What Research on Isolated Groups Tells Us about Dealing with Social Isolation in the Face of COVID-19

People spend most of their lives living and working with other people in groups.  Each of us is a member of many groups, including primary groups (such as families and close friends), secondary groups (work teams, neighborhood associations, service groups), and even larger, multi-member collectives.

So what happens when we find ourselves confined—in the current circumstances by the threat of contagion—to only one small group? How will we cope in these groups, as our social network shrinks from many to very few? Will we seize this time of enforced togetherness to strengthen our attachments to one another—to share, support, and appreciate each other? Or will boredom, tension, and conflict grow with each passing day. Will we, as Henry David Thoreau explained, grow tired of the sameness of our associates, for we have not had “time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at three meals a day and give each other a taste of that old musty cheese that we are.”

Studies of groups that have spent long periods of time in isolation, such as teams stationed in Antarctica and explorers living for months on end in a confined space, suggest that some groups will prosper, but others will falter under the strain. During the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), for example, several countries sent small groups of military and civilian personnel to outposts in Antarctica. These groups were responsible for collecting data about that largely unknown continent, but the violent weather forced the staff to remain indoors most of the time. As months went by with little change in their situation, morale declined and group members’ initial friendliness, good humor, and sensitivity were replaced with lethargy, low morale, grouchiness, and boredom.

Other groups, however, manage to prosper when cut off from the outside world. Some of the isolated groups studied by researchers at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, for example, responded quite positively when sequestered. These researchers confined pairs of volunteers to a 12-by-12-foot room with no means of interacting with anyone outside of that space—no computer, no Internet, no media. Some of these groups imploded—they insisted they be released from the study after only a few days.

Others, however, thrived. Over the course of the isolation, their reliance on one another strengthened, as did their satisfaction with their circumstances. They shared concerns and worries about how they were dealing with the isolation and made adjustments whenever conflicts and tensions arose. They set up schedules of activities, even agreeing on a plan of action for meals, exercise, and recreation. Cooperation, then, was critical. As one person who spent considerable time in an isolated group in an underwater habitat, SEALAB, explained: “If we hadn’t had a real compatible group there might have been a lot of hard feelings.  Everybody was cooperative.  They all worked and helped each other as much as possible.  I think it was a real good group.”

The successful groups also avoided one of the symptoms of maladaptive responding displayed by the less successful groups: withdrawal. The members of groups that did not cope well with isolation, over time, tended to stop interacting with each other—they cocooned instead of communicating, collaborating, cooperating, and caring for one another.

These findings offer hope to those of us hunkering down in small groups to ride out the pandemic.  Isolation need not lead inevitably to conflict, stress, and gloom; people can do things that will transform their stressed-out group into a thriving, enjoyable one.

Perhaps most importantly, successful isolated groups sustain high levels of communication within the group. Members do not keep their concerns, grievances, and worries to themselves: they share them with others, who then (ideally) provide support and reassurance. Communication, however, is no sure-fire remedy for avoiding conflict; angry, embattled groups talk just as much as cohesive, harmonious ones, but the messages are very different in emotional tenor, sensitivity, and intent. As confinement continues, each member must take on the role of a  socioemotional expert who seeks to keep the peace and maintain the group’s morale.

But quarantined individuals face another challenge: enduring confinement in the same physical space. A space that, under normal circumstances, is comfortable and relaxing can become boring and unpleasant over time, so members must act to maintain the space, to ensure that it is restorative rather than draining and depressing. Time spent in spaces that are interesting, aesthetically pleasing, and compatible with our needs leave us feeling more energized and optimistic. Outdoor spaces, if accessible and safe, should also be visited because natural spaces are generally more restorative than constructed ones.

Moreover, like Sheldon and his preferred chair in Big Bang Theory’s living room, group members will feel more comfortable if they have their spaces that they can territorialize—when they can make the space their own. Privacy needs should also be respected, so long as members of the group do not become reclusive—hiding in their private spaces and no longer socializing with others.

Isolated groups will also do better if members shift from an individualistic orientation to a more collectivistic one. When their individual needs do not mesh with the needs of the group, people  often follow their own path, acting as they personally prefer. But when they are members of an isolated group, the group’s needs must come first.  In communal groups, people help fellow members more, think of their work as a joint effort, and are more likely to consider the consequences of their actions for others. So, rather than hoarding the Pop Tarts and toilet paper, repeatedly expressing political beliefs that others find offensive, or taking personally any complaint or criticism, people should  be diligent in making sure that others’ needs are met.  What matters most is the “greater good” rather than “me, myself, and I.”

