Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

258 Pages·2009·1.71 MB·English

by  John T. Cacioppo

loneliness
SELECTED WORKS COAUTHORED BY JOHN CACIOPPO
Handbook of Neuroscience for the Behavioral Sciences (with Gary G. Bernston)
Social Neuroscience: People Thinking about Thinking People (with Penny S.
Visser and Cynthia L. Pickett) Essays in Social Neuroscience (with Gary G.
Bernston) Emotional Contagion (with Richard L. Rapson) Attitudes and
Persuasion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches (with Richard E. Petty)
loneliness
HUMAN NATURE AND THE NEED FOR SOCIAL CONNECTION
John T. Cacioppo
AND
William Patrick
W. W. Norton & Company
New York London
Copyright © 2008 by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick
Drawings copyright © 2008 by Alan Witschonke Illustration
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10110
Production manager: Julia Druskin
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Cacioppo, John T.
Loneliness: human nature and the need for social connection / John T. Cacioppo
and William Patrick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-39307031-6
1. Loneliness. 2. Loneliness—Physiological aspects. 3. Neuropsychology. I.
Patrick, William, date. II. Title.
BF575.L7C23 2008
155.9'2—dc22 2008015099
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London
WIT 3QT
For Wendi and Carolyn
contents
Acknowledgments
PART ONE: The Lonely Heart
The Lonely Heart
CHAPTER ONE
Lonely in a Social World
CHAPTER TWO
Variation, Regulation, and an Elastic Leash
CHAPTER THREE
Losing Control
CHAPTER FOUR
Selfish Genes, Social Animals
CHAPTER FIVE
The Universal and the Particular
CHAPTER SIX
The Wear and Tear of Loneliness
PART TWO: From Selfish Genes to Social Beings
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sympathetic Threads
CHAPTER EIGHT
An Indissociable Organism
CHAPTER NINE
Knowing Thyself, among Others
CHAPTER TEN
Conflicted by Nature
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Conflicts in Nature
PART THREE: Finding Meaning in Connection
CHAPTER TWELVE
Three Adaptations
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Getting It Right
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Power of Social Connection
Notes
acknowledgments
The writing of this book was a collaboration involving two authors—an
invaluable form of social connection—yet only one was a participant in the more
than twenty years of scientific research that is the foundation of the story. Thus,
for the sake of convenience and clarity, we chose to write in the first-person
singular with John Cacioppo as the narrative voice. We employ that convention
in these acknowledgments as well.
But even the research that “I,” John Cacioppo, conducted was never a solo
effort. That research on social connection began in the early 1990s at Ohio State
University, where I taught. We (my scientific colleagues and I) began with the
simple question of what are the effects of human association. To address this
question, we first conducted experiments in which individuals were randomly
assigned to be alone or with others of various kinds (e.g., friends, strangers)
while performing a task. We quickly surmised that it was an individual’s
perceptions of the social situation that mattered most. We moved from an
interest in social support to an interest in perceived social isolation—loneliness
—as a model system for studying the role of the social world in human biology
and behavior. Doing so changed how we conceived the human mind as well.
The dominant metaphor for the scientific study of the human mind during
the latter half of the twentieth century has been the computer—a solitary device
with massive information processing capacities. Our studies of loneliness left us
unsatisfied with this metaphor. Computers today are massively interconnected
devices with capacities that extend far beyond the resident hardware and
software of a solitary computer. It became apparent to us that the telereceptors
(e.g., eyes, ears) of the human brain have provided wireless broadband
interconnectivity to humans for millennia. Just as computers have capacities and
processes that are transduced through but extend far beyond the hardware of a
single computer, the human brain has evolved to promote social and cultural
capacities and processes that are transduced through but extend far beyond a