Like many animals, humans evolved to seek safety in numbers, so when we’re alone our subconscious may be on guard, prompting an increase in blood pressure and greater production of stress hormones.
“Our bodies and brains have evolved with the expectation of people around us, so if you put people in single unit housing and they’re alone, you’re going to see all sorts of health and psychological repercussions," says UVA psychologist Adrienne Wood. She sees loneliness as a medical problem and says it’s getting worse.
“People report fewer and fewer close friendships over the last couple of decades that just continues to decline, and we can point to all sorts of different societal factors that are contributing, but the long and the short of it is just that people tend to be pretty lonely, and people can also be lonely even if they have close contacts or are married or have a partner.”
So she has proposed an ambitious study of how humans make friends – tracking the behavior of people she calls social explorers.
“Social butterfly is maybe the term that best captures what I’m interested in.”
Using university students as her guinea pigs, she will track interactions over the next five years. Freshmen are, she says, ideal subjects for study.
“When you first arrive on grounds you don’t have any friends unless you’re bringing someone from high school, so we get to watch how these social networks evolve in real time, and friendship is so intense at this time. There’s really no we live with our friends and eat every meal with our friends and go to class with our friends.”
She hopes her findings will help to prevent isolation and loneliness for those who struggle to make friends.
“We could think about designing interventions to kind of catch the students when they arrive on campus, maybe they’re transfer students or international students. They’re particularly vulnerable to becoming marginalized and isolated.”
The National Science Foundation likes this idea and has given Wood more than half a million dollars to do her research.