Individuals who are quarantined in their homes will likely be able to communicate with other family members safely, but interactions with loved ones will not necessarily stave off social loneliness. Unlike emotional loneliness, social loneliness occurs when people feel cut off from their network of friends, acquaintances, and associates. If social loneliness mounts, people may look to their closest intimates for solace, but this burden may put too much pressure on these alliances—a single enduring and intimate relationship can rarely satisfy all one’s need for social contact.

But social loneliness can be countered by reaching out to other people through any (safe) means possible, including technology. Individuals confined to the underwater habitat SEALAB for prolonged periods, for example, responded well once they were able to establish communication with others outside the group. Even those of us who normally rely only grudgingly on our phones and computers to connect with other people can now use these technologies to maintain our social relationships. In darker periods in history when plagues and contagions threatened, quarantine meant total isolation from others. Today, in contrast, few of us are ever really alone, for technology keeps us constantly connected.

Living in a small isolated group will be challenging. This experience, however, offers opportunity in addition to threat. When asked “What is it that makes your life meaningful?” most people answer: their intimate relationships, including their friends and loved ones. And while everyday concerns may cause us to forget this essential fact, spending days (or weeks, or months) with only our partners, our parents, our children, or our best friends may remind us of this truth.


For Further Reading

Altman, I., & Haythorn, W. W. (1967). The ecology of isolated groups. Behavioral Science, 12, 169-182.

Collado, S., Staats, H., Corraliza, J. A., & Hartig, T. (2017). Restorative environments and health. In G. Fleury-Bahi, E. Pol, & O. Navarro (Eds.), Handbook of environmental psychology and quality of life research (pp. 127-148). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.

Radloff, R., & Helmreich, R. (1968). Groups under stress: Psychological research in SEALAB II. New York: Irvington.

Thoreau, H. D. (1962). Walden and other writings. New York: Bantam.

 

Don Forsyth is the Colonel Leo K. & Gaylee Thorsness Endowed Chair in Ethical Leadership at the University of Richmond.  In addition to his general interest in group processes and psychological aspects of moral judgments, he explores the psychological and interpersonal consequences of success and failure at the group and individual level, individual differences in ethical ideology, and perceptions of leaders.

A previous version of this article was posted on Don Forsyth’s web site, Group Dynamics Resource Page:  https://donforsythgroups.wordpress.com

Experience with Cultural Diversity

Moving to a new country, or even a new city, can be a lonely experience. Somehow you begin to form social ties. Maybe you ask a new coworker to join you for coffee, or you go to a wine-tasting event, or you find locals with shared interests on social media.

However you do it, making friends and becoming integrated into the community are essential for your well-being and success in this new place. Social connectedness is one of the strongest predictors of long-term physical and mental health, and without social interaction, it will be difficult for you to adjust to the cultural norms of your new home.

So What Will It Take to Make Those New Friends?

My collaborators and I asked this question. For starters, you must be willing and able to explore new places and meet new people. But those people will probably be different from you in many ways—they may not share your cultural references, your social norms, your values, or even your native language. So you will have to adapt to and tolerate those differences.

The ability to connect with strangers, tolerate their differences, and bridge divides are learned skills. Some people have had more opportunities, or more need, to build these skills than others. Think of a child growing up in a military family that moves every year or two. The child must be open to others despite differences and learn strategies to quickly make new friends in each new place, or else be perpetually lonely.

We wondered whether the place you're coming from might matter for your ability to make friends in a new place. Some cultures may prepare people better than others for the challenging task of becoming connected in a new community. Does the cultural diversity of your population of origin (where you're coming from) predict your ability to become well-connected when you move to a new place?

We reasoned that growing up and learning social norms in a population that is highly diverse teaches you to become friends with people who are different from you. Populations that are culturally diverse also tend to be high in relational mobility, meaning social ties are looser and friends come and go. Experiencing more social network "churn" throughout your life might prepare you to build a social network from scratch when you move to a new city or country.

Universities are an ideal setting to test these ideas. Students come from all over the world and quickly form new social networks. And it just so happened that we had data from eight entering classes of Master of Business Administration (MBA) students (2,257 students) at a U.S. university. We knew where the students came from and we knew who they became friends with in the MBA program, so we could calculate their social connectedness to their new community.

We described the cultural diversity of where the students came from in two ways: in terms of their location's historical cultural diversity and present-day cultural diversity. For the American students, we estimated the diversity of their home county, and for the international students, we estimated the diversity of their home nation.

