RSA talk: Connected Minds, Loneliness & Social Brains

Some time back, I wrote a very frustrated post on how experts from the field of psychology make sweeping generalizations of what it means to use online services like twitter, facebook and other social networking sites.

As someone who once pursued an academic career, I found it shocking to see how careless these claims where – random ‘opinions’ completely unsupported by any evidence, but yesterday, my faith in the academic field was restored when “28″ (our nickname for Anjali) and I went to see Prof. John Cacioppo’s presentation “Connected Minds: Loneliness, Social Brains and the Need for Community”, hosted by the RSA.

“An individual’s complete involvement in a thriving, engaged and altruistic community is more than spiritually beneficial. As a social species, humans create emergent organisations beyond the individual—structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilisations, and international alliances. These emergent structures evolved hand-in-hand with supporting genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms because the consequent social behaviors helped humans survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce. We are only now beginning to truly understand the ramifications of our individualistic lifestyles, as our social brains struggle to cope with isolation, loneliness and failing communities.”

What a brilliant talk.

Most of us feel lonely now and then. I certainly do. But while I have tools in place to ‘snap’ out of it – some people are chronically lonely.

Being chronically lonely does not necessarily mean that you haven’t got people in your life or that you’re a ‘loner’ with no social skills. It means having a different sensitivity to a need for human connection. If you have a high need for interaction and connection with other people, you will end up feeling lonely if that need is not met, while another person might feel perfectly happy with less contact than you do.

Lonely people end up in a vicious circle and are prone to get depressed. When they experience the world in light of their unfulfilled social needs, they become highly alert for what they perceive as social social threats. “If my answer to the question isn’t right, everybody will think I’m stupid so I better say nothing” might be one perception, while “She’s choosing to see another friend tonight so she must not like me very much” might be another. As you can imagine, this behaviour often attract more loneliness in the end – if A’s social needs are met sooner than B’s, A might feel claustrophobic by B’s frequent requests and begin to avoid B.

So far, this sounds like a personal problem. But not only does Cacioppo say that loneliness is determined by your genes, he also that loneliness is contagious, and that the future of our society inevitably will be shaped by how we manage our need for human connection.

He finds that there are three dimensions that determine loneliness:

1 – Do I have someone in my life who cares for me and loves me? (people who are close to you)

2 – Face to Face communication

3 – Collective Connectedness  (the quality of your social network)

Obviously, this immediately prompted our ‘favourite’ question from the audience – what’s the role of Facebook in all of this.

“Let’s not talk about Facebook, but social media” Cacioppo smiled.

“It’s the way you USE social media that is significant. ”

Cacioppo pointed to the many cases of people who are lonely because they’re isolated. They might have a handicap, an illness or some other reason why they’re not able to meet people face to face and in these cases, social media provides invaluable tools that can help someone feel less lonely.

But when someone completely replaces face to face interactions with social media, they might feel a temporary boost yet inevitably end up feeling lonely again.

“Most people do not use social media in this way,” Prof. Cacioppo ended. The host added it is far more common for people to use social media to enrich their existing networks.

Obviously this post is just a tiny snapshot of the brilliant talk we were given yesterday. I’m still thinking about how loneliness affect us all and how lonely people can use social media as a tool to improve their social networks and lives. The full talk will soon be available at the RSA website, or if you’re as fascinated by this topic as I am, go pick up a copy of his book Loneliness – highly recommended. Or visit ScienceofLoneliness.com!