> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.
If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse.
Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?
The DOI links aren't working so I can't read the study but I think there's a simple explanation, that also belies the headline. It may be that the typical number of close friends is now 0. But as people no longer even have any concept of close friendships, they're considering 'lesser' relationships as close friendships, because it's all they know.
This is made even more likely if they didn't define the term and allowed 'online friends' to be counted as 'close friends.' And I strongly suspect this may be the case since the graph shows a major inflection point in the increase of friends being 2007, the exact year when Facebook started becoming massive.
Feels true. People have a larger number of less-close friends.
Social media has taken over a lot more of young people's social life than it used to. Parents don't want young people to leave the house and play outside, so kids spend the time online. These patterns may persist into adulthood - hard to say.
How could one compare depth of friendship of even two current friendships, let alone of current friendships with historical ones that are only accessible through people's mutable memories?
But how can you measure except subjectively, and how can you compare subjective measurements when the whole point is that people's very idea of the meaning of phrases like "close friendship" have changed?
Its not my area, but apart from the the person subjective opinion there would be indirect ways to measure it. again I'm just guessing without looking around.
I can't find this study even searching for the author's name and the title. FYI, the cited author Stefan Thurner has published 73 articles in peer reviewed journals in the past 3 years (all of the ones I glanced at appeared to involve statistical correlations), so they are very prolific.
> Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"?
I suspect that you've hit the nail on the head. It would also be interesting to see numbers on churn. How long do these many close friendships last? Do they last longer than before? Or, more likely, less long?
I think longer is… possible, at least? The internet has allowed me to keep in touch with friends from elementary school. I’m, unfortunately, approaching 40 more quickly than I’d like, so these are around 30 year friendships.
Although, I’ve also got some college friends that I’d consider close. So that’s more like 15 years. Also online mostly at this point.
This is an excellent point. I have 10 friends that I went through 15 years of school + University with. So obviously very close friends. We remain in touch via group chat a decade on but only actually see each other once or twice a year. I would still consider them among my closest friends - but the convenience of modern technology has definitely preserved those friendships to a large extent. I imagine if we had to actually phone each other we would feel much less close.
We move a lot more than we used to. Not so long ago you generally didn't need internet to keep in touch because 50 years later your childhood friend would still live 10km away
The main things that help me know a friendship is close are: I’m sad when I don’t see them, but not worried that we’re drifting apart.
I dunno. It isn’t well defined I think. We come with built-in accelerators for social interactions, right? It runs some weird proprietary language I guess, the rest of my brain can’t make heads or tails of it.
Reflecting on my own experience - frequency of contact (if I see them once a year, can't really count them as close friends) How involved they are in my life - are they people I turn to when I'm facing a problem, do they turn to me when facing their own problems? Do we have frequent deep conversations - not just surface level discuss the weather, sports etc. but stuff that matter. Quantifying this - length of friendship (# of years), frequency of contact (annually, monthly, weekly etc.), level of trust (low, medium, high - can I trust my kids with them kind of trust), level of involvement (low, medium, high - what things do I feel comfortable sharing with them - suppose this is also level of trust?)
>> Reflecting on my own experience - frequency of contact (if I see them once a year, can't really count them as close friends)
I think this one is interesting. If you saw them daily for 20 years and then transitioned to once a year are they automatically not close friends? Even if they satisfied the other criteria (like you could turn to them when you are facing a serious problem, you have deep conversations on that annual meeting because you are comfortable with them, etc)?
I'd say we need a more analog definition than a binary one.
The term 'close' friend at least to me means close. Either in physicality or depth and regularity of contact.
Only talking to them once a year, even in depth is more like a semi-close friend. They are not there to help you with the day to day issues that you may not even realize you're having.
Personally, I find modern technology makes it easier to maintain them. 25 years ago my friendships around the world would have been relegated to 'penpalships' because of the cost of long distance calls and the lack of face time.
Loneliness is a big topic now due to the pandemic, and the lingering trends from stay/work-at-home mandates.
They probably aren't the friends people are thinking of when referring to things like this. The benefit of friends isn't just that you have someone fun to talk to, it's that you're building out a social support circle. Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss, or help you get an interview at a job shortly after you're fired (or at least, not one local to you).
Loneliness is a big topic now, imo, because people are losing helpful human friends and relying on middling digital friends. Just like how looking at pictures of a forest is nowhere near as healthy as actually going to a forest.
Most of those things seem like services rather than friends. I want a friend to talk to, not to cook me food or watch my dog, anyone can do those other things. And talking to a friend many times is as good as a video call. In fact because of the internet I can get conversations and opinions from friends all over the world quite quickly.
