Samuel: As you age, you become more and more social.
The data is unambiguously clear in our survey that younger Americans feel much more isolated
than older Americans.
Ryan: Sam, great to have you here.
We're here to talk about AEI's new survey on community and society.
It's kind of the largest study on social capital in well over a decade.
And so I'd like to start off talking about this basic question of loneliness which is
a big national discussion today and something that we have questions about in our survey
and have some interesting findings about.
Sam: So the first thing to note is that what's remarkable about our social capital study
is the fact that it involves over 2,400 individuals around the country, and we designed it very
specifically to delve deep into every demographic cleavage we can find.
So we have people from various regions, various races, ethnicities, age cohorts and so on.
And so it's not just a microtargeted group, it's the entire nation as a whole.
But each subsample is big enough that can really delve deep into the specific groups.
One of the issues of why we keep hearing about the fact that it's a loneliness epidemic is
that we have a very long tradition of scholarly work that talks about the frang[SP] of our
country's communities, our roots, the various networks that connect us.
We have the rise of the smartphone.
We have all these technological tools that seem to cocoon us and this is nothing new.
Jim Coleman of the University of Chicago wrote about this.
Bob Putnam at Harvard wrote about this, wrote about the fact that we have become sort of
sequestered in our McMansions in front of a glowing tube which is the TV.
So academics write about this all the time.
We see ethnographies all the time talking about older Americans being shut in, being
disconnected from their communities.
And then it's a very popular topic among the press, not to say that the press is getting
it wrong with the individual stories but it's not that hard to find people around the country
that are older and feeling disconnected.
The world is changing around and it's also not that hard to find younger people who are
angsty and who are angry and frustrated and are saying, "No one understands me.
No one can connect with me."
So the goal of our study was to really delve into this in a more systemic way that's both
involves art and science, the idea of polling people in a deep way asking beyond one or
two simple questions but really how do we understand how people are feeling and their
perceptions of being alone and connected.
And I'm very proud of what we did here at AEI to make a better sense of that.
Ryan: Yeah, it's a great survey.
And as you say, I mean this is something that people observed and we don't want to minimize
what's going on out there when people are living lives where they feel alone or they
feel like no one understands them.
But as you're saying, even going back before Coleman, I mean we had the Lonely Crowd in
1950, A Nation of Strangers in 1972.
I mean there had been these episodes throughout our history as a country where people have
observed that we have this problem of atomization and individualism that sometimes it's hyped
up enough or on steroids enough to lead to loneliness.
And so the survey's goal is to really kind of dig a little bit deeper.
And one data point from the survey that I wanted to get your thoughts on is this.
I mean we found consistent with some other surveys out there that about a third of Americans
will report feeling lonely at least sometimes.
The percentage of people who say they're lonely often is actually pretty low, under 10% I
think.
But let's say, so for a third of Americans who say they feel lonely, we also find that
about three-quarters of those people who report feeling lonely at least sometimes also say
they have someone they're close to or someone that they can rely on.
So what's going on there?
How can you be lonely and also have people you're close to?
Sam: Well that's where the art and science of polling comes in here.
You need to ask people a lot of different questions to really get at this.
You know, it's not that people holding consistent opinions on how they see their networks and
see their communities, but asking just one or two questions doesn't get it.
If I were to ask you or myself or our friends, how many friends do you have?
What does that really mean?
Are these friends that are intimate enough that I can tell them my deepest darkest secrets
or are they people that I sort of see once or twice a year and you can connect with?
Some surveys reveal that we have zero or only one really intimate friend.
Other surveys show that we have dozens of social intimates.
So it's not that the numbers that you said are incorrect they're just plenty of people
who feel not only alone but also know that they can talk to people.
I'm sure that you have felt alone every now and then but still have people you can talk
to.
I certainly have felt alone on one on one occasion but also know I can and talk to people.
