Loneliness is a fairly universal experience across ages, genders and cultures, but younger men who live in more individualistic cultures appear to be the most at risk, according to new research that gathered data from more than 200 countries. The study appears in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
“I am interested in understanding what makes people feel like they belong and what, by contrast, marginalizes people. A lot of my work is on identity, social stigma, and how this affects people’s social relationship,” said study author Manuela Barreto, a professor of social and organizational psychology at the University of Exeter.
“My interest in loneliness came from there, but now extends to other inter-related issues such as how culture and socio-structural conditions affect how people relate to each other. I’m interested in going beyond the rather individualistic views we currently have about loneliness to understand it as a property and responsibility of communities, not just of individuals.”
The study was based on an online survey launched on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service, which collected data from 54,988 individuals living across 237 countries, islands, and territories. The survey included the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which assesses feelings of loneliness and social isolation with questions such as “How often do you feel left out?” and “How often do you feel part of a group of friends?”
The researchers found evidence that age, gender, and living in an individualistic or a collectivist culture were all associated with slight differences in loneliness.
“The extent to which loneliness is experienced might indeed be patterned by age, gender, and culture, such that younger men in so-called individualistic cultures are most vulnerable, and older people in collectivist cultures are the most protected. But this does not mean that we should only be attentive to young men living in individualistic cultures, because the differences are very small,” Barreto told PsyPost.
Though younger men who live in individualistic cultures may be the most vulnerable to loneliness statistically, it is something that “is not characteristic of any particular demographic group, but experienced by people of all ages, genders, and cultures.”
“Importantly, we still have a long way to go to understand these effects because results are often dependent on the specific measures used, on the context of the research, and on the cultural implications of the topic we are studying — e.g., differences may reflect the extent to which participants feel loneliness is stigmatized for their age, gender, or culture, rather than their actual feelings. We need to be more aware that each study is a social context in itself, to which people respond,” Barreto explained.
“These effects can be caused by multiple factors. For example, when we say that culture affects loneliness we are basically using a shortcut to convey that there is something about that particular cultural classification that explains differences in the extent to which people report feeling lonely. There is much to do still to understand not only who feels most lonely, but what loneliness means to people, what drives it for each particular age, gender, or cultural group, and how we can best gauge differences in a culturally sensitive way.”
The study — like all research — includes some limitations. “This was a cross-sectional study among people who responded to an appeal to participate in a study on loneliness. So the participants were people for whom loneliness meant something and who wanted to share their thoughts on this,” Barreto said.
“The sample was very heavily drawn from the UK, which is high on individualism, so countries elsewhere along the spectrum of individualism-collectivism were much less represented. That said, the sample did include participants along the full spectrum, which is a strength — usually when cross-cultural studies are done researchers just compare across a small number of countries (often 2-3).”
“I’d like to add that we had very similar but a lot weaker effects when we looked at culture as place of birth, rather than place of residence, though the two overlap quite a bit, of course. This means that the cultural effects we found are most heavily due to the socio-cultural patterns that emerge where people live, as a result of ideologies, social structures, resources, etc, not necessarily something people were born with,” Barreto noted.
The study, “Loneliness around the world: Age, gender, and cultural differences in loneliness“, was authored by Manuela Barreto, Christina Victor, Claudia Hammond, Alice Eccles, Matt T. Richins, and Pamela Qualter.