For instance, to compute the historical cultural diversity of an international student from Brazil, we used estimates of how many different ethnic/national groups (and how many people from each group) immigrated to Brazil over the last 500 years. Higher scores for historical diversity mean that many people immigrated from many places to produce the country's present-day population. Brazil happens to be high on this measure, while Norway, for instance, is low. Most people living in Norway descend from people who also lived in Norway 500 years ago.

In line with our speculations, we found MBA students from more culturally diverse places became better connected to their MBA peers. This held for three of our four measures of cultural diversity: U.S. county-level historical diversity, nation-level historical diversity, and nation-level present-day diversity.

This suggests that growing up in a culturally diverse place prepares you to make friends in a new environment with new and diverse people. But this does not mean that people from places lower in cultural diversity are doomed to loneliness should they relocate—the effect of cultural background on social connectedness is small, and many other factors contribute to your ultimate social network, including your motivation to network, your personality, and random chance.

We think the social flexibility needed to make new friends is a learned skill that you can strengthen by forming meaningful bonds with people from different backgrounds or by living in different places. You might be surprised by how it changes you.


For Further Reading

Wood, A., Kleinbaum, A. M., & Wheatley, T. (2023). Cultural diversity broadens social networks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 124(1), 109–122.
 https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000395

Niedenthal, P. M., Rychlowska, M., Wood, A., & Zhao, F. (2018). Heterogeneity of long-history migration predicts smiling, laughter and positive emotion across the globe and within the United States. PLoS ONE 13(8): e0197651. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197651

Yakunina, E. S., Weigold, I. K., Weigold, A., Hercegovac, S., & Elsayed, N. (2012). The multicultural personality: Does it predict international students' openness to diversity and adjustment? International Journal of Intercultural Relations36(4), 533-540. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2011.12.008

Yuki, M., & Schug, J. (2020). Psychological consequences of relational mobility. Current Opinion in Psychology, 32, 129–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.07.029


Adrienne Wood is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. She studies how people communicate and connect.

Winter Mason

Winter Mason is a Computational Social Scientist (a.k.a. Data Scientist) at Facebook. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology and cognitive science from Indiana University in 2007, and did a post-doc in the Human and Social Dynamics lab at Yahoo. He researches social networks and social media, including crowdsourcing, group dynamics, and social influence.

What led you to choose a career in personality and social psychology?

When exploring grad programs I was almost exclusively looking at cognitive psychology or cognitive neuroscience programs.  When I interviewed at Indiana, they introduced me to Sarah Queller, who was working on mathematical models of stereotyping.  I was greatly intrigued and found Indiana to be a really great fit, so found myself in the only social psychology program I looked at.  After Sarah left the next year, I ended up splitting my PhD focus into cognitive science with Rob Goldstone and social psychology with Eliot Smith, which turned out to be a great boon to my research.

Briefly summarize your current work, and any future work you plan to pursue. 

Currently I am on the Core Data Science team at Facebook, which is a group of researchers with very diverse backgrounds (including statistical physics, computer science, sociology, psychology, communications, political science, and more) who lend their skills and expertise to different teams within the company.  For the past two years I have been working with the Civic Engagement team, whose goal is to give people a greater voice in their government.  My role has been to do foundational research that guides how new features might be designed and built, develop models and algorithms to improve the targeting and experience with different features, and impact research that assesses the real-world effects of the features that the team builds.  As one example, the team built a feature that lets political candidates or parties share their positions on different political issues, and then provided an interface so that users can compare the positions of the different candidates or parties on specific issues.  I helped design and analyze the survey that demonstrated the feature significantly increased people's knowledge of the candidates' positions.

Why did you join SPSP?

Initially I joined SPSP because I was anticipating a career in academia and felt like being a part of the society would be helpful for my career as a professor in psychology.  After I finished my PhD and found myself in an industry job, I wanted to continue being a member of SPSP because I wanted to stay connected to the community and stay on top of the latest social psychological research.

What is your most memorable SPSP Annual Convention experience?

There really are so many good ones.  Challenging my fellow graduate students to approach and talk to "big names" at the first conference I ever attended.  Giving my first panel talk on social media data, after I had finished grad school and started at Yahoo Research.  Starting up a conversation with Sam Gosling while in line for coffee at one SPSP, which eventually led to co-authoring a chapter with him in the Handbook of Psychology a few years later.  But probably the best was a couple of years ago.  For a long time I had been arguing that social psychologists should pay more attention to social media / online observational data as a means for understanding (social) psychological processes.  The year I was finally able to put together a panel on social media and psychology, I arrive to the conference and find that there are 3 or 4 other panels on roughly the same topic.  I had this simultaneous feeling of exasperation, because the panel I thought would be really ground breaking was just one of many, and triumph, because it was obvious the soap box I had been on for a while was finally being accepted as main stream.  In the end, the feeling of accomplishment won out, and my bond to the society was even stronger.