So one of the things that we did was we use the modified UCLA isolation index in this
survey, basically, a whole barrage of questions that I ask a whole gamut of ways of measuring
loneliness.
And by doing that that's generally a better way to try to assess how are you really feeling.
You might feel lonely but you're still may be connected.
And by using this modified UCLA index we can really measure what people are thinking.
And the good news is that I think a lot of the narratives in the popular press that we
are going through some loneliness epidemic are overhyped.
I just don't think the data bears that.
Ryan: Yeah.
So since you mentioned the index, I want to come back to that in a second.
Before we get there I got more of the top line level just in terms of what our data
in the survey shows.
Who's lonely and who's not?
I mean, you said it's a more complicated topic than the press often reports but it is true
that some people are lonelier than others, some people are more isolated than others,
and we'll talk a little bit about how we came up with those numbers in a minute.
But what are the characteristics?
Sam: So it's interesting, a lot of times people would have you think that people who live
in rural areas are very lonely.
You could make up a narrative that would show that look here, there's nowhere to go.
There are those very little community out there.
Other people would say there's a lot of community in rural areas.
The flipside of that is people might say, "Urban areas, it can be very isolating because
there's so much going on but you may not be able to connect."
Or because you're in an urban center there's lots of stuff around so you can't connect.
We found for instance that there are not regional variances.
Folks are no more connected or less connected in New England versus the South versus the
West Coast.
We also found that party ID didn't really matter.
It's not the case that Republicans are much more communal than Democrats or independents
for that matter.
Ryan: But independents are just a little bit lonely, right?
Sam: Marginally.
Ryan: Marginally, certainly.
Sam: But not statistically too much there.
What we really found over and over and again was that education and income you find real
differences among education and income, and age.
On the education and income, those are highly correlated and it's not surprising that folks
who are more educated tend to be more wealthy and tend to be a little less lonely a little
more connected.
If you think about it, people who have higher levels of education most likely went to college.
When you are in college for better or for worse, you are necessarily thrown into a cauldron
with other people.
You have to make social ties, you cannot survive in the absence of those ties.
So they are getting the skills to become more social.
They are forced into social situations.
So for better or for worse again they're trained and there are people who are learning how
to engage with others.
If you're less educated and less wealthy, you're maybe more embarrassed to socialize.
You may not feel as welcome.
You may not feel that you can comfortably engage with people.
So education and income matter.
The other finding which runs against a lot of popular [SP] narratives is that actually
as you age you become more and more social.
The data is unambiguously clear in our survey that younger Americans feel much more isolated
than older Americans, whereas if you read story after story it always talks about the
shut-in older American.
And I don't want to diminish the value of those findings.
There are certainly a fair number of people who have those issues, and there are many
great organizations that work to mitigate those problems, but it's unambiguously clear
that younger Americans feel disconnected.
The question that we have to answer from that is, are younger Americans feeling disconnected
because they have been raised on social media?
Is it that as a professor I regularly talk to my students and realized they have a lot
of trouble talking to me but not just talking to me, they have trouble talking to themselves.
They're so used to mediated conversations through Instagram or Snapchat or text that
the idea of picking up the phone and having that level of intimacy or having a level of
intimacy over dinner is hard for many students.
I like to tell a story, I had a student who mentioned that he was interested in a young
lady, but he couldn't find her on any of the dating apps so that you know reached campus.
And I said to the student, "Go approach the young lady and say, 'would you like to grab
lunch sometime?'"
And he found this to be shocking and he just went, "Really?"
And I said, "Yes."
Ryan: Foreign concept.
Sam: And this is the extent of the dating advice I will ever give as a professor.
I'm not someone who's good at that.
But the idea of social interaction has become increasingly mediated by these technologies.
People aren't comfortable with them.
The question is this teenage angst, is this Gen X angst, and Generation Z angst, and will
that change over time?
Or, you know, as people age out and will they become more comfortable being social?