This is an interesting argument, as by the first definition, I have more close friends than ever. If I need someone to make me food, I don't have a friend who is either nearby or has time for that.
On the other hand, I can buy all those services on an app for the most part. People I enjoy talking to for hours on end aren't available for $20 anywhere.
Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss
I'll make the counter argument that -- although I value those things and try to provide them to friends in need -- all of those can be addressed by hiring someone.
On the other hand, I've recently received fantastic emotional support from a friend who moved away a few years ago. We've seen each other in person only a handful of times since then, but of all my friends, she happened to be the one with the experience and attitude to help me.
Incidentally, I'll add that I'm the type of person to provide those types of support to others, but the vast majority of my friends are not. That doesn't make them bad friends, it just means that I have a service disposition while they don't. I think there's a vast range of qualities that people seek and experience from friends and you're going to have a hard time objectively rating them on any sort of scale.
Yeah and you can rent a truck every time you need to haul something, but it's nice when your friend lets you borrow his - and his manpower/time. And yeah, you can hire an emergency remediation company, or chef, or psychologist for your friends, but that seems... impersonal to me?
I'm not trying to say there's no value to Discord friends, but I do think it's substantially less valuable to the human condition than real, in-person friends.
I mean, to be blunt, it sounds to me like you value people for what services they can provide to you rather than what friendship they provide.
Again, friendship takes many forms and there are countless ways to express it. You're judging others for valuing these expressions differently than you do.
This is how I can tell you don’t get it. It’s not about the value of your friends doing those things for you which you can hire someone for, it’s the value YOU get out of doing those things for your friends.
You’re right that the net can be used that way but I’m not sure everyone does.
Also the loneliness epidemic has been growing worse since the 1990s. There’s a well known book about it called Bowling Alone. COVID made it worse of course but it didn’t start the trend.
Loneliness pandemic is a topic because one author wrote a book on it and is pushing and agenda to generate sales for his book.
The biggest article about the loneliness pandemic was one in the New York times and oh just to happened to mention said book. Countless articles followed on from there. If the book were sound, it would be less sad, but the studies it cites have problems so this is all built on a huge heaping of confirmation bias.
Keep in mind that it is "average" and it is about close friends.
Anecdotally, the pandemic was the great cutting of weaker ties. I talk to far fewer people than I did pre-pandemic (and most friends report the same), but I speak to those people more often. I can easily see that ending in a way where some 20% find themselves with nobody.
I would say I have 4 close friends. But some 10 weaker ties disappeared from my life. Did those 10 also double down on close friends? Or did perhaps some of them not have enough close friends to do that?
Many of my friends live abroad. We started a weekly Zoom meeting during Covid-19 lockdown. Now we have a WhatsApp group too. Does that change the classification from plain friends to close friends?
Oh god flashback, I remember the zoom calls, and people acting like they didn’t know how zoom worked 10 months into it or that the host can mute anyone that doesn’t know how to mute themselves
I opted out of the extended family ones and the social ones
I wonder if they’re still doing that, I’d rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
I would agree - usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you. Having more close friends that all think alike would increase rejection of ideas not shared by other close friends. It is harder (but not impossible) to have close friends that have dramatically different lifestyles, ideals, or socioeconomic class.
Weaker ties would include friends that have less in common, and have different ideas. But that fact that they are a friend means that you are aware of their existence and different ideas. In that way, having a broad range of weak friends suggests that you can see things from different perspectives instead of in your own (close) friend bubble.
It's like how people are less likely to know their neighbors now, who can hold different ideas. But you don't have to be close friends with them to have some empathy.
> usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you
That stirkes me as myopic. My closest friends--the ones I trust with all my secrets, with whom have have practically no secrets, the ones I'd hide if it came to that or risk my life to save--are all over the place values and ideas-wise. It's what makes their company fun. It's also what makes their advice useful, because they'll call me out on my bullshit in a way a mirror image of me could not.
If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety.
And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.
Same for "far left", those can't be trusted either.
However, what strikes me as interesting: Do you actually destinguish between right and far right? Because I have a feeling, many people don't. Why do I think that? I recently read on Planet Debian: "Conservatives tend to be criminals". That sentences struck me as the core of the problem. People seem to fail to see the difference between a person with conservative values, and outright "Nazis". There is a clear difference, but some politically active people seem to fail to see that.
> Do you actually destinguish between right and far right?
Some on the right are far right, some are not. Many people on the right will prefer far right over center and vote accordingly. They just do not like the aesthetic and historical associations.
