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Hi, my name is Nicholas Christakis and I'm a physician and a social scientist and the
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discipline I'm going to be speaking about to you today is sociology. Sociology is
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the field in which you study human behavior and human experience and how it relates to
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the fact that individuals are embedded within larger groups and collections of individuals.
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When you see an individual as a member of a group or the collectivity you get a completely
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different perspective on that person and on the groups of which they are a member and
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in fact, in sociology we explore a fundamental tension and that tension arises because of
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two facts. On the one hand you yourself have your own identity and your own agency
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and your own ability to make choices that affect your life, but on the other hand there
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is a collective responsibility for your life as well and it turns out that collective supra-individual
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factors can have as much to do with all kinds of aspects of your life, including whether
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you live or die as your own genes or your own choices and it turns out that supra-individual
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collective factors can have as much to do with what happens to you in your life and
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even with whether you live or die as things within you, your own genes or your own choices. Now
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supra-individual factors such as where you live, what kind of networks you are a part
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of, social interactions you are a part of, what kind of institutions are nearby, for
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instance governments or hospitals, all of these are critical in shaping your life and
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all of our lives and these supra-individual factors can include things like inequality,
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culture and religion as well. Supra-individual factors like where you live or where you are
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located in these vast face-to-face networks that we human beings assemble or what kinds
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of formal institutions are near you like governments or hospitals for example can have as much
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to do with what happens to you in your life as your own decisions and your own actions.
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Other sorts of things are important too, like inequality or culture or religion and
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those sorts of supra-individual factors have a similar importance. This is the difference
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between what we want to understand as structure and agency between social constraints and
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opportunities on the one hand and individual choices and actions on the other hand and
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a second key idea beyond that first one- This the difference between structure and agency,
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between collective constraints and opportunities that constrain and permit you to do certain
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kinds of things in your life on the one hand and your own individual choices and actions
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that permit you to do other sorts of things on the other hand. That is the first big
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idea that I’d like to communicate today. The second big idea that sociology
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explores and that I would like to communicate today is that collective phenomena are not
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mere aggregations of individual phenomena. There is something different, something
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special about groups of people, about collectivities that does not reside within the individuals
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themselves, something that emerges, something that transcends, something that is above and
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not a part of solely individual kinds of things that you might think of. A second
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key idea in sociology is that collective phenomena are not mere aggregations of individual phenomena.
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There is something special, something weird almost about groups of individuals, about
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collectivities, something weird that you cannot see if you just study individuals, but that
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you must study whole groups of people in order to really understand. So how did I become interested in these crazy ideas? Actually
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I started my career as a physician and I went to medical school and at the time I wanted
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to be a reconstructive surgeon and I wanted to operate on people who had cranial facial
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abnormalities or people whose extremities had been cut off and reattach these extremities
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and I used to cut class my first year of medical school and go operate with some of the surgeons
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at Children’s Hospital in Boston and I did this for quite awhile and eventually as we
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would operate on these kids they were primarily kids, one after another, day after day, I
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came to the realization that the kind of healthcare that I wanted to practice was not the kind
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that took care of people one at a time, but rather, the kind that tried to take care of
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whole populations of people. I mean I wanted to understand why do groups of people become
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sick, not just why do individuals become sick and how can we make groups become well, not
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just individuals become well one at a time and part of this was prompted by my realization
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that I was running around putting my fingers in the dike. One hole after another was
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springing water and we were running around, all of us, trying to plug these holes and
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I was interested in how can we make a better dike, how can make a situation in which fewer
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people become sick to begin with, in which we spring fewer holes to begin with, in the
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dike as it were and in fact I began to ask what I came eventually to see as sociological
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questions about the origins of illness and disease and suffering and death in our society
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and I wanted to understand how we could have a sociological response, a collective response
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to these sorts of problems and in fact this dovetails to some extent with an interest
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in public health, which can be contrasted with a kind of interest in clinical medicine
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which takes care of patients one at
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a time.
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So let’s start by taking a look at a personal testament, a very seemingly individualistic
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statement that a human being is making about their own life, about what would seem to be
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a quintessentially private individualistic decision, namely whether to take your own
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life and to commit suicide. This is Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s suicide note. She was
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75 years-old when she took her life and the note says: “The time is approaching when
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we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged
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agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature. Believing this choice to
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be of social service in promoting wiser views on this question, I have preferred chloroform
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to cancer.” And the note said: The time is approaching when we shall consider
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it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which
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we should mercifully end in any other creature. Believing this choice to be a social service
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in promoting wiser views on this question, I have preferred chloroform to cancer.”
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So despite the fact that this woman is taking her life and despite the fact that
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she is writing a suicide note notice that the note contains or eludes to kind of connections
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to others even as she was ending her own life. She bemoans the fact that society is not
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sensitive to her pain and even while dying she is trying to make a contribution to society.