Will they realize that when you have kids, certainly in my case, having a little boy
we're much more involved in our community and suddenly we have a lot more friends.
Is it an age effect or is it a cohort effect?
The jury is still out on that.
Ryan: We'll see.
Sam: We'll see.
Ryan: Yeah.
Sam: But right now the data shows that it really is a condition on age.
Ryan: Yeah.
Another interesting thing I thought in the findings is that there's really no difference
between living alone or being at home with a family.
Sam: Yes.
Ryan: Right.
So there's some things that are surprising that loneliness doesn't necessarily correlate
with living alone.
Sam: Not at all.
Ryan: So really its age, it's income, but not very big differences by the type of household
you live in, not very big differences by race.
Sam: Exactly.
Ryan: Not very big differences by region or whether you live in the city or the suburb.
Sam: Right, exactly.
And the city suburb difference which is not existent.
The race-ethnicity issue was not.
The thing that I really found interesting was that there has been a significant amount
of research out of saying that the average way we live in this country is living alone,
and that this just franging our bonds in our community cohesiveness.
It doesn't really look like it, it really doesn't seem to matter in aggregate whether
or not, again, you live alone or you live in a household full of grandparents, parents,
children, and grandchildren.
Ryan: Yeah.
That's right.
That was very interesting.
So for those who like to dig a little bit deeper into how these things are sort of measured
and discuss.
You mentioned the UCLA index in our modified version of it in the survey.
Talk a little bit about how that's constructed.
The kind of questions that are asked and then generally what the survey found.
Sam: Sure.
So the idea of this was to basically ask in our case 19 questions about how connected
you are, how lonely you feel, how isolated you feel, or how engaged do you feel.
And this battery basically said how often do you feel that you have someone you can
turn to.
How often do you feel for instance that you are present in a community but not connecting
with others in the community?
How often do you feel that you have no friends that you could turn to for instance?
And we would ask people to answer sometimes often regularly and occasionally and never
things like that.
And you have a small methodical formula where you aggregate all those answers up somewhere
in the positive, somewhere in the negative, and then you basically sum them up and you
can create what we can call an index score, and in our survey the average American hit
40 not that that's hugely illustrative, other than to say that when you look at things like
urban, rural, suburban, or region the numbers are all within a degree or two or a point
or two of that 40 number.
So the numbers really just don't fluctuate all that much.
But what it really does is it solves the problem we mentioned earlier of how do you sort of
measure and rectify the distortion between people who say they feel very alone, but there
are people around them they can turn to.
And the answer is people can hold these almost similarly competing beliefs at the same time.
You can feel there are plenty of people you can turn to but you also feel lonely at the
same time.
This way we're going a lot deeper.
It's not just do you have friends or do you feel lonely.
Do feel isolated.
It's who are your friends, how often do you really feel that way.
How often do you really feel that you can talk to people?
How often do you really feel that you're just completely alone?
And this is a much more nuanced deep way to measure people and their connections.
Ryan: Right.
It's worth pointing out that this survey is about a lot more than loneliness.
Sam: Absolutely.
Ryan: The loneliness questions were one part of it, it's a survey with over 2,400 respondents
and we asked a whole bunch of questions about people's perceptions of their communities,
how many friends they have, how many people they feel close to, how close they are, things
like parks libraries, restaurants, bars.
Do they have a dog?
We ask all kinds of things.
So there's a lot of other interesting findings in the survey.
What are some of the other points that pop up related to loneliness?
You know, the other things about what mitigates against it perhaps.
We know that the older you are and the more money you have the less likely you are to
report feeling lonely.
But there are other things that appear to effect.
Sam: Neighbors.
Neighbors is a big one.
You want to know your neighbors.
It doesn't mean you're necessarily deeply intimate with your neighbors but occasional
contact with your neighbors weekly just the simplest things like hello, how are you, asking
about the sports team.
It's amazing how that makes you feel a lot less lonely.
