Social Science Statistics Blog

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16 November 2007

Social science and popular culture

In general, my impression is that cutting-edge research in social science rarely makes the leap from academic interest to media coverage to popular culture, but there are always some studies that capture the public's attention. One such study was the recent article by Nicholas Christakis from Harvard and James Fowler from UCSD ("The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years"). They find evidence that clusters of obese individuals are present and that they do not appear to be driven entirely by selection effects. This received widespread media attention, and was picked up by the writers of Boston Legal. At the end of this promo, we see how the character Denny Crane (played by William Shatner, a man who does not appear to push away from the table all that often himself) interprets the results of this study:

Posted by Mike Kellermann at 11:44 AM