The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (3 page)

Feeling lonely is as painful as being wildly hungry or thirsty. This makes sense, says Cacioppo, if human brains evolved at a time when social cohesion meant survival while social isolation meant starvation, predation, and certain death. If our big brains evolved to interact, loneliness would be an early warning system—a built-in alarm that sent a biological signal to members who had somehow become separated from the group. Like physical pain or hunger, loneliness effectively says,
Hey, you! If you don’t find your people (or they don’t find you), you’re a goner
.

If intimate face-to-face contact is protective—girding our cardiovascular and immunological systems and even raising our lifetime IQ levels—loneliness has the opposite effect. Feeling lonely exaggerates the inflammation and reactivity to stress that are linked to heart disease while interfering with our ability to retain facts and solve problems, according to work by the British epidemiologist Andrew Steptoe.
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Loneliness is particularly risky for women. In one huge population study of middle-aged Japanese citizens, women who rarely had the chance to spend time with their relatives had the highest risk of dying.
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Women are also more likely to be affected by their friends’ feelings of loneliness, as feelings spread more easily
within their social networks.
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But other studies show that lack of intimacy is an equal-opportunity stalker. John Cacioppo and his colleagues have found that loneliness drives up the cortisol and blood pressure levels that damage the internal organs in both sexes, and at all ages and stages of adult life.
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Whether we’re college students or retirees, the data are telling us that chronic loneliness is less an exalted existential state than a public health risk. Yet there is a glib insouciance about loneliness in popular culture. Headlines such as “Get Over Your Loner Phobia” and “Eat to the Tweet” suggest that it’s now dorky to admit that if you live alone you might be lonely, or to imagine that other people might feel that way.
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In their book
Networked
, Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet Project and Barry Wellman, a Canadian sociologist who is the doyen of electronic social networks, mock the “Eleanor Rigby” lyric
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
Skeptical that screen time could be contributing to loneliness, they call it a trap to assume that “internet encounters contain less social information and communication that might cause relationships to atrophy.” We have a strong sense of the people we meet up with online, and the medium is not the message, they write, adding this odd postscript: “People rarely interact with strangers over the internet.”
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Yet there is an undeniable fact: due to the convenience and power of the Internet, many of us now live, shop, go to school, and work alone. With classes now posted online and the proliferation of MOOCs (massive open online courses), many college students don’t bother to leave their rooms. Just as the sidewalk vanished in much of American urban planning in the mid twentieth century, when the car became the dominant form of transportation, the post office, newsstand, bookstore, and video store—all places where we crossed paths just a few years ago—are becoming obsolete. True, there are lots of online conversations and apps that connect people, and cafés are more common on
street corners than supermarkets. In effect the Internet has allowed us to be more choosy about whom we meet, at least in person. Instead of bumping into neighbors or distant friends spontaneously,
we
are in control. Some research shows that our networked devices make us less solipsistic, more involved in the world outside ourselves. “Internet use does not pull people away from public places, but rather is associated with frequent visits to places such as parks, cafes, and restaurants,” write Wellman and Rainie.
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But as the
Boston Globe
columnist, Ellen Goodman, reminds us, “Go into Starbucks and a third of the customers are having coffee dates with their laptops.”
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Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it can hardly be viewed as an intimate connection. Still, talking to our friends and loved ones by landline, mobile phone, or Skype is the next best thing to being there, as Ma Bell presciently put it. I’m certainly a convert. We recently Skyped the son of a close neighborhood friend into our Passover seder. He was serving in the military at the time, but we set a place at the table for the “Ethan” laptop. Another friend who used to live across the street joined us at Chinese New Year celebrations via her father’s iPad, which was passed around from guest to guest like a wedding videographer’s microphone so everyone could greet her.

Indeed, there’s a long history of women in my family using the telephone to keep their social ties alive. At the end of every workday my grandmother picked up the receiver of her black rotary model to check up on the health and happiness of her female friends, who despite the intimacy of their conversations she addressed formally as Mrs. Dubow, Mrs. Silver, Mrs. Cooper, Mrs. Tartar, and Mrs. Teitelbaum. During her years at home with small children, my mother’s fully extended nine-foot long kitchen phone cord kept her attached—in more ways than one—to her social circle. Now it’s my turn. If I can’t see my friends and loved ones in person, I use a combination of cordless, cellphone, email, text, and
Skype to keep up with my social network, which, graphed out, looks something like this:

My sociogram: The circles are female, the triangles are male, and the black dots indicate people profiled in this book. The thickness of the line shows the strength of the connection
. (Image and Figure Credits
itr.2
)

A Pew Internet study confirms that cellphone users have larger personal networks—12 percent larger, to be precise—than the small fraction of people who shun them.
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But in a different set of studies, the same group of scientists showed that avid users of social networking sites have more diverse electronic networks but know fewer of their neighbors and are less integrated into their local communities than those who rarely use social media.
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“A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty,” Emerson wrote in 1857. True, that was a long time ago, but are we really that different?

