Strange as it sounds, loneliness may be contagious

From The loneliness network by Drake Bennett

... Loneliness is bad for us. A substantial body of research links loneliness with everything from depression to high blood pressure and cholesterol to poor sleep, weight gain, diminished immunity, and Alzheimer’s disease.

And if a paper published this month is to be believed, loneliness isn’t just a health risk - it is, like the flu, a contagious one: Lonely people make the people around them lonely, too.

The finding grows out of a wave of research into social networks and the ways that emotions and behaviors can spread, epidemic-like, through them. It’s an idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s blockbuster 2000 book, “The Tipping Point,” but one that social scientists have only recently started to find solid evidence for. Two of the most prominent researchers in the field are Nicholas Christakis, an internist and sociologist at Harvard University, and James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and working together they have found that obesity, happiness, and smoking, among other things, are contagious.

Still, there’s something seemingly oxymoronic in the idea that loneliness can be catching. By definition, a lonely person would seem unlikely to spread anything, any more than a hermit could give someone chicken pox. But according to Christakis, Fowler, and John Cacioppo, a psychologist and leading loneliness researcher at the University of Chicago who collaborated with them, making sense of the contagiousness of loneliness demands that we rethink our idea of what loneliness is, and that we come to realize how being surrounded by people doesn’t necessarily protect us from it.

The new research also fleshes out the picture of the varying ways that social phenomena move through networks of family members, friends, and acquaintances. The spread of loneliness is shaped by gender and geography, by where a person finds himself in his web of relationships. Loneliness spreads in a different way from obesity, which spreads in a different way from happiness, and figuring out how exactly they differ may eventually help doctors, social scientists, politicians, planners, educators, and even architects figure out better ways to encourage the behaviors they think are good for us and limit the ones they don’t. With a sense of the larger picture in place, network researchers are turning their attention to figuring out in detail the different mechanisms at work, and figuring out how to use them.

“Not everything that spreads in networks spreads the same way,” says Christakis. “Germs spread differently than money, which spreads differently than ideas, which spread differently than behaviors, which spread differently than emotions.” ...

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