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She is trying to be connected to other individuals. Here is another note: “Dear God,
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please have mercy on my soul. Please forgive me. I can’t stand the pain anymore.”
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And that note was written by a 76 year-old grandmother who isolated by depression and
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disability crawled into her basement freezer to kill herself by the cold and you might
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ask what kind of a social system permits this to happen, permits one of its members to be
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so alone, to feel so isolated that this is the choice that they would make and in fact
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you might ask was this suicide truly an individual act, was it really purely an individual choice. Another
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one, Ron Berst jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and in his will he donated $10,000
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to AIDS research. This is his note: “To the San Francisco Police Department or equivalent
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jurisdiction. This is to state that I, Ron R. Burst did take my own life due to the fact
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that I have the disease AIDS and it has progressed both rapidly and to the point where number,
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I constantly feel ill and have almost no energy and number two, I very soon expect to become
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a burden to my friends and family and I do not want to put any of them through such an
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ordeal. I sincerely regret any inconvenience that this may have caused anyone involved.
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I honestly believe that a fast end such as this while one is still able, yet ill enough
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to justify it is easier on my close friends who have been so unbelievably supportive emotionally
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for me and my family who have been no less so than to drag this out. I did not give
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up.” So again in Mr. Berst’s note notice the social concern. His death is
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not an individual act at all. First of all, it was public. He jumped off the Golden
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Gate Bridge. People saw him. Second, it was guided by a concern for others. He is
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worried about his friends and family and third, it is infused with the social ties that connect
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him to his family and his friends. Now there is another way that suicide is social
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as well. It is not just the connection the individual has to others. It is the responsibility
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that others have to the individual. It is about how social and structural factors constrain
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or permit individual acts even like suicide. For example, this is an image of the Golden
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Gate Bridge from which Ron Berst jumped and this bridge is unusual in its design because
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the sidewalk as you can see is directly next to the edge of the image. He walked along
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the sidewalk and then just jumped over that railing, stood there and jumped right over. And
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this is a picture of Kevin Hines who almost met the same fate as Mr. Berst. In September
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of 2000 at the age of 19 suffering from depression he went to the Golden Gate Bridge and he stood
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there for 40 minutes crying. No one approached him to ask what was wrong and then eventually
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a tourist came up and asked him if he could take her photograph. Hines interpreted this
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as a clear sign that no one cared. He took the picture and then when she walked away
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he turned around and he jumped right over the railing, but instantly he says he realized
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that he had made a mistake. He changed his mind. “Oh shit,” he thought, “I don’t
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want to die.” “What am I going to do?” he later recalled. In midair he came up
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with a plan to save his life as he described as follows: “It was simply this. “A;
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God save me, B; throw your head back and C; hit feet first.” And it takes four seconds
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to drop the 220 feet from the height of the Golden Gate Bridge to the water and you eventually
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reach a speed of 75 miles per hour and among the over 1,200 people who have jumped off
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the bridge since 1937 only 26 are believed to have survived and interestingly a large
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percentage of those who attempt the jump when they are interviewed afterwards say that they
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regretted the decision as soon as they jumped. For example, another jumper, Kevin
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Baldwin was 28 and also severely depressed in August of 1985 when he jumped and he later
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said the following thing: “I still see my hands coming off the railing. I instantly
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realized that everything in my life that I thought was unfixable was totally fixable
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except for having just jumped.” It is 220 feet from the deck of the bridge to
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the water and it takes just four seconds to reach the bottom and by which point you are
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traveling at 75 miles per hour. Even allowing for the fact that we cannot know
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what all the successful suicides would have said had we been able to interview them these
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kinds of reports by people who jumped and survived beg the question of how to prevent
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these kinds of supposedly purely individual acts. What would happen to these people
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if somehow society could have prevented them from jumping, if there somehow had been a
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structure in place which had constrained the agency of these individuals? One landmark
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study conducted in 1978 of 515 people who were removed from the Golden Gate Bridge before
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they had jumped and followed them for an average of about 26 years afterwards found that 94%
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were still alive or had died of natural causes many years later, so suicidal behavior is
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acute and crisis driven and if the individual is prevented from acting on their suicidal
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impulses by those around him it might not be repeated. There are quite a number of remarkable things about
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such stories. No doubt these individuals and their illnesses are central actors in
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the experience of the individual, but I want to highlight two other observations. One
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is the role of the perceived indifference expressed by the person that Kevin encountered.
