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Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do Paperback – Illustrated, January 12, 2011
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Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Dr. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide.
In Connected, the authors explain why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, Connected overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm-that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLittle, Brown Spark
- Publication dateJanuary 12, 2011
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100316036137
- ISBN-13978-0316036139
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"In a category of works of brilliant originality that can stimulate and enlighten and can sometimes even change the way we understand the world."―The New York Times
"Groundbreaking."―Kirkus
"An entertaining guide to the mechanics and importance of human networking."―Publishers Weekly
"Engaging and insightful...sure-to-be a blockbuster...Connected succeeds in connecting with its audience."―SeedMagazine.com
"Illuminating...The authors excel at drawing out the devil in the detail. Connected has profound implications."―New Scientist
"Intriguing."―SmartMoney.com
"Connected explores the startling intricacies of social networks."―O, The Oprah Magazine
"Could well be one of the most important works of the decade. Full of fascinating stories and examples. A must read."―Ed Diener, Joseph Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology University of Illinois and author of Happiness
"In a social world exploding with new ways to interact, Connected is a user's guide for ourselves in the 21st century."―Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics and author of Predictably Irrational
"A God's-eye view of social relationships that may make you dizzy. Every business leader, teacher, and parent should see their life from this vantage."―Chip Heath, coauthor Made to Stick
"A lively, well-written account of social networks and their power to shape our lives. The world becomes smaller and more meaningful after reading this engaging book."―Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day
"The possibility that we all participate in one mind challenges religion, philosophy, and the meaning of life itself."―Deepak Chopra, San Francisco Chronicle
"[In a category of] works of brilliant originality that can stimulate and enlighten and can sometimes even change the way we understand the world."―The New York Times
"A clever, cogent, and enjoyable look at the latest thinking about humans in community. It provides a swath of important research in one place for readers and makes it a stimulating read."
―Michael Fitzgerald, Boston Globe
"An intellectual but accessible approach. The authors make a persuasive case for the power of social networks to affect everything and everyone."―Business Week
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Little, Brown Spark
- Publication date : January 12, 2011
- Edition : Reprint
- Language : English
- Print length : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0316036137
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316036139
- Item Weight : 11.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #129,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, with appointments in the departments of Sociology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistics and Data Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Medicine.
Previously, he conducted research and taught for many years at Harvard University and at the University of Chicago. He was on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009. He worked as a hospice physician in underserved communities in Chicago and Boston until 2011.
Nowadays, he spends most of his time in the Human Nature Lab, where his team explores a broad set of ideas, including: understanding the evolutionary, genetic, and physiological bases of friendship; encouraging villages in the developing world to adopt new public health practices (working in locations in Honduras, India, and Uganda); mapping social networks in settings around the world; arranging people into online groups so that they behave better (such as being more cooperative and more truthful); developing artificial intelligence that helps humans address challenges in collective action; exploring the effect of social interactions on the human microbiome; and more. When he is not in the lab, he teaches at Yale University.
Christakis was elected a Fellow to the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006, to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

James H. Fowler earned a PhD from Harvard in 2003 and is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego. His work lies at the intersection of the natural and social sciences, with a focus on social networks, behavior, evolution, politics, genetics, and big data.
James has been named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers, TechCrunch's Top 20 Most Innovative People, Politico's 50 Key Thinkers, Doers, and Dreamers, and Most Original Thinker of the year by The McLaughlin Group. He has also appeared on The Colbert Report.
His research has been featured in numerous best-of lists including New York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas, Time's Year in Medicine, Discover Magazine's Year in Science, and Harvard Business Review's Breakthrough Business Ideas.
James wrote a book on social networks for a general audience called Connected. Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award, it has been translated into twenty languages, named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review, and featured in Wired, Oprah's Reading Guide, Business Week's Best Books of the Year, and a cover story in New York Times Magazine.
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Customers find the book informative, with fascinating explanations of the research and interesting examples throughout. They describe it as an excellent, well-written read that is worth the reader's time and energy. The book receives positive feedback for its connectivity aspects, with one customer noting how it shows network connections between individuals. The narrative quality receives mixed reviews, with several customers finding it somewhat repetitive.