> Because I have a feeling, many people don't.
That is because right radicalized itself much more then left. And moderate right spend too much time excusing, enabling to and defending far right then by anything else. They loved to pretend far right does not exist, actually, until it turned out they ended up undistinguishable.
> People seem to fail to see the difference between a person with conservative values, and outright "Nazis"
Problem is that "conservative values" is more of an euphemism that sounds good when you want to pretend a group of people have much better motivations then they actually have. That is how it was used for over a decade now. People with conservative values rarely object to far right values, but they straight up hate the center (which they claim to be practically communists).
That is probably a US specific phenomenon, as we in Europe don't have so much dislike towards communism as you guys over there seem to have. However, I could draw the same conclusion as you did regarding left leaning people. People with progressive "values" rarely object to far left values, although they are incapable of having a useful conversation with center people. So.
Just at the moment: a lot of people who consider themselves merely "right" voted for a candidate who is undeniably "far right". So for the moment I'm not drawing much distinction between "conservative values" and "outright Nazis".
That was not always true and I hope it will not remain true. But speaking at this specific time in history, this fact represents a genuine threat to life and liberty.
From my POV, you are pissed that your people lost, and can't get over it. Remember that democracy is a pendulum. Swinging from side to side is a necessary ingredient of democracy. You can't always win, and, you shouldn't. But I guess you are unable to listen to this simple principle, because you and your people railed yourself up so much that you are unable to calm down. That is weird to me, as I believe that is a skill we all learn when moving from childhood to adulthood. Throwing tantrums isn't very useful.
The difference between right and far right is, in a nutshell, endorsement of insurrection and militarism.
The GOP was a right-wing party. MAGA is bona fide far right. There are plenty of conservatives (or pissed-off idiots) who voted for Trump but aren’t MAGA. There are also lots of folks who believe in MAGA to the core. The latter are far right, probably fascists.
> democracy is a pendulum. Swinging from side to side is a necessary ingredient of democracy
It’s a multidimensional pendulum. There is no natural partisan swing to group dynamics; it’s why parties fail and are remade or replaced, even in two-party systems.
Also, Democrats should embrace Trump’s precedents next cycle. But the results will uglier than before for those on the other side. (To port prior policy goals, you’d cancel student debts by literally shredding the documents, thereby undermining the government’s ability to collect even if it wants to. And you’d pursue environmental policy by dismantling coal power plants and mines. The courts may get mad later. But it wouldn’t be rebuilt.)
Do the multiple elections contested not count any more? MAGA clearly don't endorse insurrection, their basic strategy to control the government is to win lots of votes and come back to try again a few years later if it doesn't work (they're impressively persistent). Which has involved broadening their support base into low-wage minorities in US society and trying to prise the Black and Hispanic votes away from the Democrats, I note. Might be seeing the fruits of that starting to turn up in the 2024 presidential elections. Or might be a fluke and just Trump's charisma, the Republicans are hard to support.
Yeah but not the riots, the standards in US politics generally demand that people separate mostly peaceful political protesters from smaller numbers of rioters who happen to be involved. The Democrats identified the riots as a major tactical blunder (although realistically I think they badly overplayed their hand, they seemed to spend a lot more time talking about J6 than developing compelling policy positions, and managed to get democracy voted out which is quite impressive - I'm hoping they disband and let someone else contest the next election) and MAGA as a whole seems to agree with them given the lack of any reoccurrences.
If you want to put that the dividing line between right and far-right as militantism for today then that makes sense. But the MAGA movement hasn't been using militant tactics, and they'd be more alt-right than far-right under that standard. They've been pretty consistent at working to win power through increasing their vote share and base of popular support. They've been dumping vast amounts of time, money and effort into it.
For the sake of argument, say that J6 riot was a planned thing. Compare the logistic efforts to get a crowd settled at a major Trump rally to the organisational support that resulted in an insurrection with less than 100 armed people. The oomph just isn't there.
Nazi share values with quite a lot of people. Nazi adjacent worldview is not as rare as we like to pretend it to be.
But I intentionally picked example that makes it clear that shared values are necessary for that trust. You may have differences on the edges, but it wont work without them.
The folks who support January 6th are also incredibly quick to support ignoring courts, suspending habeus, concentration camps (sorry, extrajudicial domestic detention explicitly based on probable cause that begins and ends with race, followed by attempted exfiltration from protection from the law), and, like, straight up admitting to revering Nazis [1][2].
Democracy works with left- and right-wing elements because there is a lot of heterogeneity in those sets. That makes compromise possible. Far left and far right groups across history are remarkably similar in their policies, messaging and even colour schemes for reasons I don’t get. (There is autocorrelation due to the heavy lifting homage does in their branding, of course, but why do the far right and left always embrace tariffs and trade wars? Like, going back to the Roman Republic.) This uniformity and quasi-religious zeal basically makes them poisons to democracy.
The moment someone is arguing why their far right position is actually quite different from being Nazi (or far left from its worst elements), you’ve already lost.
Based on your wording, everything that's right to your position, that you label as "balanced and center" of course, is "far right". I'm probably far right to you, because I have some right-wing views.
It had some meaning maybe 10 years ago but now it's washed out terminology. Keep thinking that you're surrounded by nazis, if it keeps you warm though.
> everything that's right to your position, that you label as "balanced and center" of course, is "far right"
Nope. I have plenty of conservative and right-wing friends. We disagree on a number of social issues, and occasionally, economic ones too.
They don’t support violently overthrowing the U.S. government, or using the military to secure what they can’t at the ballot box, however, and so aren’t far right.
> Keep thinking that you're surrounded by nazis, if it keeps you warm though
Straw man. I don’t personally know anyone who is far right. Out of the folks in the administration, I can only really finger Miller and the DOGE bros as bona fide racists and far right agitators.
It could also be something structural about how the "friendship graph" looks. The mean number of friendships isn't the median or typically experienced number of friendships, and if friendship relationship distributions follow some kind of power law, a change in the power-law exponent could make those diverge.
I am wondering the same thing. It's interesting that they didn't report at all on the median and only the average. Also find the timing interesting, as I can't help but suspect that both the justification and incentive for self-reporting a higher number of friends materially changed for some people in the early days of social media. They didn't seem to acknowledge this at all.
The model they built that draws a causal relationship between graph density and polarization is interesting, but these gaps leave me skeptical.
There are just so many other reasons I can see for polarization.
1. Late-stage of civilizational monetary cycle (bretton woods - petrodollar) -> historically leads to polarization
2. Dramatic increase in access to information / wide range of things to know and care about
3. Attention economy (novel upsetting news is best at getting attention, not nuance, not truth)
4. Habits of instant gratification diminishes patience for nuance
5. Maybe foreign state interference/bias towards polarization to destabilize rivals?
6. Several more maybe??
So I buy the graph density correlation, and I'm curious about contributing to causation, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's the primary or sole cause.
I think you left out the biggest one (though I suppose #3 indirectly hits on this). Social media, and increasingly even online media in general, tends to heavily misrepresent 'the other side.' In the past relationships were formed primarily in person so you actually got see what 'the other side' was like. Now a days people instead depend on completely inaccurate stereotypes that are far more like cartoon caricatures than real people. See: the perception gap. [1]
So people simply don't understand 'the other side', but ironically think they do - which is a rather toxic combination. For instance the more news somebody follows, the less accurate their assessments of 'the other side.'
I agree completely, though I continually wonder why. Is it by specific design? By economic incentive? Is it because novel threats attract attention, and having a need to be validated continually satisfied maintains attention?
I can't help but wonder if the polarization in the media is deliberate (e.g. foreign state sewing division) or accidental (second order consequence of attention economy) or organic (the claims of the paper, and/or other psychological effects of anonymity, etc.) or maybe all of the above?
It's a natural consequence of a highly-connected communication graph. People with extreme political views talk about politics a lot, so casual political conversations are naturally going to disproportionately represent the extremes. Similarly, when people more-or-less agree, they tend to discuss politics less (because there's only so much preaching the choir that people can stand). Most meatspace communication graphs happen between people who tend to have similar world views, but online, you've got neonazis and anarchists replying to the same reddit threads. The combination of the above two factors means that by far the most political views you'll end up seeing are 1) your own, followed by 2) extreme versions of your opposition's views.
Just look at any form of social media. Many, if not most, people seem to seek out and enjoy drama. A straight forward representation of some event is usually going to get orders of magnitude less "engagement" than a excessively hyperbolized and sensationalized representation of it, even if the latter may often play a bit fast and loose with the facts to further magnify the dramatic effect of it all.
And then with every sort of algorithm and feedback mechanism (e.g. upvotes, likes, etc) based on maximizing "engagement" you then get this stuff spreading everywhere and even further drowning out any sort of rational discussion. So people who regularly follow it are going to be living in some sort of alt-reality all the while convinced that they are the most informed about the latest happenings in the world.
When was that past? People used to hate you for being from a different village.
Polarization could instead be because there are fundamental differences in how people see the world and what is right. And now that we've tangled ourselves through all the wars imaginable to dispel the old division lines, this is what we're left with. This is what we have, now that information has become available for the masses; the real differences which split people. Not based on phony dividers of the past.
Polarization also means that if you disagree with the ideology of your family or of your village, you have millions of friends on a national or international level who think like you, instead of being ostracized for life.
It seems insane to try to connect a twenty year shift in one global variable to one causal factor. This approach is why the social sciences continue to struggle to create understanding. It is all they can afford to do, though.
That said, 3) I think possibly best explains both: the increase in average number of friends due to influencer dynamics skewing the distribution, and the increase in polarization due to the tactics in social media.
However there seems to be no chance it is a durable or reproducible link, as it depends on the novelty of polarization techniques which wear over time and become known and integrated in education, reducing their effectiveness
And the various articles found seem to agree. The GP claims to have combined 30 surveys. I wonder if they wound-up with one of those statistical paradoxes where a combining of data sets points to something different from each individual data set. But something probably isn't true 'cause the individuals sets are well curated and the combination isn't.
Without knowing the distribution it is unwise to place too much trust in a numerical average. There is always a tendency to assume a normal distribution, but even a small population of hypersocial individuals can drag the mean higher.
And reported loneliness does not always imply an absence of close friends, although I'd agree that that is a major factor.
I don't really see the causal link here between "more close friends" and "growing polarization", and I'm having trouble finding the actual study - the link in the article seems broken.
I can't find more information on the actual distribution, but I think looking at the _average_ number of close friendships is a red flag. It's perfectly possible for some social groups to be growing, while others are shrinking.
It likely doesn't account for the evolving definition of what a "close" friend actually is.
Just because Jack and Jill know a bunch of details about each others' lives owing to facebook updates or group chats, that doesn't necessarily mean they share a strong connection, at least not in the traditional sense. But I suspect they might still feel a certain connection and belonging to each other.
It used to require frequent, active, quality communication to know someone well. Now it just requires a few clicks.
I have a sinking feeling it's a situation where people who are adept at creating and maintaining relationships are getting more of them, whilst people who struggle socially are being excluded more than ever as a result. The overall count grows, but a substantial slice of the population still has barely any.
I have no data for this, just a gut feeling. I still see so many people on the day-to-day who are completely socially inept. I don't even mean just like, rude or abrasive, I mean people who don't have the emotional intelligence to like, navigate basic conflicts.
It may be a combination of both: the fact it is easier to stay in touch makes it more difficult to let go of friendships. But this may make those friendships feel less meaningful and therefore increase loneliness.
It seems salient to ask the follow up question of "Why aren't men getting laid and/or married?" Actually finding the root cause may be much less simple. Your response seems as hand wavy to me as saying "Most of the loneliness epidemic is really an epidemic of people feeling lonely"
Because if the problem was "everyone is feeling a bit lonely", then that's something that points at actual problems, that aren't self-inflicted, and need fixing. If the problem is "The absolute worst men you know no longer can get laid by being the only available option", then whatever, who cares, it's self-inflicted.
Completely agree. Fully online friendships are hollow simulacrums of the real thing, like most fully online things compared to their offline counterparts. That's not to say there isn't real connection or real value there, just that they are a supplement to - and not a replacement for - the 'real thing'.
Example: long-distance relationships vs. in-person. My wife and I started off as long distance before moving to the same city together. Obviously we established a very real relationship digitally, but it was a means to an end, and not an end in itself, and the real-world date nights and so on are so much deeper and richer than Facetime calls.
What most people describe as Loneliness is a specific form of loneliness that represents the degree of disconnection they feel from others. When you don't feel seen and heard in a friendship, you are more likely to feel alone. More people "proving" they don't want to know you or see you, reinforces the idea.
When you look at studies, women and men are lonely at about the same rate. There are differences at the margins - period right after divorce, being stay at home and such. But overall rates are the same.
You mean "feel lonely at the same rate" or that they are actually alone at the same rate? Men do have fewer friends and its much more common for men to have no close friends at all.
The free market rate of a young/fit woman's sexual services are several hundred or even thousand+ $/hr. I suspect any man who is seen as potentially offering 100s of $/hr in services if you pretend to be a friend long enough, would see similar interest of fake friends.
I could see it making you even more lonely, to have to filter through that though, as a man is probably less likely to reject someone as a 'false positive' who might be a true friend through such filtering process. If you are down and out man and someone is being nice to you and not trying to sell you something, I've found it pretty rare that the person isn't being genuinely friendly. I've heard the exact opposite from females.
If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend.
We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?
If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse.
Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?