Loneliness is a Meme!
DharmaTroll
paradoxically, that loneliness can be spread from person-to-person and
can work its way through social networks. The paradox is resolved by
the important point, outlined by one of the study's authors, John
Cacioppo, that “Loneliness isn’t being alone, it’s feeling alone". In
other words, it's not about having social contact but about feeling
like you have meaningful relationships. This feeling, it turns out,
was increased or was more likely to occur when one person had contact
with a person who already reported themselves to be feeling lonely.
Not mentioned by the Globe article was the interesting finding that
loneliness spreads most strongly through mutual friends but only
weakly through family members. The study, which you can read the study
in full as a pdf, was drawn from data from the famous Framington Heart
Study which tracked the health of a small community over many years
and, rather fortuitously, asked who was related to and friends with
who, initially for the purposes of tracking people down if the
researchers lost contact.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/27/the_loneliness_network/?page=full
The loneliness network
Strange as it sounds, loneliness may be contagious
By Drake Bennett
December 27, 2009
The holiday season is entering the home stretch, but flu season is
just getting going. And so, we’re warned, the upcoming New Year’s
parties and homeward airplane trips and visits to the mall to return
our gifts won’t just mean encounters with crowds, they will mean
opportunities for infection.
But even as public health officials exhort people to get their shots
and sneeze into their sleeves, a more insidious, if less acute, threat
to our health may be taking advantage of the holiday season to spread:
loneliness.
Loneliness is bad for us. A substantial body of research links
loneliness with everything from depression to high blood pressure and
cholesterol to poor sleep, weight gain, diminished immunity, and
Alzheimer’s disease.
And if a paper published this month is to be believed, loneliness
isn’t just a health risk - it is, like the flu, a contagious one:
Lonely people make the people around them lonely, too.
The finding grows out of a wave of research into social networks and
the ways that emotions and behaviors can spread, epidemic-like,
through them. It’s an idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s
blockbuster 2000 book, “The Tipping Point,” but one that social
scientists have only recently started to find solid evidence for. Two
of the most prominent researchers in the field are Nicholas
Christakis, an internist and sociologist at Harvard University, and
James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California,
San Diego, and working together they have found that obesity,
happiness, and smoking, among other things, are contagious.
Still, there’s something seemingly oxymoronic in the idea that
loneliness can be catching. By definition, a lonely person would seem
unlikely to spread anything, any more than a hermit could give someone
chicken pox. But according to Christakis, Fowler, and John Cacioppo, a
psychologist and leading loneliness researcher at the University of
Chicago who collaborated with them, making sense of the contagiousness
of loneliness demands that we rethink our idea of what loneliness is,
and that we come to realize how being surrounded by people doesn’t
necessarily protect us from it.
The new research also fleshes out the picture of the varying ways that
social phenomena move through networks of family members, friends, and
acquaintances. The spread of loneliness is shaped by gender and
geography, by where a person finds himself in his web of
relationships. Loneliness spreads in a different way from obesity,
which spreads in a different way from happiness, and figuring out how
exactly they differ may eventually help doctors, social scientists,
politicians, planners, educators, and even architects figure out
better ways to encourage the behaviors they think are good for us and
limit the ones they don’t. With a sense of the larger picture in
place, network researchers are turning their attention to figuring out
in detail the different mechanisms at work, and figuring out how to
use them.
“Not everything that spreads in networks spreads the same way,” says
Christakis. “Germs spread differently than money, which spreads
differently than ideas, which spread differently than behaviors, which
spread differently than emotions.”
This time of year, with its parties and family feasts and mistletoe
and bands of carolers - or at least their ubiquity in the ad campaigns
and Christmas movies the season relentlessly brings - can be
especially difficult for the lonely. Studies have found that
loneliness is particularly high during the holiday season due to what
researchers call “social comparison”: Surrounded by all of those
images of communal cheer, it’s easy to feel like one’s own social life
is comparatively empty.
What this drives home is that loneliness can be surprisingly unrelated
to one’s actual social situation. The psychological definition of
loneliness is “perceived social isolation.” As Cacioppo emphasizes,
this means that loneliness and solitude are not the same thing.
“Loneliness isn’t being alone, it’s feeling alone,” he says. A person
surrounded by others can be lonely if he doesn’t feel like he has a
meaningful connection with any of them.
Loneliness, Cacioppo hypothesizes, is an evolutionary adaptation that
humans acquired to knit them together into collaborative social
groups, increasing their odds of survival in a hostile world. It spurs
people not only to form social ties, but to strengthen the ones they
have. And the pain of loneliness gives communities a powerful tool in
disciplining members who get out of line - from the shunning practices
of Native American tribes to the “timeouts” issued in elementary
school classrooms.
“It’s a biological signal that motivates you to think about something
critical for your genetic legacy. We all have it, just like hunger,
thirst and pain,” Cacioppo says.
Different people, Cacioppo has found, vary widely in their
susceptibility to loneliness. How lonely a person feels, Cacioppo has
found, can be shaped by everything from cultural norms about
friendship to childhood upbringing to even genes.