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Customers find the book informative and thought-provoking, with fascinating explanations of the research and interesting examples throughout.
"...In this insightful and thought-provoking book, the authors explore our social networks and their powerful shaping role in our daily lives...." Read more
"It's an interesting topic, but a bit dry. There are many examples, but the authors don't tie them together or highlight additional takeaway points...." Read more
"Very interesting book on how we influence and are influenced, in good and bad, by our social networks...." Read more
"There are some very good central messages around this book but it is supported by too much fluff to fill the book out" Read more
Customers find the book intriguing, with one review highlighting its exploration of network connections between individuals and another noting its introduction to the power of networks.
"...are striking similarities between the nature and extent of connections within the human brain and those that occur within social organizations such..." Read more
"...Connected is one such book...." Read more
"...There are a number of cool graphs in the book that show network connections between individuals, the blogosphere of Iran, political blogs, etc that..." Read more
"Connected is a very intriguing book that makes you aware of situations or events that can affect you even though you weren't there...." Read more
Customers find the book worth buying, with one mentioning its cost-effective public-health interventions.
"...-network perspectives can offer a whole new set of cost-effective public-health interventions...." Read more
"...influences makes it surprising, even shocking in parts, and worth buying...." Read more
"...sporadically dense and repetitive but remains overall, worth the reader's time and energy." Read more
"...Still though, definitely worth reading!" Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the narrative quality of the book, with some finding it somewhat repetitive, while one customer appreciates its powerful stories and another notes how it draws parallels between seemingly unrelated occurrences.
"...but after a while, it starts to feel more of the same and somewhat repetitive...." Read more
"...from original research reveal hidden influences among us and reframe old famous stories about how people influence each other indirectly and..." Read more
"...bit out of focus, jumpîng from subject to subject without providing much context and connection but taking these imperfections into account I can..." Read more
"...is informative and well-researched, it is sporadically dense and repetitive but remains overall, worth the reader's time and energy." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2013Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseI read this book when it was first published in 2009 but am only now getting around to re-reading and then reviewing it. Since then, the nature and extent of social media have expanded and extended far beyond anything that Tim Berners-Lee could have imagined twenty years ago when he developed his concept of the worldwide "web" of electronic connection and interaction while working as an independent contractor the for European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Currently he is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Presumably Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, co-authors of Connected, are amazed by the growth of networks of various kinds since they published their book.
As they observe in the Preface, "Scientists, philosophers, and others who study society have generally divided into two camps: those who think they are in control of their destinies, and those who believe that social forces (ranging from a lack of good public education to the presence of a corrupt government) are responsible for what happens to us." They think a third factor is missing from this debate: "our connections to others matter most, and by linking the study of individuals to the study of groups, the science of social networks can explain a lot about human experience." I agree.
This book is the result of what Christakis and Fowler have learned thus far from their research and I think they make a substantial contribution to a discussion of a question that has continued for several thousand years: "What makes us uniquely human?" They remain convinced that to know who we are, we must first understand how we are connected.
These are among the dozens of business subjects and issues of special interest and value to me, also listed to indicate the scope of Christakis and Fowler's coverage.
o Rules of Life in the Network (Pages 16-26)
o Emotional Contagion (37-40)
o The Spread of Happiness (49-54)
o Big Fish, Little Pond (71-75)
o Dying of a Broken Heart? (81-86)
o Changing What We Do, or Changing What We Think? (112-115)
o Moody Markets (148-153)
o Three Degrees of Information Flow (153-156)
o Networking Creativity (162-164)
o Real Politics in a Social World (184-187)
o The Network Architecture of Political Influence (202-204)
o The Ancient Ties That Bind (213-217)
o Networks Are in Our Genes Too (232-235)
o A Brain for Social Networks (240-243)
o The Human Superorganism (289-292)
As some of these subjects suggest, there are striking similarities between the nature and extent of connections within the human brain and those that occur within social organizations such as Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I eagerly await breakthrough insights in months and years to come that increase our understanding of metacognition even more.
During a conversation near the conclusion of the book in the Reading group Guide, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler are asked this question: "What particular aspects of social networks are you currently researching? Is there anything exciting coming to light?" Their response:
"We are especially intrigued by the idea the idea that evolution may have shaped the networks humans form with one another, and we think this might give us a clue about some important questions: Why do we help each other so much compared to other species? What is the reason for the spark in love at first sight?"
