumb machines. And the question is, well, how do we program those dumb machines to benefit the group, to make the group more innovative, more productive, to decrease racism, for example, in the group?
Robert: These are online communities?
Nicholas:It can be online. We've also done work with humanoid robots. I can give you an example of that in a moment. So let me back up and try to fix ideas with a little toy example of this. So imagine a digital assistant, like an Alexa. The manufacturer of this device manufactures it so that it is optimized to interact with you, the purchaser of the device. So for example, when you want something from Alexa, you don't have to say, "Excuse me, Alexa. I'm terribly sorry to interrupt you. If you don't mind, would you please tell me the weather tomorrow?"
Robert: I try to be nice to Alexa just in case.
Nicholas:Yeah. Well, I don't disagree with you, but you don't have to be that obsequious and elaborate in your politeness to the machine. You can just say, "Alexa, weather," and the machine obediently responds, and in fact, it's designed to do that. So here we're talking about the human machine interaction, but what I'm interested in is you bring that machine into your home and then your kids use this machine and they learn to be rude and they go to the playground and they are rude to other children.
Because they learned to be rude from Alexa.
Robert: And you found that to be the case.
Nicholas:Yes. We've done many experiments like this. But the point is that the machine is changing the human-human interactions.
It's not the human-machine interactions.
Robert: Well, that's troubling.
Nicholas:It is. Very troubling. And the machine could change the human interactions, the human-human interactions for better or worse. For example, we did another experiment with humanoid robots. This was done with, spearheaded by Maggie Traeger, who's now at University of Notre Dame and Sarah Sebo and Brian Scassellati, a roboticist at Yale. And what we did is we created little groups of three humans and a humanoid robot. And the group of four was given the challenge on little tablet computers. And they had to work together to lay railroad track on the tablets. They had to get from point A to point B, and they had to each take turns laying some track.
And we varied the programming of the humanoid robot. So sometimes it told dad jokes and sometimes it did not. So the robot was acting as part of the team, but sometimes it told really dopey jokes and sometimes it didn't. And we found that when the robot told dopey jokes, it changed how the humans talk to each other.
Robert: It made them more familiar with one another?
Nicholas: Yes.
Robert: Net positive.
Nicholas: Yes. So we changed the human-human conversational dynamics by manipulating in a very simple, dumb way.
Robert: Dads knew what they were doing with those dumb jokes.
Nicholas:Yeah. So that's what I think you and I are going to bond over. We're going to agree over that. But that's right.
Robert: Thank you.
Nicholas:Actually, there's a theory about dad jokes. Dad jokes are cross-cultural. They're seen in every culture. There's a newspaper just published recently that makes the argument that the purpose of dad jokes is to build resilience, that you're toughening up your kids by teasing them, by telling these embarrassing stories.
That it's building toughness. Anyway, I'm going to stick with that explanation.
Robert: Sure.
Nicholas: But the point is, we've done a series of experiments where with online bots, we've shown, for example, that we can have a group of people with an online bot interacting online, and we can have some very simple programming for this bot and make the group more cooperative. This is work I did with Hiro Shirado who's now at Carnegie Mellon University. So there's lots of ways in which you can imagine AI is going to change our society. The topic I'm tackling in my lab, with my students, is the issue of how AI is going to rewire us, how we will interact with each other differently because of the presence of AI.
I think we humans are extraordinary and we're not machines, and we can do things that machines cannot do. And I also think we need to pay attention to whether these machines will, they could potentially improve us. So imagine here what you and I have been talking about how the psychologists that are going to lose their jobs because of ChatGPT type machines, and that could well happen and a lot of psychologists would lose their jobs. On the other hand, all the people who are now getting more effective therapy may become more productive. So there may be a net gain.
Robert: Or so many people that don't have access to regular mental health.
Nicholas:So in a way, it's sort of depressing that we're fobbing off people with mental health issues to talk to machines, but if it actually works, then we may be a net positive. So we don't want to be Luddites, right? So the economy's going to be reshaped by this technology, not immediately, but for sure in 10 years, we're going to see a very different kind of world.
Robert:And maybe Blueprint, your book, has some lessons for the future in this respect. I mean, you go all the way back to the dawn of human cognition and social interaction to argue that our pro-social behaviors, our formation of friendships, our care for young and teaching them are all favored for survival, and therefore we kind of intrinsically are nicer than we are cruel, if that's a fair summarization.