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This point points to an important theme in sociology, the rule of social connection
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in our personal experience and the role of our embededness in the lives of others. So
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one thing I would like to highlight is the perceived indifference on the part of the
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person that approached Kevin. One thing that I would like to highlight is the perceived
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indifference on the part of the person, the tourist that approached Kevin because this
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highlights an important theme or an important idea in sociology, namely the idea that we
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are all connected to each other. The role of connection in our experience of the world
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and the role of our embededness in others is in fact a key consideration or a key point
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that sociologists are interested in. The other important thing to realize from these
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stories is the importance of extra individual factors that help determine individual outcomes
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as I alluded to the role of structure versus the role of agency. Now the Golden Gate
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Bridge has a foot path adjacent to the railing unlike most bridges and people still regularly
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kill themselves from it and if you look at the Golden Gate Bridge you can see some ideas
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about how we might constrain individual agency, how we might as a society respond to prevent
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people from jumping. For example, suicide barriers such as this one at other sites have
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drastically reduced and often even eliminated suicides such as at the Eifel Tower, the Empire
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State Building or the Sydney Harbor Bridge, but a barrier has not been put at the Golden
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Gate Bridge for reasons that many, myself included find a bit silly. Namely, that
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it would somehow ruin the aesthetics of the bridge, but here is an artist rendering of
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one possible solutions and it doesn’t look so bad. This argument it turns out has been
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around for years, but finally in February of 2010 the Golden Gate Bridge Board after
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many years of lobbying agreed to put some suicide nets under the bridge to catch jumpers,
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but they did not agree to assign the use of any toll revenue for this purpose, so still
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there is nothing there to prevent suicide. So this is a particularly specific and dramatic
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illustration of the interplay between structure and agency, between policy decisions made
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at the collective level and the ability of an individual even to stay alive. Moreover,
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this is a particularly powerful illustration not only of the issue of structure versus
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agency, but also of more complicated ideas, namely, the issue of group level phenomena
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or of emergence which is the second big idea I would like to talk to you about today. Now
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suicide has been used as an example to illustrate this idea ever since 1897 by a very famous
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sociologist by the name of Emile Durkheim who wrote about this topic and Durkheim had
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a number of arguments including the following. He said or he wrote—so Durkheim had a
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number of arguments about suicide including the following. He wrote: “The individual
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is dominated by a moral reality greater than himself, namely, collective reality. When
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each people is seen to have its own suicide rate more constant than that of general mortality,
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that its growth is in accordance with a coefficient of acceleration characteristic of each society,
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when it appears that the variations through which it passes at different times reflect
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the rhythm of social life and that marriage, divorce, the family, religious society, the
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army, etcetera affect it in accordance with definite laws then these states and institutions
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will no longer be regarded simply as characterless, ineffective ideological arrangements. Rather
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they will felt to be real, living, active forces which because of the way they determine
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the individual prove their independence of him, which if the individual enters as an
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element in the combination whence these forces ensue at least control him once they are formed.” So
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the individuals come and go in Durkheim’s analysis. People come and go, but the rates
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of suicide stay the same, so he was looking at suicide rates in different religious groups
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in different periods in France and he found that these rates are constant across time
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and vary across religious groups even though the individual members of those groups in
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those particular times changed dramatically, so the Protestants in 1800 France are completely
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different than the human beings who are the Protestants in 1850 France and yet the suicide
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rate let’s say is the same. Hence this constancy of rates and this variation across
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societies is indicative of something else going on beyond individual choice or brain
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biology. It is as if the society determines this—it is as if the society determines
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this seemingly purely individual act, suicide. Hence this constancy of rates and this variation
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across societies is indicative of something else going on beyond individual choice or
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individual biology. It is as if society determines this seemingly purely individual
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act, this seemingly purely individual choice. So you see groups can have properties of
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their own and the individuals within them are affected by those properties.
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Sociologist have been studying social networks beginning with the pioneering work of Georg
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Simmel in the 1890s and they have been doing this, studying networks for well over 100
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years and social networks are one particular kind of supra-individual factor that can affect
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individual choices, that can shape your destiny and shape what happens to you in your life.
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Now by social networks I don’t mean Facebook or MySpace of the kinds of recent networks
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that many of you might be thinking about. I actually mean the kind of face-to-face
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networks that human beings have been making for tens of thousands of years. In fact,
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ever since we lived on the African Savannah. Now each of us forms or inherits certain kinds
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of connections to friends, to coworkers, to our relatives, to our neighbors and each of
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those individuals in turn also has friends and coworkers and relatives and neighbors
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and as a result of this we form this incredibly ornate, almost baroque structure known as
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social networks and we precede to live out our lives embedded within these networks. Now
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what is the difference between a group and a network? Here is a picture of a group
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and a group maybe of 100 people. Each dot represents a person, but a network in addition
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to the 100 people also has ties, the ties that connect the people to each other and
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it has specific ties at that and there are two kinds of networks, artificial networks
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and natural networks. So for example, here is an example of one of the simplest type
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of artificial networks you can imagine, a bucket brigade. It is
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a simple linear network. It has 100 people to which we have added 99 ties. Everyone
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is connected to the guy on the right and to the guy on the left and assembling the people