Jeffrey A. Hall
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
I think different countries throughout the world have acknowledged the importance of seeing loneliness as a public health concern. But I think more broadly, people are receptive to the message. I think we've seen a change recently where people are starting to say, wait a second, you know what? I want to improve the quality of my social life. How do I go about doing that?
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
It's a great question. One of the ways to think about this is think about the fact that all technologies are energy efficient. So whether it's a dishwasher or whether it's even the printing press, it is an efficient, much more efficient way of basically getting things done in the past. People love efficiencies.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
And one of the theories and ideas we operate from is the value of people place on having to do less. So a text is less work than a phone call. A phone call is less work than a face-to-face interaction. So people actually generally, when given the option, will kind of trend towards the things that require less of them.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So I think that you're not wrong to suggest that the proliferation of technologies for communication between individuals have made it easier to sort of forego more challenging communication that is more face-to-face,
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
that's a longer conversation like on a phone call i think what's really tricky is that these technologies are also ones which are always being updated and more and more appealing so it's hard to resist them so the technology sort of reflects back to us our values that we're placing and become easier and more efficient as they are developed to make it simpler and simpler to do less work with our social relationships
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Well, I think one of the very sort of positive notes that I've heard when people have responded to this idea is that they're excited about being given some direction, you know, being given some direction on sort of what to do or how to approach it as valuable.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
I think a lot of people also find it fascinating to think about this idea that they have a social battery, you know, social energy that they want to build up or develop like a muscle that you do when you exercise. I think that people are also receptive to the idea that it doesn't take that much. It's not that hard.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
You know, it's not that complicated that we have particular little strategies like talking to strangers or showing dignity to another person or listening rather than trying to be a perfect communicator that are all like not impossible, but they show research backed evidence to to get people moving in the right direction.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
but the compliment we get the most often is that it's really sympathetic to this is hard like it's not easy to really change our habits or to be do differently when it comes to something as common and every day as uh you know communication i'm asking people to take small steps and have self-forgiveness towards the fact these this is difficult but it's work that's absolutely worth doing
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Exactly. I think people have to acknowledge that this is something that they want to sort of improve in their lives and that they want to try to find a seek that balance that creates a very healthy social biome for them to live in.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Yeah, I mean, I think we can always look in our communities for, like, who's really good at this, and maybe they can give me some tips. You know, I certainly have people who I've met before that are amazing storytellers or such excellent listeners or are just so funny that I want to spend more time around them.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
And we're always going to find people that are superlative at communication or are really good at it. And I think getting some ideas about how to be good at it from them is a great idea. But Andy and I actually try to offer something that's much simpler is that a lot of times people just kind of like to be heard and they enjoy the fact that another person is responsive to them.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So what's fascinating is when there are different sort of interventions that are done in communication research or in psychology research to have people engage in specific social behaviors, a lot of times the value of just being present or just listening or just acknowledging another person is as good as any perfect line or any perfect statement or any great joke.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
It's simply valuable simply to be there for another person, to be responsive and interested in what they have to say. You know, I think that, you know, the kind of great Dale Carnegie's argument that if you want to be interesting, talk to the person's interests is a great piece of advice. In many ways, merely being responsive to what's exciting to another person makes them interested in you.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Putnam does this analysis that goes back into roughly the 1950s to the present at that time, so the late 90s, and talks about sort of the decline of membership in bowling leagues, in social clubs, in Elks Lodge, all these different sort of organizations that were pro-social, community-oriented, and oftentimes just meant for leisure and spending time together for fun.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
And he looks at the decline of membership, the decline of participation in these things for roughly a 50-year period. So his arguments around bowling alone, in the book Bowling Alone, are really fundamental in sort of setting the tone for a lot of researchers thinking about the importance of social behavior and having a just and healthy society.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Yeah, well, at the time, you know, his conclusions were really focused on a couple of factors. You know, one of those factors was actually the change of women in the workplace.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So tons of women joined the workplace during that same period of time, which made it harder for there to be a person in the home that was coordinating the social schedule or planning events or making time for these things to facilitate the organization of the family to make these things possible.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Some of it actually at the time he was concerned about the internet society or the rise of the internet as being a contributing factor and the ease in which that media was able to be accessed. But the point that Putnam made I actually would love to be able to share is he was interviewed about his work in the New York Times only last year.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
