Another Symptom of Growing Isolation - The Atlantic

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This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.<br>In Europe in the 1700s, coffeehouses were sources of coffee, but also conversation. As the MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle points out in her 2016 book, Reclaiming Conversation, many people went to coffeehouses specifically to have rich, deep, sometimes even confrontational discussions: She quotes the British essayist and politician Joseph Addison, who wrote in 1714, “I have taken a particular Care never to be of the same Opinion with the Man I conversed with.”<br>Contrast this with how, some 300 years later, I engage with my local coffeehouse, Starbucks. I open the app at home and order a latte, then whirl my Honda through the drive-through and collect my drink from an employee, who says, “Have a nice day.” No conversation—just caffeine.<br>This new way of obtaining java is part of why, according to a recent study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, people now are talking less and less. For the study, the psychologists Valeria Pfeifer, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Matthias Mehl, of the University of Arizona, analyzed data from thousands of participants in the United States, Mexico, Australia, and Europe. The subjects carried around a device that randomly recorded sound bites of their speech throughout the day. In 2005, when the studies began, the average number of words that each participant spoke in a day was 16,632; in 2019, when the research concluded, the average was 11,900. Each year, the participants spoke about 338 fewer words a day than they did in the previous year, amounting to a decline of about 28 percent over the entire time period.<br>Read: How to cheat at conversation<br>From what I can tell, two main reasons seem to be driving this gradual silencing. The first is that conversation requires, at the very least, the presence of another person. But during the study period, people almost everywhere spent more and more time alone—a trend that only accelerated after the study ended, as the pandemic drove millions of people into further isolation. One major paper found that from 2003 to 2019, the portion of free time that Americans spent alone grew from about 44 to about 49 percent—which may sound like a small increase until you consider that the study excludes time spent working, sleeping, and grooming. In 2006, 21 percent of respondents to a survey in 21 European countries said they got together daily with friends; by 2022, the number was just 12 percent.<br>The other big factor is the rise of digital communication, such as texting and social media, as well as online shopping, ordering, and many, many other -ings. A generation ago, many of the tasks of daily life required conversations: with the grocery-store cashier, the receptionist at the doctor’s office, the host at the neighborhood restaurant. But today, Pfeifer told me, “you can reserve a table using an app as opposed to calling the restaurant.” She added, “The conversations you have with strangers or maybe people that you don’t know as well—the opportunities for those just seem to have declined a lot in recent years.” Opportunities for speaking with people one does know have also declined, as people tend to send a text or DM instead of calling a friend on the phone. (Indeed, when Pfeifer and Mehl analyzed their data by age group, they found that people under the age of 25, who presumably text more because of their well-known aversion to phone calls, had lost even more words a year than those over 25.)<br>Whatever the reasons for the decline of talking, it could have negative consequences for mental health. Turkle said that, unlike texting or emailing, face-to-face conversation builds empathy: “We experience the emotion of conversation from within our bodies.” In her book, she points to a study in which researchers compared college friends who communicated face-to-face, and by videochat, audio chat, and online instant messaging. “In-person conversation led to the most emotional connection,” she writes, “and online messaging led to the least.”<br>Even the loss of relatively shallow conversations can be harmful. Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex and the author of Once Upon a Stranger, studies “weak ties,” or the people we talk with casually throughout the day. She has found that although these interactions might seem meaningless, they boost our sense of well-being, making us feel part of something bigger, even if we’re just buying milk or chatting with a colleague at the office coffee maker. And when we have fewer of these exchanges, we miss them: A recent study published in the journal Science, for example, found that remote workers spent more time alone each workday and also experienced more mental distress than in-person workers. The effects were especially pronounced if the remote worker also lived solo. Talking less can...