Nicholas:Yes. No, I do make those arguments, but I think the connection to some of these ideas about our artificial intelligence might be the following, one, that any technology that we introduce, especially technologies that are trying to modify our social behavior, and that these principles that I discussed in the book, we are more likely to have a utopian than dystopian future. In other words, technologies that try to subvert us having friends or interfere with our capacity for love or that make us more hostile to each other, those technologies are going to lead to unsurprisingly a kind of dystopian future.
Robert:And we see in politics and news and history that it's very possible to influence people to form prejudicial and violent social groups.
Nicholas:Oh, absolutely. I mean, the basic argument I make is I want to be clear, I'm not naive. I understand. So here's the thing. There are a number of scholars, for example, Steven Pinker, who have rightly argued that the world is better today because of the Enlightenment. In other words, during the Enlightenment in Europe, there was a kind of set of philosophical principles that was advanced about the equality of human beings, about democracy. And in parallel to that, a number of scientific developments, the discovery of electricity and magnetism, the steam engines and all of these things and those philosophical moves and those scientific advances starting initially in Europe and unevenly applied. I mean, they weren't immediately applied to women. They weren't immediately applied to people of color. And they were spotty. But sort of the anti-slavery movement principally began as a result, as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment.
There'd been slavery amongst human beings forever. For thousands of years, every group had enslaved other groups. But a really kind of modern anti-slavery movement, which finally almost stamped out slavery. There's still actually shadow slavery today in the world. There are 40 million people, lest we forget, that are enslaved in the world today. There are more slaves in the world today than there were numerically back two centuries ago. But anyway, these benefits to human beings arose, it is argued, because of these scientific advances in philosophical moves. And I think that's correct.
And we're living longer because we're richer, we have clean water, we have cotton underwear. I mean, there are all these things because of the looms and the mills. There are all of these things, vaccination we have, all of these technologies. So all of that is true. But my argument in Blueprint is that we don't necessarily need to rely on these recent historical forces acting, that in fact a more powerful, deeper ancient set of biological predilections with which we humans have been endowed for hundreds of thousands of years, is propelling a good society. So my argument in the book is, the arc of our evolutionary history is long, but it bends towards goodness.
Robert:And so how do we bend it deliberately when it comes to public policy and education, for example, or social welfare or media regulation? I mean, this of course is like stepping into a more abstract conversation about the way we wish the world to be, and maybe not so practical, but do you feel like there are ways that we can work toward creating a society that better reconciles with our better human nature and worse ways?
Nicholas:Well, I definitely feel like there are different policies we can implement. The policies that we attempt to implement that go against the principles of social life that are encoded within our genes are doomed to fail. For example, in Europe, in Eastern Germany, the Stasi try to eliminate friendship by making everyone suspicious of everyone else. And with a lot of effort, they did it for a while, but eventually it stopped. People started befriending and trusting their friends again when the Stasi finally fell. So you can, but that was rightly regarded as a dystopian society where you couldn't trust anybody and you were worried you'd be... And in fact, after the Berlin Wall fell, I think they found like 50% of East Germans were reporting on even their own family members. I mean, it was a corrupt, awful thing. And on the flip side, you could imagine doing things that are sustaining the kinds of things that we humans desperately need, like love and kindness and so on.
But I just need to make clear that my agenda in Blueprint is not policy prescriptive. In other words, it's not like a cookbook where you can open up and say, "Oh, these are the implications for modern politics." I'm after something deeper. I'm after an understanding of societies almost regardless of politics. I'm interested in the following fact that when you travel and all of us have had this experience, you travel to another part of the world. And initially it seems very alien there. These people eat different food. They worship different gods, they have different politics, and the smells in the street are different. And these people seem so different than us. Then you spend a little time in that country and you're like, oh, my God, their children play in the streets, the people love each other. Look at them, they're hanging out with their friends, and you come to the realization, they tell jokes.
They have schools where they teach their young. You realize that there's these deep fundamental aspects of our common humanity that are the same everywhere. For me, I find that a very appealing philosophy, going back to almost where we began our conversation. I mean, I think I would rather privilege our common humanity. I would rather focus on the ways in which we are like each other than unlike each other. I find that a sounder footing for our politics. I find it a sounder footing for our interactions with each other. And I find it a more pleasant way to live, to imagine that we're all human beings, we're all soft on the outside, and we have by and large, similar desires, similar worries and that this feeling this way and recognizing this reality provides a vehicle for us to understand each other better and work in common purpose.
