The part of human nature that I’d like to talk about today is that part of our human nature that is relevant to our interactions with others. There’s been a phenomenal amount of work taking place in the last ten years, certainly, and even in the last year or two that seeks to understand how we interact with each other and how we assemble ourselves into social networks.

If you think about it, humans are extremely unusual as a species in that we form long-term, non-reproductive unions to other members of our species; namely, we have friends. Why do we do this? Why do we have friends? It’s not hard to construct an argument as to why we would have sex with other people, but it’s rather more difficult to construct an argument as to why we would befriend other people. Yet we, and very few other species, do this thing. So I’d like to problematize that; I’d like to problematize friendship first. 

Nicholas Christakis is a Physician and Social Scientist; Director, The Human Nature Lab, Yale University; Coauthor, Connected: The Surprising Power Of Our Social Networks And How They Shape Our Lives.

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