And last year he said that for years he's kind of been a Cassandra warning us about the processes of these things and he only sees them continuing.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
And the recommendation that he has now is the same that one he had in the 90s, which was, we have to convince people that it's in their own interest to be more socially obligated to one another, for us to live in a world in which that we are obliged to one another, to care for one another, and that's a better world to live in.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Basically, since the 1990s, we have seen a steady decline of people spending time being social. We're actually looking at a roughly 40% reduction. People aren't going to places like parties or inviting friends over for dinner or hosting events where they host family or visit other family or friends.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
I think so. One thing that I think is a very interesting statistic, people are generally speaking, have friends. There's a high, high, high percentage of people who have friends. It's like 98, 97% of people say, I have friends. The second is people's rates of satisfaction with their friends are very high. So people are like, yeah, I really like my friends. I have good friends.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
And they're even higher if you ask questions like, do you have people who will celebrate your good times and cheer you on if something good's happening? And they say even a higher percentage of people say, yes, I have those people. But the two things that people also say is I'm not as close to my friends that I would like to be and I'm not making time for them.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So one thing to think about, I think, is the broader sort of message is for sure there are folks out there who are struggling with chronic loneliness. And I think we need to be attentive to that. But I think for the kind of the modern kind of American circumstance is that people have relationships.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
They just don't have the time and aren't making it a priority to deepen those relationships or prioritize them in a way that we organize our days and weeks.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So basically, since the 1990s, we have seen a steady decline in the United States and across a lot of Western countries of people spending time being social. We're actually looking at a roughly like 40% reduction of time spent being social, just conversing for the sake of conversation, for the sake of being social around one another.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
One of the areas that it's declined the most is actually one that's kind of hard to see because people aren't about doing it. People aren't going to places like parties or inviting friends over for dinner or hosting events where they host family or visit other family or friends.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So what's interesting is the people that you see out and about who are actually on their phones are one example of people not necessarily spending time talking to each other. But there's a bigger issue here, which is that people are not prioritizing time with one another across Western Europe and in the United States and have not been doing so for 25 years.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
But that took a major hit during the pandemic. A lot of folks actually went down dramatically in their face to face conduct and a good number of people haven't recovered since. Really, it's that that was the that was the tipping point right there was covid. It's sort of think about the idea that it accelerated an existing trend, right?
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
We were already on our way to a less social world and it pushed things further. And one of the reasons that it really pushed things further was for younger adults. And during that time of development, you know, people want to spend a lot of time in the company of their friends. They fall in love. They spent a ton of time outside of their family of origin, building their new families.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
And during COVID, a lot of that time was restricted. So for a lot of folks, they don't have the kind of friends and connections they would like to have simply because they didn't make them to begin with. So COVID created the conditions that accelerated an existing trend and made things slightly worse.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
That's a really great question. One of the hardest things is actually to direct the messages that the Surgeon General has and other people have about trying to focus on sociality to raise awareness about the problems associated with loneliness to people who need it the most.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So one of the things that my co-author Andy and I talk about a lot is that as professors of communication, as people who actually have very rich social lives, and we're both parents and we're both married, we actually, even in our situation, we still, through all the research that we get, have to be reminded to be social.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
There's a whole subset of groups of people out there who aren't even aware that not being social is a problem. They're not really aware that these are things that they need to be doing for their well-being.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So one of the sort of goals that we have broadly is to try to make it clear to folks that taking small steps, achievable little moments of interaction with strangers, with customer service representatives, with the people that you see can make a difference in your daily sociality and actually over time sort of build up your social battery to be more social. So how do you do that?