But it can also be determined by those around us. The paper Cacioppo
co-wrote with Christakis and Fowler, published in the current issue of
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that having a
friend who reports feeling lonely makes a person 52 percent more
likely to feel lonely. In another measure, they found that, for each
additional day per week a person reported feeling lonely, his friends
reported an additional lonely day per month. Not only that, having a
friend who has a friend who feels lonely makes a person 25 percent
more likely to feel lonely, and at three degrees of separation (a
friend of a friend of a friend) the odds are still increased by 15
percent.
The dataset the trio relied on is a map of social connections created
by Christakis and Fowler using the Framingham Heart Study, a
multigenerational survey that started in 1948 with more than 5,000
Framingham residents and has recorded a wealth of social and medical
information about them, their children, and grandchildren. It’s the
same data that the two researchers have used to explore the spread of
smoking, happiness, obesity, and alcoholism, among other things - work
they describe in detail in their book “Connected,” published earlier
this year.
The spread of loneliness seems to have its own particular
characteristics. Women, for example, seem to be more susceptible than
men. Also, the more lonely people a person knows, the more likely she
herself is to become lonely. That trait distinguishes loneliness from
something like alcoholism: Having an alcoholic friend increases your
odds of becoming an alcoholic, but having three alcoholic friends
makes you no more likely than having just one. Fowler suggests that
this is because drinking, while social, doesn’t need to be all that
social. “All you need is one drinking buddy,” he says.
Loneliness, by contrast, seems to spread through an accumulation of
encounters. Lonely people are, in general, less pleasant than
nonlonely people: more impatient, more moody, more self-pitying. They
have, in the language of psychology, “more negative affect,” and each
unpleasant encounter they subject their friends to wears on those
friends and taxes the friendship, until the friends themselves start
to feel lonely, as well. Having more than one lonely friend only
accelerates the process.
As a result, an emotion that evolved to bring us together now pushes
us apart. We live in a very different social world than the one we
evolved for - we have many more social relationships, but most of them
are more transient, Cacioppo argues, and feel less vital than those we
would have formed in a small embattled tribe on the prehistoric
savanna. As a result, he says, when someone begins to act lonely,
we’re less likely to see that as a cue to minister to them and more
willing to simply cut them off.
Distance also seems to matter to the spread of loneliness. The authors
found that living close to a lonely friend was more likely to make
their loneliness contagious - if the friends lived more than a mile
apart there was no significant effect. This was in contrast to
obesity, which, Christakis and Fowler have found, doesn’t require
physical proximity to spread. In other work, the two have found that
an obese friend who lives in the next state can still make you more
likely to gain weight. Christakis suggests that it might just be
easier to remotely transmit norms about how much to eat and exercise
than emotions. “What we think is that norms can leap great differences
in a way that behaviors and emotions cannot,” he says.
So if loneliness is contagious, is there something we can do to
inoculate ourselves against it, as individuals or communities? One
response is to simply quarantine the lonely. And there is some
precedent for this in the animal world. When rhesus monkeys that have
been raised in social isolation are introduced by researchers into
existing colonies, they are either driven off or killed.
But trying to emulate that model is likely to backfire badly, argue
Cacioppo, Christakis, and Fowler. If it were possible to easily form
new social bonds, it might make sense to simply cut off our lonely
friends and find warm and gregarious replacements. But making friends
is hard, and there’s a good chance that, having cut that original
bond, the average person won’t find a suitable replacement. That
leaves him with one fewer social connection, and that much closer to
himself lapsing into loneliness.
“Having a lonely friend is bad, not having the friend at all is
worse,” says Fowler.
Loneliness also enfeebles communities. What is most distinctive about
the way loneliness spreads, argue Cacioppo, Christakis, and Fowler, is
the way it burns bridges behind itself. Being alone is not a
prerequisite for loneliness, but lonely people do tend to let their
friendships languish and eventually wither away. As a result,
loneliness eventually cuts the very links it has spread through,
shriveling the social networks in which it becomes endemic.
“These reinforcing effects mean that our social fabric can fray at the
edges, like a yarn that comes loose at the end of a crocheted
sweater,” the authors write, near the end of the paper.
And while the paper only briefly discusses the question of how to
stanch the spread of loneliness, the authors insist that the same
networks that propagate loneliness can be used to fight it. By being
conscious of the contagiousness of loneliness, we can try to guard
against spreading it ourselves, meeting a lonely person’s negative
affect with patience rather than absorbing it and passing it on to
someone else. We can remind ourselves to think of a neighbor’s
loneliness as the manifestation of an innate hunger for connection,
and remind ourselves that feeding the hunger is the best way to stop
its spread.
“If you know the effects of loneliness, you can stop it by being a bit
kinder even if someone’s being a bit hostile,” says Cacioppo. “Rather
than transmitting it to others, you can start to reknit the fabric
that connects you and me. You can help me become less lonely over
time.”