The Qualities That Make a Good Society

Elemental human capacities like friendship and love, teaching and learning, have tremendous, constant, practical force. We don’t think of these in terms of what has given our species the grit to endure through hard times and even evolve in the long run. They’re lived social intelligence, part of the everyday, and so can be hard to see as serious amidst the high tumult of our age. But these kinds of human qualities are what sociologist Nicholas Christakis studies from his Human Nature Lab at Yale and his life generously lived. He offers a wide lens, a broad perspective, that deepens and refreshes.

Nicholas Christakis — is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he’s also the director of the Human Nature Lab and co-director of the Institute for Network Science. He’s the author of Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do and Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. In October 2020, he published Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Nicholas Christakis — How We’re Wired for Goodness." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired on March 5, 2020.