Jonathan Kanter’s studies on loneliness are featured in this NPR article on loneliness during the pandemic
Loneliness Hasn't Increased Despite Pandemic, Research Finds. What Helped?
July 15, 2020
When the coronavirus barreled into the U.S. this year, the predominant public health advice for avoiding infection focused on physical isolation: No parties, concerts or sports events. No congregating inside bars or restaurants. No on-site family reunions. No play dates for kids. Just keep away from other people.
Meanwhile, although social scientists supported that medical advice, they feared the required physical distancing would spark another epidemic — one of loneliness, which was already at a high level in the U.S.
"You might expect this would make things much worse," says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a neuroscientist and social psychologist at Brigham Young University.
But several new studies suggest that huge increase in loneliness hasn't come to pass — at least, not yet. And the researchers studying the pandemic's emotional fallout say humans may have ourselves to thank.
Angelina Sutin, an associate professor of behavioral sciences at Florida State University College of Medicine, was one of a team of researchers who checked in three times between January and late April with more than 1,500 Americans ages 18 to 98. Her team's survey, which aimed each time to get at measures of loneliness, was recently published online in American Psychologist, a peer-reviewed journal.
"Like most people who study loneliness, we expected loneliness to go up," Sutin says. "Humans are social creatures. We like to be together. We need to be together."
Sutin and her colleagues had designed their survey in pre-pandemic days as a one-off look at how loneliness and other aspects of psychological health affect physical health. Respondents filled out a computer questionnaire about whether they felt lonely or isolated, whether they had people to turn to and whether they had preexisting health conditions.
Then came the coronavirus. By mid-March, state and local governments were issuing "shelter in place" rules. And even in many communities where it wasn't mandated, many people started avoiding face-to-face encounters.
Sutin and her colleagues realized they had a unique opportunity to measure the effects of physical isolation on loneliness. Between March 18 and 29 they asked those who had participated in their original survey how they were doing now that all those social distancing rules were in place. A month later the researchers checked in with the respondents yet again.
On a loneliness scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being not very lonely and 3 being very lonely, the score was 1.69 in the first survey, 1.71 in the second and 1.71 in the third — no statistically significant difference. "The thing that everybody thought was going to happen didn't happen," says Sutin...
And there are two ongoing studies being conducted by research psychologist Jonathan Kanter and colleagues at the University of Washington. The research team is texting people in the Seattle area and around the country nightly on their cellphones, asking them each evening to fill out a short survey that includes questions about how much social interaction they had that day, whether they felt understood or cared for by others and whether they enjoyed being alone. The data have not yet been published, but Kanter says the responses seem to be pointing in the same direction as the findings from the Florida researchers.
"The levels of loneliness in our sample and in our national sample also have been largely flat across this entire period of time," Kanter says.
Which all leads to the question of — why? Why aren't people reporting dramatically more emotional pain at a time when most are more physically distant from other people and normal routines than ever before? Neither Kanter's data nor the FSU study speak directly to that. But Kanter has some ideas.
"That sense of solidarity that people are feeling when they are collectively under some threat together — when they are collectively going through a challenge together — seems to be a real strong protective factor," he says. "And I don't think we fully appreciated that months ago when all this started."