The power and immediacy of electronic media have persuaded us that the different ways of “clothing ourselves” in social contact are interchangeable. In the coming pages I’ll show that the latest evidence upends this idea. Electronic media can sway voters and topple newspapers, but when it comes to human cognition and health, they’re no match for the face-to-face.

The “come-hither” aspect of electronic media has pulled the wool over our eyes, convincing us that different ways of making contact are the same as being there, and leading us to believe that our networks are expanding. In fact, even if our electronic networks are larger, the size of our face-to-face social networks has stayed roughly the same, while the number of people we feel close to is shrinking. Given that the only person many Americans say they can trust is their spouse, it turns out that many of us are just one person away from having no one at all.

Of course, there are paradoxes. The longer you live—which is usually a good thing—the more likely that your spouse, partner, and close friends will predecease you, leaving you on your own. Unless you’re resourceful and have groomed your networks over a lifetime, solitary living can mean forgoing face-to-face contact on a day-to-day basis. Claude Fischer, a Berkeley sociologist who has been studying social networks and urban life for three decades, points out that “living alone is largely what Americans do,” and that the widowed and divorced are largely responsible for the boom in people living alone.
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While a quarter of American men over seventy-five now live alone, fully half of all women that age do, many of them having divorced or outlived their spouses. In Britain the number of people living alone has doubled since the early 1970s; in 2010, sales of single-serving cookware increased by 140 percent, according to the
Daily Mail
, which reported that “frying pans small enough for just one egg, plates for one slice of toast, and one-cup teapots are now some of the fastest selling items in cookware.” Where large casseroles were the must-have items of the latter half of the twentieth century, the article notes that “even woks have been downsized for the single market.” Given that 80 percent of British citizens over eighty-five live alone, those whipping up one-egg omelets are very likely to be seniors.
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These are extraordinary statistics, and they can be understood in a couple of ways. The good news is that in North America, Japan, and Europe, people, especially women, are living longer than ever and the majority can now afford to live alone, if that’s what they choose. But the other part of the story is that they might live even longer if they had the right company. In a study of nearly seven thousand older people in Finland, epidemiologists found that one of the most powerful predictors of loneliness was living alone; when they followed up four years later, the lonely folks—no matter their state of health to begin with—were 31 percent more likely to have died in the meantime than people who felt intimately connected.
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In a huge study of 11,500 middle-aged Japanese citizens led by Tokyo epidemiologist Motoki Iwasaki, urban women who rarely had the chance to interact face-to-face with their relatives had the highest risk of dying.
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The researchers followed all of the women between the ages of forty and sixty-nine who lived in Gunma Prefecture; these women were hardly the oldest, nor were they the poorest. Yet their resilience was fatefully affected by their opportunities for face-to-face contact.

In the following pages I’ll address some crucial questions about human relationships in a digital age. How important is face-to-face interaction as children develop new skills, when adults fall in love, when they negotiate business deals, and as they age?
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How did humans evolve such finely tuned barometers of trust and betrayal, and do these mechanisms still work if you’re not face-to-face with your partner? Why are women’s social networks tighter than men’s, and what does this mean for their health and the health of others? For example, Tom Valente, at the University of California at San Diego, among others, has shown that smoking, drinking, and drug use among adolescents spreads (and may be reversed) via popular kids who act as hubs of influence through overlapping cliques.
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Without deploying adolescents’ social networks, expensive public
health programs are likely to fail, even if Twitter and Facebook are used to spread the message.

This research is telling us that proximity matters. Sixty years ago Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.” In the following pages, you’ll see that he was wrong.

W
hen Sylvie La Fontaine was diagnosed with breast cancer in April 1999, she had just competed with her team in the Canadian Masters national swimming championships. Five foot ten, with rectangular tortoiseshell glasses and pixie-cut hair, Sylvie favored snug wraparound tops she sewed herself, worn over leggings and boots; she hardly looked the part of a grandmother of three. A real estate agent and interior designer, she was the de facto hub of several intense face-to-face social networks, including her swim team. Its president for seven years by that time, she fielded a multitude of personal and training questions from its 150 members, including but not limited to their health issues, reproductive concerns and sports injuries, marital flare-ups and child-rearing doubts, thoughts on the pool’s water quality and the coach’s latest endurance workout. She was even a shoulder to cry on when a member’s beloved pet had to be put down. She sustained this role with bemused equanimity until a teammate blasted her—and not for the first time—about some insignificant mishap at a competition. The attack penetrated her usual defenses and really stung. Given her recent cancer diagnosis, Sylvie
wondered whether she should pull back from the team in order to conserve her emotional resources.