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There is a new study that suggests that being lonely is like having a bad, contagious cold. It will spread among people and eventually push them to the edge of their social networks.
The simple finding that the feeling of being lonely will isolate people may not be so surprising, but the discovery that loneliness can be transmitted before relationships are severed, resulting in a chain reaction that will isolate people that were previously connected to each other.
The research, conducted by scientists at the University of Chicago, the University of California-San Diego and Harvard, analyzed data reaching back to 1948 and an original source of 5209 people, which has grown to more than 12,000 individuals. Researchers kept in touch with the subjects every two to four years and accordingly collected names of friends who knew the subjects.
“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.”
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, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology.
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.
The findings were published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Just like a bad cold, however, loneliness can be treated. 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.
The research also claims 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, something that is mirrored in tests of monkeys, who tend to drive off members of their groups who have been removed from a colony and then reintroduced,” Cacioppo said.
That pattern makes it all the more important to recognize loneliness and deal with it before it spreads, he said.
