Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

"John Cacioppo’s research shaped a lot of projects that I’ve done where I’ve tried to create tools to help people—particularly people in later life—reach out to others, or at least recognize that loneliness isn’t something that’s fixed and a necessary part of life. In one project for older adults and their caregivers, we depicted loneliness—or, on the flipside, social connectedness—in a visual display that looked like a solar system. It was driven by sensors and also a journal that they kept. In making this with interaction designers and developers, what I really wanted was to take some ideas about loneliness from John Cacioppo’s work and from ‘learned helplessness’ to show that things are changeable. Learned helplessness is when someone stops trying to change a negative situation after repeated failures. The situation is perceived as fixed or stable, part of an attributional style that’s associated with depression. In the case of this study, that would be the feeling that as one participant said at the start of the study ‘Loneliness is a part of old age and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ “Making small gestures for others and not expecting anything in return is one really positive path out of loneliness” We wanted to create feedback that immediately rewarded social effort. So that if the older adult made a phone call or sent an email or had someone over, the dynamic display immediately updated to reinforce that effort. It conveyed that they could change their social engagement through small steps. The other part of it is what you can do to bring about change. One of the things I found really interesting in John Cacioppo’s work is that loneliness isn’t exclusively about receiving social support. It’s about participating in different kinds of relationships and communities. Making small gestures for others and not expecting anything in return is one really positive path out of loneliness. That’s consistent with some of the other ideas that we’ve been talking about, helping someone realize how they can bring about change through their own actions. Being less lonely isn’t necessarily about other people doing things for you—it’s about small things you can do on your own. One of the things that technology can do is give feedback. You can remind yourself, ‘Oh, I did a little bit more than yesterday today. I’m working towards this.’ Yes, it certainly doesn’t feel good, and studies indicate it’s an important risk factor for dementia and chronic disease. If you can help people who are lonely establish closer relationships or some kind of social participation, the benefits might be far reaching. In my projects on new technologies for mental and physical health, I’ve addressed isolation in different ways. For example, the mood phone project focused on a high conflict style that sets people apart from others and has been associated with cardiovascular disease. The prompts in the app invited people to question some of their immediate interpretations that provoke hostility. The intent was to help people in their relationships and to mitigate disease risk. In a recent review paper , psychologists Adam Waytz and Kurt Gray draw a line between social media use that supplants deeper offline engagement and use that enhances already deep offline connection. They also point out that if social media is the only means of connecting due to mobility issues, it can still add to sociability. I agree with many aspects of that, and in my book, I explore the details of how individuals use social media and technology to enhance already close relationships. Sometimes technology offers a common language, or one person may demonstrate caring by learning the technology embraced by the other person (e.g. one woman described struggling with Snapchat to stay in touch with her niece). There’s also an immediacy to online communication that I think can strengthen bonds—you can comment on things that are going on in the world at that moment. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s also worth noting that some people find value and connection via social media that isn’t tied to an offline relationship. This can be crucial if one feels ostracized in local communities. In a nutshell, I don’t think that connection over social media contact is necessarily inferior to face-to-face contact. Most people do think that it is, though. I don’t think the research solidly lands us in one place or the other. A lot of my students were concerned about how they were using technology, especially this last year compared to when I taught a similar class a couple of years ago. It’s caught the public’s attention. I don’t know whether the language of addiction is really helpful or not. I think it might be more helpful to talk about compulsions or simply habits. It comes back to finding ways to use technology that are supportive of what you want in your life. Recently I spoke with a man who was concerned about how much time his son was spending on his phone. He tried to set limits with him. But one thing he found useful was not to just set a blanket limit. They live in the US, but the son has a Spanish tutor who lives in Chile. So, the son can spend unlimited time FaceTiming the tutor, but there’s only a very modest amount of time allowed for games. Not all screen time is the same. That family values education, and the son is learning Spanish and developing social skills through this interaction. So they are using the tech in accordance with their values. “Not all screen time is the same.” Another thing to keep in mind is how much we are influenced by our environments. Just having the intention of doing something differently is often not enough to make a change. So some people move their phone someplace further away, or take certain apps off of it. When I’m writing, I try not to open up social media on my computer unless looking for something specific and it has helped me to log off those sites each time. It’s worthwhile to try to make our physical environments support our goals. I also think, though, that technology can be adapted to reinforce routines. Some people use digital assistants like Alexa to set timers to say, ‘We as a family are respecting what time we said we’d have dinner/we’d go to sleep’ etc. Tech can also be adapted help with change habits (habits that are unrelated to tech). One woman described in my book used a smart lock in her kitchen to stop mindless snacking—a habit that made her feel bad about herself. Sometimes technology habits are the ones we want to change and sometimes we can use our devices as a helpful barrier or nudge. I think so. Technology isn’t a cigarette or a pill. It doesn’t affect us all in the same way, in part because it’s so interactive. We don’t all use technology, even the same social media application, in the same way. So I don’t think we can approach it like a drug and say how much is okay to take. It’s a question of how you use it. I do think self-reflection is part of it. Another big part of it is just putting your human relationships first and making the technology subservient and really work in line with those. You can’t lose sight of what actually matters which is, by and large, human relationships. The technology is just a means of deepening those conversations."