Loneliness Can be Contagious

Research at the University of Chicago, the University of California San Diego and Harvard shows that loneliness can spread among groups of people like a bad cold.

Using data from a large-scale study that has been following health conditions for more than 60 years, a team of scholars found that lonely people tend to share their loneliness with others. Gradually over time, a group of lonely, disconnected people moves to the fringes of social networks.

“We detected an extraordinary pattern of contagion that leads people to be moved to the edge of the social network when they become lonely,” said University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo, one member of the study team and one of the nation’s leading scholars of loneliness. “On the periphery people have fewer friends, yet their loneliness leads them to losing the few ties they have left.”

Other members of the study team were James Fowler, Associate Professor at the University of California San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis, Professor of Medicine in the Harvard Medical School. Before relationships are severed, people on the periphery transmit feelings of loneliness to their remaining friends, who also become lonely. “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,” said Cacioppo.

Because loneliness is associated with a variety of mental and physical diseases that can shorten life, Cacioppo said it is important for people to recognize loneliness and help those people connect with their social group before the lonely individuals move to the edges.

These findings were published in the article, “Alone in the Crowd: The Structure and Spread of Loneliness in a Large Social Network,” published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. For the study, the team examined records of a study which has been ongoing since 1949, including more than 5,200 people in what was originally a study of cardiovascular risk.

The study has since been expanded to include about 12,000 people, as the children and the grandchildren of the original group and others have been included to diversify the population sample. This study now includes more tests, including measures of loneliness and depression. The second generation in the study, which includes 5,124 people, was the primary focus of the loneliness research.

Researchers kept in touch with the subjects every two to four years and collected names of friends who knew the subjects. Those records became an excellent source of information about the people’s social networks.

By constructing graphs that charted the subjects’ friendship histories and information about their reports of loneliness, researchers were able to establish a pattern of loneliness that spread as people reported fewer close friends. The data showed that lonely people “infected” the people around them with loneliness, and those people moved to the edges of social circles. The team found that the next-door neighbors in the survey who experienced an increase of one day of loneliness a week prompted an increase in loneliness among their neighbors who were their close friends. The loneliness spread as the neighbors spent less time together.

Women, who are more likely to need emotional support, were more likely to report “catching” loneliness from others than were men. People’s chances of becoming lonely were more likely to be caused by changes in friendship networks than changes in family networks.

Research also shows that as people become lonely, they become less trustful of others, and a cycle develops that makes it harder for them to form friendships. Societies seem to develop a natural tendency to shed these lonely people, a pattern which makes it all the more important to recognize loneliness and deal with it before it spreads.

“Society may benefit by aggressively targeting the people in the periphery to help repair their social networks and to create a protective barrier against loneliness that can keep the whole network from unraveling,” the authors said.

Dave