HCP Professor Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, has been studying several aspects of the health effects of social networks. Christakis and colleagues have found, for example, that social contacts play a major role in the development of obesity. In a new study, published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, Christakis and a colleague examined smoking behavior in a large social network. They found that network ties were a major factor in people’s stopping smoking, and that widely interconnected groups of people quit smoking roughly in concert.

A NEJM editorial discussed this study, and it was widely covered in the media, including in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, International Herald Tribune, and Time. Read the Harvard Medical School press release about the study. Supplementary scientific information, including a video animation of the evolving network, is available here.