Robert:I was thinking about your book even in annoying traffic this morning, because you can conceive of your commute as a kind of competitive zero-sum game in which people cut you off and they're irritating and you yell at them.
Or you can think of it as kind of an amazing cooperative endeavor in which everyone is trying not to get where they're trying to go. They're trying to not crash with you. Sometimes you save them from crashing if they change lanes and you tap your brakes. Other times, they save you from crashing. And one really can bring a more positive mindset to all sorts of social enterprises. And I think it's sweet the way that your book encourages us to do so in a certain sense.
Nicholas:Well, the story you just told evokes in me a memory when I was in medical school at the time I was in Boston. And I was struggling with trying to regulate my own attitude towards adversity in the world and in my own life. And there was a scientist, I think at MIT that was doing a study of Buddhist monks' brains and the discipline for meditation that these Buddhist monks have, and was it reshaping their brains? MRI machines had just been invented. They were interested in looking at different regions of the brain and the size of the brain. And these monks have a meditative practice of reframing events always to be positive. So they train themselves to see the good in the world, and they train themselves to re-narrate what's happening in a positive way.
And so they were interviewing one of these monks, and I pulled over to listen to this guy. I was so affected. I don't know how old I was. I was 25 and it was on an NPR show or something. And I pulled over to listen to this interview because I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And so the interviewer asked the monk, "Well, what would you do if you were driving and someone cut you off in traffic? Wouldn't that irritate you?" It's a very Boston kind of question.
Robert: Driving in Boston is difficult.
Nicholas:Yes, exactly. Wouldn't that irritate you? And we all know that experience of being irritated. You're in a car. Someone does something rude, and you're smart to ignore all of that because road rage is really a stupid way to lose your life. Who cares if someone cuts you off? But anyway, so the monk said, without missing a beat, when he was given this hypothetical, he said, well, he goes, "I would imagine that there was a desperate man driving this car and his wife was in the back seat and she was delivering a baby and he had to get her to the hospital in time, and this baby was going to have a beautiful life and be a wonderful baby."
I'm saying, "Wow, I wish I could do that." What a complete change in perspective. Right? Anyway, so your story put me in mind of that experience.
Robert:Maybe he inspired you to write this book in a way it's cool to think that kind of dramatic positive mental gymnastics that that monk was undertaking actually fulfilled our evolutionary purpose to a certain extent.
Nicholas:Yes, I think our capacity to not only make a good life for ourselves, but our capacity to envision a good life for ourselves is itself a distinctive and miraculous feature of our species. We haven't talked about this, but sexually reproducing animals have sex with each other. They mate with each other.
Robert: I should say there's a lot of amazing animal anthropology in the book.
Nicholas:And of course we mate with each other too, but we do something else that's extremely rare if we befriend each other. We form long-term non-reproductive unions with other members of our species, namely we have friends.
Robert: Which often lasts longer than our romantic relations.
Nicholas:Yeah. Romantic relations, that's also true. That is also true. But other animals don't do this. Very few animals do it. We do it. Certain other primate species have friends, certain whale species have friends, and elephants have friends. And then there's some other unusual rare exceptions in other parts of the animal kingdom. And it is amazing that we have this capacity, and yet everyone takes it for granted that we have friendships, we evolved to have friendships, and these friendships are central to our lives. We have all of this psychological and physiological apparatus. You feel good in the presence of your friends. It lowers your blood pressure, makes you feel you can cope with adversity.
Robert: You feel good to do something nice for them.
Nicholas:Yes. And we often do things for our friends that they don't even know about that are nice, secret things. We would happily help our friends and they're not genetically related to us. So the fact that we evolved to have these predilections, the fact that we evolved this psychological and apparatus that supports our capacity for friendship says something very profound, I think about human beings, very optimistic about human beings.
Robert:Well, thank you for your optimism.
And for your research to give credence to that and solidity to that optimism. And thank you so much for joining us today.
Nicholas: Thank you for having me. It's really been a wonderful interview.
Robert:Again, I'm Robert Perkinson and we've been speaking as part of the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series. Nicholas is here visiting for a conference run by UHERO. This visit has also been sponsored by the Department of Economics. The Better Tomorrow Speaker Series is a joint venture of the Hawaii Community Foundation and Kamehameha Schools. We have support from Scholar Strategy Network and the Queen's Health System and Ulupono Initiative.
And thank you so much. It was really a wonderful conversation.
Nicholas: Thank you.