Title: Americans are Lonely and Isolated. Here’s How Public Policy Could Help.

Americans are becoming increasingly socially isolated.

One in four adults in the U.S. reports not having any social and emotional support. Nearly 30 percent of American households are single-person households today, up from 13 percent in 1960. And according to the Institute for Family Studies, young Americans only spend about five hours per week with friends, down from nearly 13 hours in 2010.

Social isolation can lead to mental health problems and self-destructive behaviors like substance abuse and suicide, said Bradley Holst, assistant teaching professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy.

For Holst, a political theorist and ethicist, the epidemic of social isolation is not just a problem for individuals — it creates challenges public policy makers should take seriously. He and his students explore the various causes and consequences of social isolation in his class, Social Isolation and Public Policy, and what policy makers can do about it.

“Deaths of despair, the adolescent mental health crisis, mass shootings, the crisis of masculinity, low social mobility, extreme partisan polarization, and openness to authoritarian rule. Social isolation is a unifying thread linking all these social ailments,” Holst said. “Policy makers wanting to ameliorate any of these problems should pay more attention to the role social isolation plays in producing all of them.”

We asked Holst to explain why social isolation has risen, whether it is just an American phenomenon and what policy remedies could help people reconnect with each other.

Ask a Professor: Mitigating Social Isolation With Public Policy

How do you define social isolation? Is it the same as loneliness?

No, they’re different. Psychologists tend to talk about loneliness and try to measure the downstream consequences of that. Sociologists talk more about social isolation. How much time do you spend alone? How much time do you spend with friends? How many close personal relationships do you have? What do marriage rates look like? What percentage of households are single-person households? Those are ways to measure social isolation. 

Loneliness is typically understood as a subjective feeling. People may be objectively very isolated, but not feel lonely. And there are people who are objectively very much in the mix with other people all the time but who feel profoundly lonely.

How does your background in political theory shape the way you think about social isolation?

One of the major debates in political theory when I started graduate school in the 1990s, was known as the liberal-communitarian debate. Liberals and communitarians argued about many fundamental ideas ranging from the nature of the self to the nature of the good life, and their respective positions on those questions informed their thinking about what good politics and legitimate government are. 

Philosophical liberals tend to assume that whatever story we tell about political authority — be it an empirical or a legitimizing story — must begin from autonomous, typically self-interested, atomized individuals. And liberals tend to understand the good life as one that individuals define and choose for themselves. On those premises, government is necessary to ensure that each of us has the liberty and the rights to pursue our own good in our own way. Liberals tend to think it necessary to convince individuals that meeting social obligations is in our self interest and to see politics as a necessary evil. 

The communitarian critique of liberalism emerged out of the civic republican tradition. Civic republicans view politics — that is, acting together in pursuit of a common purpose — as one of the more noble human activities. As political actors, we are able to accomplish things we’re not capable of individually. And civic republicans think it essential that we attend to those common goods — not just to our own private lives — if we are going to have a chance at living good lives. 

Both ways of thinking — liberal and communitarian — are present in American political culture. But in the latter half of the twentieth century, the liberal way of seeing the world became dominant. Liberalism became, as Michael Sandel argued, our public philosophy. I think the fact that so many of us act in our social world on the basis of liberal premises is one of the long-term causal factors we must understand to make sense of today’s rising levels of social isolation.

Why is social isolation a public policy challenge and not just a personal issue?

Let me give you a couple of examples. One comes from Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation. I think a lot of people are familiar with the argument in the book, which is that the “screen-based childhood” is behind today’s adolescent mental health crisis.

But Haidt actually makes a more complicated argument, one where social disconnectedness plays a significant role as an intervening variable. Kids are spending tremendous amounts of time on screens. But we must also look at what they’re not doing, and what they’re not doing is spending time with each other engaged in what Haidt calls ‘unstructured free play,’ where kids learn the social skills needed to succeed in society by interacting with other kids.

A second example comes from Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Again, many people have a high-level understanding of the book’s argument, which is that structural changes in the economy led to high levels of despair among the white working-class, and that a lot of self-destructive behaviors followed. But again, in the middle of that account you find the experience of social isolation. 