How has being a member of SPSP helped to advance your career?

This is an easy one.  It was at the SPSP conference that I met Jonah Berger, who was interested at the time in the role of networks in social influence, and I was presenting a poster on my research in that area.  We struck up a conversation as a result and started brainstorming potential collaborations.  It was because of this collaboration that he later introduced me to Duncan Watts, which led me to apply for the job at Yahoo Research, which turned me into the computational social scientist that I am today.  That definitely would not have happened if I wasn't a member of SPSP attending the annual conference.

Do you have any advice for individuals who wish to pursue a career in personality and social psychology?

I think my general advice for anyone considering graduate school applies here: consider the job opportunities before committing to the program.  In social and personality psychology, a lot of emphasis is traditionally placed on an academic career, but the number of faculty jobs is limited, so anyone considering the career should also look at non-academic jobs and decide whether that career track is also appealing.  Aside from the rare jobs like mine in the tech industry, there are many opportunities in marketing, user experience research, and consulting, and it's worthwhile to explore these career paths before starting grad school.

Outside of psychology, how do you spend your free time?

Honestly, I enjoy the work that I do so much that I end up spending my free time doing work outside my direct job responsibilities, whether it is exploring new directions for research, diving deeper in an analysis, or reading the latest literature in the field.  But outside of research, I have gotten to travel a lot for my job, and always try to add a few days of personal vacation to the trips.  When not traveling, I like to go on hikes with my dog, take care of my home, and spend time with my girlfriend.

Declining Loneliness Among American Teenagers

There has been a growing concern that modern society is increasingly lonely. In 2006, a New York Times article "The Lonely American Just Got a Bit Lonelier" highlighted research that shows a decline in social engagement--people are less likely to join clubs, have fewer close friends, and are less likely to perceive others as trustworthy. However, studies have also shown an increase in extraversion and self-esteem, which suggests loneliness is decreasing.

In an effort to study the societal trend of loneliness, researchers from the University of Queensland and Griffith University conducted an analysis of data on high school and college students. The study is published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

In the first study, the researchers examined past studies that utilized the Revised UCLA loneliness scale (R-UCLA) to analyze changes in loneliness over time, and gender differences in loneliness. The studies focused on college students through the year 1978 to 2009. Analysis of the studies showed a modest decline in loneliness over time. Female students reported lower loneliness than male college students.

Study 1 used a small sample of studies, which limits the reliability of the analysis. The literature also focused on college students, which is not necessarily a representative sample of the general population. Study 2 aimed to address these limitations.

Study 2 utilized a large representative sample of high school students from the Monitoring the Future (MTF) project. The MTF project surveyed the behaviors, attitudes and values of American high school students. Overall, high school students reported a decline in loneliness from 1991 to 2012.

The researchers examined specific items within the MTF data to determine if various aspects of loneliness demonstrated differing trends. The MTF project assessed feeling lonely, feeling left out, and desiring more close friends, which assess subjective feelings of isolation; the researchers termed this factor "subjective isolation." The second factor included items such as whether an individual has friends to talk to, turn to, and interact with, which measures a students' social environment and social support; the researchers labeled that factor "social network isolation."

Study 2 found that White high school students reported lower loneliness than Black students, Hispanic students, or other races. The study also found that subjective isolation declined, but social network isolation increased, which suggests that high school students perceive less loneliness but poorer social networks. High school students reported fewer friends with whom to interact, but less desire for more friends.

Lead researcher David Clark explains that "the trend in loneliness may be caused by modernization." Throughout history, modernization has changed the way people interact with one another. "People become less dependent on their families and need more specialized skills, which could lead to less interest in social support and more self-sufficiency," Mr. Clark says. "Over time, people are more individualistic, more extroverted, and have higher self-esteem."

More research on cultures outside of the U.S. is necessary to determine if modernization is the root cause of the observed results. "If other cultures show the same pattern of reduced loneliness in the face of poorer social networks, this would support the idea that modernization is responsible," Mr. Clark says. If other cultures do not show a similar pattern, then the cause is something more specific to American culture.

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Clark, D.M.T., Loxton, N.J., Tobin, S.J. (2014). Declining Loneliness Over Time: Evidence From American Colleges and High Schools. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(1). http://psp.sagepub.com/content/41/1/78.abstract

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), published monthly, is an official journal of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). SPSP promotes scientific research that explores how people think, behave, feel, and interact. The Society is the largest organization of social and personality psychologists in the world. Follow us on Twitter, @SPSPnews and find us at facebook.com/SPSP.org