I think it creates a very subtle social safety net knowing you're not alone in your community
and there's availability to talk to others.
But it's not an urban effect.
It's not to say that if you're in an urban area you know your neighbors.
Plenty of New Yorkers literally on top of each other but don't know their neighbors.
I've lived in New York for years and in many cases did not know the people down the hall
or really even engaged with them.
So it's not necessarily conditioned on where you live.
You could be in a big suburban home and still know your neighbors and have engagement with
that.
The other big finding which I very much like is that community amenities matter, like there's
been a lot of interest in are we investing enough in our communities.
Do we have libraries, public parks?
Would the literature traditionally has called third spaces, places to go outside the home
and outside the workspace.
Concurrently, we have the decline of malls which were many, many years ago thought of
as third spaces and then all of those legal cases.
Are they really public or they're private?
What can and can't you do in those areas?
But when you have movie theaters, places to shop, community town centers, skating rings,
its remarkable how much good that does for the community because whether you like it
or not it anchors you to your community and you may have to engage with others as a result
of that.
Bowling alleys, for instance, believe it or not, are very important.
And I mentioned bowling alleys because Putnam's landmark, bowling alone talked about the fact
that there were bowling lanes that were very vibrant, you know, in the post where you're
in by the 1990s the typical arrangement was that Americans were bowling alone.
It turns out that actually bowling is booming in this country once again.
Bowling leagues are actually very pronounced and doing very, very well.
And when you have these amenities in your community they really do help bring, you know,
create social capital, raise your interest in your community collectively and actually
make you more social, there's something you can focus on.
There's something that really connects you to others in a very casual way.
It doesn't have to be very formal.
But over time those casual connections can make and really mean powerful...
Ryan: Yeah, that's right.
So you calculated that social isolation score for people depending on how many amenities
they said they could either walk to or within like a 5 to 15-minute drive.
Sam: Exactly.
Ryan: And then compare that to people who are 15 to 30 minutes, 30 to 60 away from those.
Those swings from the social isolation scores for people that are close to the things, especially
things like parks and libraries, grocery shopping.
And the scores of those who are farther away from those things were pretty significant.
Sam: They were.
Ryan: And on par with those people who said they talk with their neighbors once or twice
a week or participate in solving community problems with neighbors and those who said
they never do those things, that the swing was about the same in those cases.
That was pretty substantial.
Sam: It is and that's why when we have foundations and community planners they like to say what
can we do to bring the community back?
How do we make things more civic?
Make sure we build park, when we build new housing make sure they're public spaces, make
sure they're public amenities, make sure they're libraries, you know, Andrew Carnegie was very
interested in this with the Carnegie Library system.
He was right.
He may not have realized he was right.
But he was absolutely right and the nice thing about this idea of building libraries making
sure we have this community amenities is this is a non-political issue.
This is a partisan issue.
There's no reason anyone wouldn't want to be on board with this.
And we've seen a push on both the left and the right for this sort of work and I really
think this is something that can help rebuild communities.
We go to newer communities that were built in the '80s and '90s and the odds, the 2000s.
A lot of times that you see big cocooned areas where there are absences in these third spaces.
The advice in the policy implication here is we absolutely need to make sure we build
these things, whether we were starting from scratch and building a new or making sure
we put them back in.
And, you know, literally, every other week when you look at great places to travel they
talk about, you know, visiting libraries.
Vancouver just opened up another magnificent library which is not just for books, it's
a public gathering space and people take pride in that civic architecture and our survey
certainly suggests that that's necessary.
Ryan: Yeah.
It really does jump out of the data, these points on the way communities are designed
and then also this just reality of neighborhoods, it's a very real thing, and if people consider
that they have friends in their neighborhoods.
Their neighborhoods are not just people they live next to but they're their friends.
They're much less likely to say they're lonely than those who don't say the same thing.
So this idea that what is local, what is proximate, what is close to us is very clear within the
findings.
