Unspoken: Lost Social Connections and How to Re-Engage

Have you noticed? Compared to prior decades, we’re spending more time alone. American Time Use Surveys from 2003 to 2024 found that 15- to 25-year-olds’ in-person socializing plummeted—from 60 to 36 minutes a day, with parallel, but lesser, declines among older folks.

We’re working more from home. We’re dining out less often with others and more often eating take-out food. We’re shopping more online. Many of us are living alone—with U.S. single-person households having doubled since 1960. 

We’re also spending much more time online. For some people, online time includes chatbot friends, which are available 24/7 to offer comfort, support, and encouragement. Alas, chatbots are not real friends—the sort of friend who will offer a lift to the airport, a hug, or their own experiences. Unlike real friends, they also rarely challenge our maladaptive thinking or disapprove of our rash plans. And though lonely people may seek companionship from chatbots, University of British Columbia psychologists Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn said in a report, “such use may, over time, exacerbate feelings of loneliness.”

1.7 Million Fewer Words Per Year

Now, thanks to Valeria Pfeifer and Matthias Mehl’s analysis of body-worn audio recorder data (sampled from the United States, Mexico, Australia, and Europe), comes news that by 2019 we were not only more alone, but also speaking less—28% fewer words than two decades ago. Each year, they report, we now “speak more than 120,000 words fewer than in the previous year”—suggesting that by 2019 we were voicing 1.7 million fewer annual words than in 2005. For the social media-attentive under-25 generation, the spoken-word decline was even greater (37%).

Does it matter that we, as social animals, have become less verbally social? In their new review of 1158 studies of computer-mediated versus face-to-face communication, Roy Baumeister, Michaela Bibby, Dianne Tice, and Brad Bushman report that communicating via computers and smartphones beats not communicating, and extends the range of our contacts. Yet, compared to face-to-face communication “relationships, trust and group cohesion develop more slowly,” and people feel less happy. 

That helps explain why the number of Americans reporting fewer than four “close friends” has nearly doubled since 1990—from 27 to 49% —and why teen and young adult depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts have, as Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and others report, dramatically increased. We are people who need people. Nature has designed us for face-to-face interaction, including its wealth of verbal and nonverbal cues.

The Science of Social Connections

But as three wonderful new books by my esteemed colleagues explain, we needn’t succumb to a less social existence. By marrying scholarship with storytelling, each book offers a guide to a more connected, happier, and kinder world.

If you want to feel more loved,” note Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis in How to Feel Loved, “the first step is that you make the other person feel loved. Start with curiosity, actually showing interest.”

All loving relationships, Gillian Sandstrom reminds us in Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life, begin as an interaction with a stranger. Moreover, she documents, reaching out to someone at the bus stop, on a commuter train, or in the grocery line almost inevitably proves rewarding. “People’s experiences are much more positive than their predictions,” she writes. “Our worries far outstrip the reality.” 

Reach out. Take an interest in the ride-share driver. Invite someone for coffee. Put away your phone. Risk meaningful conversation, even by exploring differences.

When matched with a stranger for conversation in her research, nearly everyone—in a striking exception to our common self-serving bias—believed “that they found their conversation partner more interesting than their partner found them to be.” Actually, their conversation partner liked them more than they realized! The lesson: Reach out to someone, and they will like you more than you suppose.

In his new book, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection, Nicholas Epley similarly explores why we shun talking to strangers, hesitate to move beyond small talk, avoid discussing differing views, and are slow to express gratitude to colleagues, friends, and family members—and thus miss out on the satisfactions such connections enable. 

In experiments, Sandstrom, Epley, and their colleagues have, for a small inducement, recruited volunteers to talk (or not) to a fellow commuter, a barista, a bus driver, or a stranger on the sidewalk. Although anticipating an awkward encounter, nearly all the volunteers—whether extraverted or introverted—exited the brief encounter in a better mood. 

Epley has also paired 4,586 people with a stranger for 15 minutes of meaningful sharing in response to instructions such as “If you were to become a close friend of the other person, please share what would be important for him or her to know?” and “For what in your life do you feel most grateful? Tell the other person about it.” Most people expected—even dreaded—an awkward experience but emerged with warmed hearts. 

Reconnecting

The practical lesson: Reach out. Take an interest in the ride-share driver. Invite someone for coffee. When together, put away your phone. Risk meaningful conversation, even by exploring differences. If you are thinking about an old friend, tell them. If grateful, say so. If curious about someone, ask away. Do it and people will love you back. As David Brooks, author of How To Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, reflects, 

If I respectfully ask somebody about their life story, how often do they say, ‘None of your damn business’? Zero. Zero times in my life. People are dying to tell you their story.

Thus, the bad news: Compared to two decades ago, we are spending less time with others, speaking fewer words, and experiencing what former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” 

But there is also good news: We can choose to be more social. If we will follow the Old Testament admonition to “love the stranger”—by risking friendly curiosity, by voicing gratitude, by self-disclosing—we can enjoy the benefits of being a little more social, a little more loving and loved, and together we can enable a kinder world.

David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. This essay, from his TalkPsych.com blog, is republished with the permission of Macmillan Learning.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock