Running Head: THE BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS OF LONELINESS

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Loneliness: A Critique of Weiss

Peter. H. Boyajian
University of Chicago

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Abstract
This paper focuses on loneliness in humans. Specifically, it addresses the
question of whether loneliness really is what Weiss (1973) and the
psychological community have historically deemed it to be: a chronic
distress without redeeming features (1973, p. 15). On one hand, a
multitude of studies have been conducted which indicate that loneliness
leads to increased rates of morbidity and mortality among the elderly and
has various significant negative health effects over all parts of the population
(Cole et al, 2015; Ong, Uchino, & Wethington, 2015; Kurina et al, 2011;
Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009; Luo et al, 2012). On the other hand, recent
studies indicating that loneliness is highly heritable have led many
psychologists to view it through an evolutionary lens, thereby revealing
many potential benefits that it may confer unto mankind (Goossens, 2015; J.
Cacioppo, S. Cacioppo, & Boomsma, 2013; Waaktaar & Torgersen, 2012). By
considering these and other studies, it will be revealed that, despite its
various downsides, loneliness is highly beneficial to our survival; it is an
imperfect evolutionary advantage.

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The Benefits and Drawbacks of Loneliness: A Critique of Weiss

Before considering the benefits and drawbacks of loneliness, one must
first define what exactly it is that one means by loneliness. While society
tends to interchange terms such as lonely, alone, isolated, and in
solitude, the consensus amongst much of the psychological community is
that loneliness, also known as perceived social isolation, is a distinct
phenomenon defined as the discrepancy between actual and desired social
relationships (Ong, 2015, p. 2). More specifically, this discrepancy is called
loneliness (or perceived social isolation) if and only if there are fewer actual
relationships than desired relationships; it is entirely possible for an
individual to have more relationships than they desire, in which case they,
despite the existence of a discrepancy between their actual and desired
social relationships, are not considered lonely. Employing this definition,
Weiss, in 1973, after conducting years of research into loneliness, described
said phenomenon in a very unfavorable light as a chronic distress without
redeeming features: a view shared by many of his contemporaries (1973, p.
15). If loneliness truly is as lacking in redeeming features as Weiss
postulated, then a world which is lacking in loneliness would clearly be
superior to the one in which we live today. By considering a variety of
studies into loneliness conducted amongst diverse populations around the

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world in conjunction with an evolutionary theory of loneliness published by
Cacioppo and colleagues in 2006, I will argue that this is not the case;
despite its partially deleterious nature, loneliness is beneficial for both the
individual and society as a whole- it is an imperfect evolutionary advantage.
The available literature concerning the negative aspects of loneliness is
abundant in nature; a plethora of studies have linked loneliness to negative
health effects among the elderly including, but not limited to, increased risk
for chronic disease and mortality (Cole et al, 2015), increased risk for
cognitive decline and Alzheimers disease (Gow et al, 2007; Tilvis et al, 2004;
Wilson et al, 2007), increased levels of vascular resistance (Cacioppo et al.,
2002; Hawkley, Berntson, Burleson, & Cacioppo, 2003), and increased levels
of systolic blood pressure (Hawkley, Thisted, Masi, & Cacioppo, 2010). A
further study conducted by Kurina and colleagues (2011) examined the
Hutterites, an Anabaptist agrarian society living in South Dakota whose lack
of both tobacco and diversity of socioeconomic status made it possible to
eliminate various confounding factors that often contribute to loneliness
studies, thereby enabling Kurina and colleagues to obtain interesting, reliable
results about the relationship between sleep and loneliness. Researchers
involved in the study conducted interviews with approximately equal
numbers of male and female Hutterite adults (130 in total) with similar age
distributions between the two sexes: fifty percent of participants were aged
19-36, twenty-five percent were between 27 and 37, and the remaining
twenty-five percent were between 48 and 84 years of age. The interviews

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conducted were designed to determine levels of perceived social isolation (in
addition to several other factors) and were followed by a number of sleep
studies which used wrist actigraphs to measure both sleep duration and
sleep fragmentation among the previously interviewed participants. Analysis
of results revealed a strong positive correlation between sleep fragmentation
and perceived social isolation. That is to say, it was shown that loneliness is
associated not with how long a person sleeps, but with how many
microawakenings they experience during the night. On one hand, since it is
well documented that high sleep fragmentation is associated with various
poor health outcomes (Bonnet & Arand, 2003), this indicates that such
fragmentation may be one of the underlying mechanisms leading to the
various health concerns associated with loneliness. On the other hand, this
may be indicative of some potential evolutionary benefits that loneliness has
afforded us in the past, specifically, that it would have made us light sleepers
which could certainly be advantageous.
These findings become much more interesting when considered
through an evolutionary lens in conjunction with a report written by Cacioppo
and Hawkley (2009) which showed that lonely individuals experience
hypervigilance for social threats. That is to say, due to a lack of secure
shelters to offer protection, an ancient ancestor who perceived themselves to
be socially isolated would have had to have been constantly on high alert for
threat and enemies because they, by the very nature of the fact that they
were lonely, would be under the impression that there was no one around to

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protect them. Throughout the daytime, this would have meant
hypervigilance for social threat, while, throughout the night, it would have
meant being a light sleeper so that they didnt get attacked or eaten in their
sleep. This line of reasoning directly implies that the aforementioned
phenomena evolved as a sort of protective mechanism, thereby offering
some explanation as to why loneliness with all of its negative consequences
may have been passed down through generations and arguing that perhaps
said phenomenon is not as bad as Weiss originally painted it to be. Now, of
course, a counterargument is that the sole fact that loneliness has been
passed down through generations does not dispute Weisss claim; it does not
directly indicate that loneliness maintains its benefits in our current society,
because our world differs from that of our ancestors. Rather, it is entirely
conceivable that, now that we have protective shelters, lonely people no
longer have to worry about constantly watching their back and, hence, no
longer benefit from increased levels of hypervigilance for social threat or
from higher levels of sleep fragmentation in the same way that they used to.
Furthermore, as suggested by Luo and colleagues 2009 longitudinal study, it
is also possible that the associated negative health effects such as increased
vascular resistance, increased systolic blood pressure, and increased risk for
Alzheimers disease (mentioned above) are only significant in old age and
thus did not get weeded out by natural selection simply because they come
into effect only after one has already reproduced. Thus, while it may
certainly be true that loneliness was historically evolutionarily advantageous

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in some respects, this claim alone is not enough to dispute Weisss 1973
proposition because it does not tell us anything about how loneliness
functions in our present society; through an aging population and the
relatively recent development of more secure shelters, perceived social
isolation could now manifest more negative consequences and fewer positive
consequences for health than it did at any point prior throughout our
evolutionary history.
While this conclusion certainly does seem to follow given the preceding
evidence, considering it in conjunction with a number of different
experiments will show that it does not hold in general. First consider the
expanse of studies showing that loneliness leads to depression. Two studies,
one of which was longitudinal, conducted by Cacioppo and colleagues
(2006), for example, both found not only that loneliness exhibited a strong
positive correlation with depressive symptoms, but also that it is in fact a
unique risk factor for depressive symptomatology even after controlling for
psychosocial risk factors and demographic variables (2006, p. 141). In the
former, these results were obtained by conducting telephone interviews with
a nationally representative sample of adults over the age of 54 while, in the
latter, they were obtained by examining data from the first three years of the
Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study (CHASRS) which used a
much smaller sample size and, as the name suggests, is only representative
of the city of Chicago. Cacioppo and colleagues (2006) argue that, by using
these two very different samples, their results, when replicated, become

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more easily generalizable. Even if we could generalize these results, it is still
not at all obvious how they could be used to argue against Weiss postulate.
This will be greatly clarified by once again looking at it through an
evolutionary lens. In a recent paper published by J. T. Cacioppo, S. Cacioppo,
and Boomsma (2014), the trio does just this. They argue that, evolutionarily
speaking, loneliness may have led to depressive symptomatology for two
distinct reasons. First, they postulate that perhaps being depressed could
have been a way to protect a lonely individual by preventing them from
attempting to force their way into a group to which they do not belong.
Additionally, it is possible that being depressed would cause the lonely
individual to cry or look sad, thereby attracting others to come see what the
problem is and to help the individual get reintegrated into society. This latter
reason serves as a counterpoint to Weiss postulate and is not subject to the
same objections as the previous evolutionary argument related to sleep
fragmentation and hypervigilance for social threat because, as pointed out
by Cacioppo and colleagues, it is representative of a phenomenon manifest
in our present society: a childs reaction to being punished by being put in
time-out (p.13-14).
When a parent punishes their child for misbehaving by putting them in
time-out, they are effectively inducing an ephemeral sense of loneliness
within the child which leads to a slightly more prominent manifestation of
depressive symptoms such as audible crying sounds. In turn, these sounds
can then lead those who were hurt by the childs original time-out-worthy

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action to, due to a sudden increase in sympathy, forgive the child. The
silent treatment and ostracization are hypothesized to operate under similar
mechanisms (p.14). Hence, it is in this way that the existence of the
aversive state of loneliness can contribute to our socialization and culture
(2014, p. 14). That is, the depressive symptoms brought about by fleeting
loneliness can illicit sympathetic responses from group members which serve
to reunify the group as a whole.
Of notable importance, is the fact that the beneficial aspects that have
just been shown to be associated with loneliness come about only because
said loneliness is fleeting; when a person experiences chronic loneliness, it is
not as obvious that such a phenomenon is accompanied by any added
benefits. Several recent studies, when viewed through an evolutionary lens,
seem to address this matter rather succinctly, however. In particular, Distel
and colleagues (2010) surveyed over 8600 twins, parents, and siblings from
over 3000 Dutch and Belgian families to test how heritable loneliness is. The
surveys consisted of three questions from the R-UCLA Loneliness Scale (a
very widely used tool to assess levels of loneliness) as well as several
questions which asked whether or not the participant was married, how high
a level of education they had received, how often they worked, and how
many children and siblings they had. The non-R-UCLA questions were
included in order to help investigate the effect of socioeconomic factors on
loneliness heritability. Results indicated that, not only is loneliness
moderately heritable, but It is likely, that loneliness has a stable trait-like

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component, independent of environmental situations (p. 490). Furthermore,
a more recent study conducted by Waaktaar and Torgersen (2012) of the
University of Oslo extended these findings to Nowegian adolescents, showing
that additive genetic factors explained seventy-five percent of the variation
in their levels of loneliness, while the remaining twenty-five percent could be
explained by non-shared environmental factors. These findings, that
loneliness is heritable, can be seen, when viewed in conjunction with the
previously highlighted benefits of perceived social isolation, to lead
ultimately to the dismissal of Weiss claim. The previously referenced paper
by J. T. Cacioppo, S. Cacioppo, and Boomsma (2014) presents a theory which
will do just that.
By considering loneliness, once again, in an evolutionary light, the
aforementioned researchers argued that the finding that loneliness is
heritable implies that the social pain associated with it is also heritable. That
is, they postulate that individual differences in the social pain associated with
loneliness would have been passed down through generations and can be
seen to serve a beneficial evolutionary role. Specifically, they argue that the
existence of a wide variability among these differences would have led to
society being filled with people who vary in levels of relative connectedness
to that society which is a positive thing because such variance is necessary
for a properly functioning society (p. 12). Individuals who experience a
relatively low amount of pain at the thought of social disconnection are
necessary because they are the ones who, like Christopher Columbus, Vasco

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Nez de Balboa, Hernn Corts, and other explorers prior, were willing to
leave the comfort of home to explore new, unknown, far-away lands, with the
hope of discovering new resources that might then be utilized for increased
development of the larger society (provided that they are not so insensitive
to the pain of social disconnection that they will be lacking in desire to return
and report their discoveries to the larger society, that is). If these individuals
were lacking, then it is argued that society would be slow to advance due to
a lack of exploration and discovery. So too, society requires individuals who
experience a relatively high amount of pain at the thought of social
disconnection to keep it running while the explorers are away by
continuously remaining in, protecting, and developing it; if these individuals
did not exist, then society, as Cacioppo argues, may be characterised by
sufficiently weak forces holding the group together that the group would
splinter when pitted against oppositional forces (p.12). Hence, the presence
of varying degrees of loneliness may have been evolutionarily crucial to the
formation of society and, therefore, to the development of the individual
citizen within that society.
While many studies have shown that loneliness leads to increased
rates of morbidity and mortality among the elderly populace of several
continents and countless other negative health effects among the general
populace of the United States and several European countries, it also, when
viewed from an evolutionary perspective, can be seen to be absolutely
essential for life. At a personal level, an individuals ephemeral feelings of

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perceived social isolation have been shown to lead to brief manifestations of
depressive symptoms which can serve as a call to others to help the lonely
individual reintegrate into a group from which they may have been
temporarily ostracized. More broadly, it has been argued by J. T. Cacioppo, S.
Cacioppo, and Boomsma that the heritability of loneliness contributes to a
sort of necessary diversity for society which, in the long run, works to benefit
both it and the individual contained within. Hence, Weiss 1973 claim that
loneliness is a chronic distress without redeeming features is not only
disputed, but in the light of new experimental evidence and evolutionary
theories detailing its benefits (1973, p.15). It follows that a world without
loneliness would not, as originally postulated, be superior to the world in
which we live today; perceived social isolation is beneficial for our continued
success as a species because it promotes both individual exploration and
social cohesion. As we enter into a bold new era of space exploration and
discovery with Mars and other planets as our future frontiers, one can hardly
imagine how important lonely individuals may prove to be for the future of
scientific and, accordingly, cultural advancement.

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deprivation. Sleep medicine reviews, 7(4), 297-310.

Cacioppo, J. T., & Cacioppo, S. (2013). Social neuroscience. Perspectives on

Psychological

science, 8(6), 667-669.

Cacioppo, J. T., Cacioppo, S., & Boomsma, D. I. (2014). Evolutionary

mechanisms for

loneliness. Cognition & emotion, 28(1), 3-21.

Cacioppo, J. T., & Hawkley, L. C. (2009). Perceived social isolation and

cognition. Trends in

cognitive sciences, 13(10), 447-454.

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Cacioppo, J. T., Hawkley, L. C., Crawford, L. E., Ernst, J. M., Burleson, M. H.,
Kowalewski, R.

B., et al. (2002). Loneliness and health: potential

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Cacioppo, J. T., Hughes, M. E., Waite, L. J., Hawkley, L. C., & Thisted, R. A.
(2006). Loneliness as a specific risk factor for depressive symptoms: crosssectional and longitudinal

analyses. Psychology and aging, 21(1), 140.

Cole, S. W., Capitanio, J. P., Chun, K., Arevalo, J. M., Ma, J., & Cacioppo, J. T.
(2015). Myeloid

differentiation architecture of leukocyte transcriptome

dynamics in perceived social isolation. Proceedings of the National Academy

of Sciences, 112(49), 15142-15147.
Distel, M. A., Rebollo-Mesa, I., Abdellaoui, A., Derom, C. A., Willemsen, G.,
Cacioppo, J. T., & Boomsma, D. I. (2010). Familial resemblance for
loneliness. Behavior genetics, 40(4),

480-494.

Goossens, L., Van Roekel, E., Verhagen, M., Cacioppo, J. T., Cacioppo, S.,
Maes, M., & B

Boomsma, D. I. (2015). The Genetics of Loneliness Linking

Evolutionary Theory to G

Genome-Wide Genetics, Epigenetics, and Social

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Gow, A.J. et al. (2007) Social support and successful aging: Investigating the
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Hawkley, L. C., Berntson, G. G., Burleson, M. H., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2003).
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and health behaviors.

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105e120.
Hawkley, L. C., Thisted, R. A., Masi, C. M., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2010). Loneliness
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increased blood pressure: five-year

cross-lagged analyses in middle-aged and older

adults. Psychology &

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& Ober, C. (2011). Loneliness is associated with sleep fragmentation in a
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Waaktaar, T., & Torgersen, S. (2012). Genetic and environmental causes of
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Psychiatry 64,

234240

Abstracts of Referenced Papers

Note: I do not include abstracts of all papers referenced, but, rather, only of the ones on which I
elaborated considerably and we did not read in class.

1. Distel and colleagues' Familial Resemblance for Loneliness:

Social isolation and loneliness in humans have been associated with physical and
psychological morbidity, as well as mortality. This study aimed to assess the etiology of
individual differences in feelings of loneliness. The genetic architecture of loneliness was
explored in an extended twin-family design including 8,683 twins, siblings and parents from
3,911 families. In addition, 917 spouses of twins participated. The presence of assortative
mating, genetic non-additivity, vertical cultural transmission, genotypeenvironment (GE)
correlation and interaction was modeled. GE interaction was considered for several
demographic characteristics. Results showed non-random mating for loneliness. We
confirmed that loneliness is moderately heritable, with a significant contribution of non-

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additive genetic variation. There were no effects of vertical cultural transmission. With
respect to demographic characteristics, results indicated that marriage, having offspring,
more years of education, and a higher number of siblings are associated with lower levels of
loneliness. Interestingly, these effects tended to be stronger for men than women. There
was little evidence of changes in genetic architecture as a function of these characteristics.
We conclude that the genetic architecture of loneliness points to non-additive genetic
influences, suggesting it may be a trait that was not neutral to selection in our evolutionary
past. Sociodemographic factors that influence the prevalence of loneliness do not affect its
genetic architecture.

2. Kurina and colleagues Loneliness is Associated with Sleep

Fragmentation in a Communal Society:
Study Objective: Loneliness has been shown to predict poor health. One hypothesized
mechanism is that lonely individuals do not sleep as well as individuals who feel more
connected to others. Our goal was to test whether loneliness is associated with sleep
fragmentation or sleep duration. Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Members of a
traditional, communal, agrarian society living in South Dakota. Participants: Ninety-five
participants (mean age 39.8 years, 55% female) who were 19 years of age at the studys
inception. Interventions: Not applicable. Measurements and Results: We conducted
interviews querying loneliness, depression, anxiety, and stress, as well as subjective sleep
quality and daytime sleepiness. Study participants wore a wrist actigraph for one week to
measure objective sleep properties; the two studied here were sleep fragmentation and
sleep duration. Higher loneliness scores were associated with significantly higher levels of
sleep fragmentation ( = 0.073, t = 2.55, P = 0.01), controlling for age, sex, body mass
index, risk of sleep apnea, and negative affect (a factor comprising symptoms of depression
and anxiety, and perceived stress). Loneliness was not associated with sleep duration or
with either subjective sleep measure. Conclusions: Loneliness was a significant predictor of
sleep fragmentation. Humans social nature may partly be manifest through our dependence
on feeling secure in our social environment to sleep well. Keywords: Loneliness, sleep,
actigraphy.

3. Luo and colleagues Loneliness, health, and mortality in old age: A

national longitudinal study:
This study examined the relationship between loneliness, health, and mortality using a U.S.
nationally representative sample of 2101 adults aged 50 years and over from the 2002 to
2008 waves of the Health and Retirement Study. We estimated the effect of loneliness at one
point on mortality over the subsequent six years, and investigated social relationships,
health behaviors, and health outcomes as potential mechanisms through which loneliness
affects mortality risk among older Americans. We operationalized health outcomes as
depressive symptoms, self-rated health, and functional limitations, and we conceptualized
the relationships between loneliness and each health outcome as reciprocal and dynamic.
We found that feelings of loneliness were associated with increased mortality risk over a 6year period, and that this effect was not explained by social relationships or health
behaviors but was modestly explained by health outcomes. In cross-lagged panel models
that tested the reciprocal prospective effects of loneliness and health, loneliness both
affected and was affected by depressive symptoms and functional limitations over time, and
had marginal effects on later self-rated health. These population-based data contribute to a
growing literature indicating that loneliness is a risk factor for morbidity and mortality and
point to potential mechanisms through which this process works.

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4. Waaktaar and Torgersens Genetic and Environmental Causes of

Variation in Perceived Loneliness in Young People:
Loneliness is prevalent in adolescence, despite the widespread expectation directed to
young people to start building close relationships beyond the nuclear family. The aim of the
present study was to explore the causal genetic and environmental structure behind
variability in adolescents perceived loneliness. Seven national cohorts (ages 1218 years) of
Norwegian twins reared together (1,394 twin pairs) participated. Perceived loneliness was
measured with five items from the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Data were collected from
mothers, fathers, and twins self-ratings by means of a posted questionnaire. Biometric
analyses were applied, testing the causal architecture of loneliness within a psychometric
model with one common latent factor in addition to specific genetic and environmental
sources influencing the scores of each informant. The results showed a heritability(h2) of
75% on the latent perceived loneliness factor, and nonshared environmental effects (e2)
explaining the remaining 25% of the latent factor variance. There were also significant raterspecific genetic and nonshared environmental effects. No shared environmental effects were
found in the model, and there were no sex differences in the estimates. This study showed
that variation in perceived loneliness in adolescents is highly genetic. Additional genetic and
nonshared environmental etiological sources are to some extent represented in the scores of
the specific rater.

5. J. T. Cacioppo, S. Cacioppo, and Boomsmas Evolutionary Mechanisms

for Loneliness:
Robert Weiss (1973) conceptualised loneliness as perceived social isolation, which he
described as a gnawing, chronic disease without redeeming features. On the scale of
everyday life, it is understandable how something as personally aversive as loneliness could
be regarded as a blight on human existence. However, evolutionary time and evolutionary
forces operate at such a different scale of organisation than we experience in everyday life
that personal experience is not sufficient to understand the role of loneliness in human
existence. Research over the past decade suggests a very different view of loneliness than
suggested by personal experience, one in which loneliness serves a variety of adaptive
functions in specific habitats. We review evidence on the heritability of loneliness and outline
an evolutionary theory of loneliness, with an emphasis on its potential adaptive value in an
evolutionary timescale.