And I guess our survey like others finds that the farther you get away from home to the
national debate about politics where people become divisive or how people trust their
local government versus the federal government, those are very big difference because people
care a lot about what's close to them.
I think we also found that consistent with other work that's been done in this area,
that people who have higher levels of religiosity also have lower social isolation scores.
Sam: Absolutely, and that's very consistent with quite a bit of research on that and it
makes sense.
And I want to mention that it's not just religiosity though.
It's not just how religious are you or how often do you attend services.
It's very much how connected you are to your religious community and it's important to
remind ourselves that religious organizations and actual churches, synagogues, mosques,
and so on are not just places of prayer, they're places of prayer they're places of community
building.
I mentioned myself earlier with having a little one, you know, I don't necessarily attend
synagogue services but I certainly attend community works.
So, you know, a lot of people will say that we need to focus on these religious institutions
as benchmarks and keystones of communities.
They're absolutely right.
Our research is unambiguously clear that the more of these the more active they are.
And the closer they are the more available they are the tighter the communities you have.
And they don't need to be truly religious in nature but they do build a community...
Ryan: Yeah.
And I think the findings, correct me if I'm wrong whether it also holds if you participate
in activities sponsored by religious organizations, well, because we ask those questions too and
that was something that is going...
Sam: Exactly, that was my point, that I participate personally in quite a few activities not necessarily
religious observance activities but community activities, and immediately I'm connected
to dozens of families in my community, and now I can walk on the street and run into
people which is something that I think a lot of Americans like.
The more often you do that the nicer you actually become.
It's hard to curse somebody out.
It's hard to hate someone when you actually get to know them, and you realize that they
are human beings.
They may disagree with you on certain things but you realize they're good people, they're
coming from a place of integrity and they may have a difference of opinion, but they're
still valid opinions.
And this is one way on a very local community level, we can overcome I think a lot of this
divisiveness.
We need to focus on the local.
We need to focus back on the community.
And remember that so much of this country is built on the local community not just what's
going on here in Washington.
Ryan: That's right.
So there are lessons in this data for community planners, for civic leaders to encourage people
in your community to get out and do things with our neighbors.
It seems to make a big difference.
As we wrap this up, is there anything else in the survey that you think bears worth talking
about as far as it's related to the question of loneliness and belonging?
Sam: So, yes, actually.
The question of the American dream and have you made it in this country.
One of the really pronounced findings in our data is that the overwhelming majority of
Americans in the 80% range believed they've either achieved their American dream or well
on their way to achieve the American dream.
And when you ask what predicates the American dream, what really anchors the American dream,
it's not owning a big home, a big car and becoming rich anymore at all.
It's about having friends, it's about living one's life in a meaningful way and it's about
having a community here.
So there's a tightly coupled relationship quite frankly between feelings of community
and feeling like you've achieved the American dream.
So I would encourage us to remember that the dream is about community and living harmoniously
with others and being part, no one wants to be an island in and of itself.
That's not pleasant.
We need each other, we like each other, it's how we move forward as a society, and it's
pretty remarkable to see that that's actually the idea of being connected to others and
being in a community really is what anchors people's perceptions of the dream in achieving
the dream.
It's not how much money you have in your bank account.
It's actually how connected to others you are.
So I think that is another very powerful important finding.
Ryan: Well, it's great stuff, Sam, it's a good note to end on actually that when it
comes to the American dream, Americans are more likely to think of freedom and family
as there are more material definitions, and I think there's a lot more to explore there
as far as that relates to these questions of belonging and loneliness which we look
forward to doing in the coming months.
So thanks again for the discussion today.
Sam: Thank you.
Ryan: Hey, everyone, that's the end of our discussion with AEI visiting scholar, Sam
Abrams.
Thanks for watching.
As always let us know what other topics you'd like AEI scholars to cover on viewpoint.
And to learn more about the survey we were discussing today, check the links in the description
below.
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