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
And one of the sort of symptoms of our age of interiority that we live in right now is the feeling of kind of frictionless technology. So frictionless technologies are those things which basically make it so that we don't have to have any contact with another person in order to get our food. So that's like DoorDash to order products, to make exchanges, to buy things.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
That's all the Amazon products to be delivered to your door and otherwise. And the idea is that we've built up a technological environment where so much of the social behaviors which were part of just being part of everyday life, shopping, being a neighbor, existing in a community, are things that we have used technology to replace.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So there's a good argument to be made that we have collectively as a society agreed that we would prefer to exchange all of those small moments of connection and interaction with things that are simple or perhaps frictionless in the terminology of the tech industry. But the consequence of that are, as you say, people become less familiar with how to do it.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
They also become less comfortable with doing it when they're expected to. So those moments of sort of like bottle of water, please, as you meant before, also are for people who are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the very process of day-to-day interactions and transactions.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Every opportunity to have an interaction with another person, just acknowledging the dignity of that person and that role that they're playing plays an enormous difference in our sense of well-being and connection to the community. So that means looking me in the face and say, thank you.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
That means actually acknowledging the presence of a shared moment, whether it's the weather or if you lived in Los Angeles like I did, bad traffic. Whatever it is that you share together is a thing that you can exchange with a person near you. And these small moments of connection build up the possibility of a greater sense of well-being in general.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Yeah, well, I'll give you five that are all research backed empirically supported. Number one, right? The number one predictor of longevity is social connectedness, right? This is actually the equivalent. Having being lonely is equivalent of smoking 20 pack of cigarettes a day or 20 cigarettes a day, right? We also number two, what's interesting is it doesn't just mitigate harm.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So being social and having strong relationships doesn't always make you live longer. It makes you happier while you're alive.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
The Harvard men's study found that if you make a change in your sociality in the middle of your life, so maybe you weren't a very social person when you were younger, but you make a commitment to being more strongly connected to your community, your friends, and your family at your middle age, you will be happier later. So you can change at any time. So that's the second one.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
The third is your days are better. If you look at these what's called time use studies, which basically is how do people allocate their time, where does it go, on any given day, a more social day is generally a better day. It's a day that people feel more connected to one another. They feel happier. They feel a greater sense of purpose and meaning.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Number four, meaningfulness is actually very difficult to derive from a lot of the sort of pursuits that also might make people feel satisfied in the moment but not happy in the long term. Media is a great example of that. Lots of media is very pleasing in the short term, but not very satisfying in the long term.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Relationships, on the other hand, are fundamentally built in a way where the constant sort of work that we have to put into maintaining our friendships and being close to other people are rewarding every time we do it. That it's not something that has diminishing rewards the more that we have a strong friendship that lasts for years, but we gain in value because we keep working at it.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
And the last thing I would just say is that it's not as hard as I think that a lot of people might fear. Not trying to be perfect in our communication. There is no perfect way to communicate. That a lot of the ways to actually be better at communication is to merely be a responsive partner to the person right next to you.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Yeah, that's a great question. One of the ways that we really want to approach this is that those who are probably are the most socially adept and comfortable being social also are the ones that have the most to offer. So that the people who are probably the most able to hear this message enacted in their daily lives.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
But I would really sort of point out here is that it's very, very difficult for people who are very lonely, partly because loneliness co-occurs with depression. to easily take action to improve their circumstances. And you're not wrong. The difficulty of actually reaching out to the folks who are feeling disconnected in their lives in a chronic sense is very challenging.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
But I think that one of the messages is that not only can you do certain things, take small steps that we offer very clearly that you can take in order to improve your days, But the second thing I think is really critical is doing so for other people is an important act for the people that you care for.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So when I spend time, let's say, you know, planning to spend time with my friends, when I make a plan, I'm in fact going out with my high school friends tonight to hang out. And we do so every other month or every third month.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
know it took arrangement people didn't have times that line on we have a text thread we're always like well who's in town and what can we do but the fact that we work at that means that i get a benefit from it but if i don't put the work into sort of developing those friendships i can't have those friends i can't enjoy those friendships and in return all of my friends also benefit by being responsive to that text thread to taking the small making the small sacrifices to show up or to put apart other you know put aside other plans to be there
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
So the idea is that we give to other people by being social and prioritizing being social in our lives.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Yeah. Well, I think we collectively as a society certainly need to be continually reminded about the importance of this. I think that there have been other kind of harbingers of this when Robert Putnam wrote his outstanding book, Bowling Alone. He's been warning us about this for years. People are aware that these problems are happening.
Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
But at this particular day and age, the trends that were put in place in the 90s have all gotten generally worse. So this is a time that I feel like there's a certain amount of energy and excitement around this. I think the Surgeon General of the United States played a role in that.