I’ve cut way back on social media over the last few years – largely because most of my real-life friends have too. Blame the algorithms, blame the business model, blame whatever you want.
But on the comparatively few occasions I do use it, here’s what I’ve noticed about my own behaviour:
- I exchange tips and news with neighbours in my town’s unofficial local groups.
- I trade ideas and experiences about skiing in the Northeast with other like-minded folks.
- I talk about soccer – and especially the US Men’s National Team – with other long-suffering fans.
In almost all of these cases, the people I’ve sorta/kinda gotten to know exist to me only as usernames. Whether we’re talking about PAskiguy415 on Reddit or Jane Smith on the local town Facebook group, I have an inch-wide, quarter-mile-deep view into their lives.
But we don’t actually know each other in real life.
Now, a new study from Oregon State University just addressed the underlying core questions these kinds of relationships pose:
- Do online-only connections count?
- Can these virtual relationships do for us what real-life relationships do?
Sorry PAskiguy415. The short answer, apparently, is no.
In fact, for some people, they may make things worse.
Idealisation of friendships
Published in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Public Health Service, the study surveyed 1,514 U.S. adults between the ages of 30 and 70 in a nationally representative sample.
Researchers divided each person’s social media connections into two groups: people they had met in person, and people they hadn’t.
Adults with higher percentages of online-only connections (people they’d never actually met face-to-face) reported greater loneliness.
Moreover, connecting online with people you actually know didn’t help either. It was associated with neither greater loneliness, but it also wasn’t associated with less loneliness.
Study co-author Jessica Gorman explained the mechanism:
“We know that social media interactions can result in idealisation of other people’s friendships with each other, which can exacerbate the effects of social comparison.
This idealisation is possibly stronger when those friendships involve people you’ve never met because there is no personal experience to counter that idealisation.”
In other words: when you interact with someone online you’ve never met, you fill in the gaps–usually with something rosier than reality.
You don’t see the bad days and the friction that comes with actually knowing someone. The comparison makes you feel worse about your own social life, not better.
‘Happier and healthier. Period.’
None of this would surprise Robert Waldinger, the Harvard psychiatrist who has been running the 88-year Harvard Grant Study of adult development since 2003. I’ve written about that research several times, including most recently in April.
His summary of what decades of data show: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”
But, this new study suggests that relationships only matter when people build them on actual shared experiences.
It’s perhaps about time in the same room, attention paid in real time – the good, the bad, and the ugly that comes along with getting to know almost anyone in three dimensions.
Both directions?
Quick caveats:
- The study predates the current wave of AI-powered social tools (summer 2023).
- It’s a snapshot, not a longitudinal tracking of the same people over time.
- And, we have our old friend correlation versus causation to consider: Lonelier people may be more likely to seek online connections with strangers to begin with, rather than those connections causing the loneliness.
Most probably, said lead author Brian Primack, it runs in both directions.
People experiencing loneliness “may wish to examine critically their interactions with strangers on social media and to prioritise in-person connections over social media ones, even when those social media connections are considered close.”
All of which leads me to: If you see a middle-aged guy in a throwback 1994 denim soccer jersey going a little bit crazy for the US men’s national team on Friday against Paraguay, say hello.
It might just be CaligiurisLeftFoot from your online group.
And you’d both probably like to meet in real-life. – Inc./TNS