Losing your job to technological innovation or offshoring isn’t simply an economic problem; it’s an existential problem. The loss of manufacturing jobs in communities across the Rust Belt meant the loss of paychecks, to be sure. But for many it also meant the loss of those activities and structures that integrated them into their communities. Without the union and the softball team and committee building the company float for the Fourth of July parade the social glue starts to dissolve, and people’s lives lose meaning and purpose.

This unfolded across enough American communities to create a national phenomenon. When enough people sink into despair, you get 100,000 overdose deaths every year, plus the other ways that despair manifests, such as drinking yourself to death and suicide. 

Is this phenomenon happening outside of the U.S., too?

Japan and the United Kingdom have both created ministers of loneliness, recognizing that this is significant enough of a problem to create a cabinet-level position. There’s a term originally used in Japan, hikikomori, which is somebody who has spent six months or more out of social circulation at home. Three percent of the Japanese population, aged 15 to 64, fits that description. 

If you reduce the amount of time to one month out of social circulation and look at the young adult population in South Korea, one in four young adults has basically spent a month in their bedroom. The Korean government is actually offering young people cash incentives to leave the house and to connect with others.

The Economist also published a piece last month that pointed to Madagascar as the loneliest place on Earth, which tells us loneliness is not just a “first-world problem” — it’s experienced in developing countries as well.

How does technology shape how people connect with each other?

I’m worried about what AI chatbots will do to social connections. If somebody’s lonely, a chatbot might alleviate that feeling, but it certainly doesn’t solve the root problem. We’re in a period where the appeal of AI-powered chatbots is only increasing.

What are the economic forces that shape social isolation?

Think about our experience as consumers. Our economy consistently offers us things that make it easier for us to be alone. Derek Thompson recently described our economy as “optimized for introverted behavior.”

To give you an example, 75% of restaurant traffic isn’t in the restaurant today because it’s increasingly takeout or DoorDash. The consequence of that is you don’t accidentally run into somebody at the local restaurant that you might’ve seen if you were there. You go to the grocery store. You go through the self-checkout. And those encounters that used to occur in the checkout line don’t happen anymore.

The reason to be concerned about the thinning of what social scientists call loose ties, or the village, is because our interactions with our neighbors — not our close family or best friends — are where we learn how to get along in a society that is diverse along multiple axes. We learn to navigate real differences — building bridges, negotiating, practicing tolerance — in the village. Without these skills, the citizens of a democratic republic can fall into the habit of seeing the social world as composed of only friends and enemies. And, despite all the war metaphors we use to talk about politics, we cannot do the work of politics with our enemies.

What policy solutions might ease social isolation?

There is no panacea for today’s social isolation. That’s because the causes of social isolation are complicated and so are the reasons to care. Moreover, social isolation for seniors is different from social isolation for teenagers. 

Reconnecting with one another will require many different micro-interventions. Those include banning cell phones from school and investing in public spaces like libraries and senior centers — or third places. In medicine, it can mean actively looking for the undiagnosed hearing loss that starts some seniors down the road to isolation and writing social prescriptions for some physical ailments. There are interventions like the friendship benches Dixon Chibanda created in Zimbabwe, which bring grandmas in the community together to talk to young people struggling with their mental health. Friendship benches mitigate social isolation for both parties — the person in need and the elder with wisdom to share.

Policy can work against us too. Poorly considered policies hollow out communities, make us suspicious of one another and deprive us of the social infrastructure that enables connection. Urban planners concerned to move cars efficiently have disrupted many sites of social activity. One of my primary teaching objectives is to get McCourt students to ask habitually, “How will my preferred policy affect social cohesion?”

What can people do in their personal lives to build social connections?

I’ve made some conscious choices recently to facilitate connection with my colleagues at the McCourt School. One: I’m in the building every day. And two: I leave my door open. People know it’s okay to stop and talk to me. And I have developed relationships with some of my colleagues in the last few years. On one level, this happened accidentally. There weren’t stated intentions to befriend X and lots of calendar invites. But on another level, these connections would not have formed if I hadn’t chosen to be here and made it clear to people that stopping by to talk is something I welcome.

On the other hand, there are limits to what individuals can do. I taught for fifteen years as an adjunct, during which I did not have an office door to leave open. Some critical factors may lie beyond the individual’s control. And you can imagine a family deciding that they want their child to spend less time on the phone and more time with friends. But if the parents of their child’s friends don’t make a similar commitment, limiting phone time could leave the child worse off socially. In other words, collective action challenges arise here.