Stay tuned....
- Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2015Format: KindleVerified PurchaseThe premise of the book is pretty simple. You have close friends and acquaintances. Your close friends and acquaintances also have friends and acquaintances, that may or may not over lap with yours. Those people also have another set of friends and acquaintances. And here's the kicker, that third layer, not your friend, or your friend's friend, but your friends friends friend can affect your daily mood, the amount of exercise you do, whether or not you smoke, your involvement in crime, all sorts of things. The book sets out to prove it. Along the way you also learn about things like why you probably only have somewhere between 3-8 close friends. Why you probably don't have more than about 100 people that you communicate with regularly (uh, but what about my 7,000+ Twitter followers?). How these are to a degree biological factors hardwired into you. Most interesting of all is how the ripples just fade away at the third layer, over and over again throughout their studies and their testing.
The book was just filled with highly interesting facts about how your network influences you. Also, how you can influence your network. It also matters the type of network that you have. Are you connected to lots of people that aren't connected to each other, weak ties, or are you connected to lots of people that are all connected to one another, strong ties. Each of these types of networks influences you differently. Your behavior within a network is probably following one of three paths; cooperator, you're willing to help others, free rider, you're letting others do the heavy lifting, enforcer, you're making sure everyone follows the rules. Your behavior is also likely to shift between those roles depending on who you're interacting with and when.
In short, a fascinating book. I do have a nit to pick with it though. At the end of it all, I have a great set of information about what a strong network would look like. I get a good sense of why I would want to have a strong network. Nothing about how to really get a strong network other than making sure my friends are connected with my friends and that my friends, and as much as possible their friends and their friends, are all on a positive path. Right. I'm sure that's easy to work out. Guidance around this network thing would have been nice.
Top reviews from other countries
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Amazon カスタマーReviewed in Japan on January 18, 20185.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommendable
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis book describes what social networks are, with some examples of their structure diagrams and outcomes of previous studies including authors’. It provides the readers with basic concepts of social networks in a way easily understandable for general readers. At the last part of the book, the authors emphasizes usefulness of social networks approach as an alternative, different from conventional social science approaches of methodological individualism and methodological holism. Highly recommendable for those who want to understand what social networks are.
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Alex_KoslowskiReviewed in Italy on April 29, 20195.0 out of 5 stars Un buon libro
Il libro è molto ricco di dettegli ed esempi che spiegano perfettamente ciò che gli autori intendono. Oltre agli esempi ci sono anche molte illustrazioni che facilitano l'esplicazione di alcuni esempi.
Georgine KalilReviewed in Germany on February 10, 20145.0 out of 5 stars Great condition
The book was delivered very quickly and is in great condition. I have started to read the book and find it very interesting.
JulzBReviewed in Canada on September 10, 20155.0 out of 5 stars Want to Quit Smoking or Lose Weight? The Secret is in Your Network
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseGiven the following choice for your level of attractiveness, which would you prefer:
A: You can be about a 6/10 in a group of people who average 4/10.
B: You can be about an 8/10 in a group of people who average 10/10.
Which group would you choose?
If you chose A you are in good company. 75% of people chose A.
I chose B.
My thinking was that if I were in group A, it's more likely I would let myself go and become a 5. There would be no incentive to improve.
The majority of people surveyed do not share my perspective. Perhaps it's because the average person isn't actually aware of just how much the people in their circle impact their life and their decisions?
This book is a brilliant and somewhat startling account of how your decisions are massively influenced by the people in your social network. Your happiness, whether you quit smoking, lose or gain weight ... these are all things that YOU can change by changing who you associate with.
If human psychology interests you, if you're in a business where understanding people's decision making matters, or you just seek self improvement, this book will be one you'll love reading.
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NinjaReaderReviewed in Brazil on December 1, 20173.0 out of 5 stars Repetitive
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseI considered the central idea and theme very, very interesting, but the way the writer conveys his thoughts is repetitive and boring. The book could be shorter and then it could leave us wanting more. Sometimes, less is more. But a good read anyway.







