Research
Everything the Center has published, most recent first. 257 items.
11 January 2026
The WHO Commission on Social Connection's headline that one in six people worldwide are affected by loneliness rests on a different measurement approach than the Gallup, Cigna, and HINTS figures it is often cited alongside. The four numbers are not measuring the same thing.
4 January 2026
Loneliness research reports many statistically significant associations. Comparing effect sizes across mortality, cardiovascular, and intervention studies shows which findings are large enough to act on and which are merely detectable.
30 December 2025
Most of the data cited to justify policy attention to young-adult loneliness is cross-sectional. A review of what longitudinal designs exist, and what they would need to show, to support the causal claims policy documents already make.
20 December 2025
A new nationally representative study tests the popular claim that remote work drives loneliness. The literature on this question has almost no null results, which is itself worth examining.
15 December 2025
A review of what published research establishes about the economic cost of loneliness and social isolation, and why almost none of the widely cited figures come from a genuine cost-effectiveness study.
11 December 2025
Governments increasingly treat the loss of cafés, libraries and senior centres as a cause of loneliness. This review takes that causal chain apart link by link and specifies the study designs that would actually test it.
2 December 2025
Cigna's 2025 survey puts American loneliness at 57%; a 2025 analysis of federal HINTS-6 data puts moderate-to-severe loneliness at just over 37%. The gap is a measurement story, not a factual dispute.
30 November 2025
National loneliness strategies rest on different instruments asking different questions. The choice of scale, not just the policy response, determines what gets counted as a crisis.
25 November 2025
Survey after survey finds loneliness highest among young adults, yet the policy apparatus for social connection was built largely around older adults. The gap is explained by conflating isolation with loneliness.
21 November 2025
Successive reviews of loneliness and isolation research, from 2020 through 2025, name the same gap: intervention evidence has not kept pace with the mortality and morbidity findings that motivate concern in the first place.
20 November 2025
The comparison between loneliness and cigarette smoking has become the most-quoted statistic in loneliness policy. Tracing it from meta-analysis to advisory to press release shows how much precision the number lost along the way.
16 November 2025
Surveys put youth loneliness at record highs, while time-use data shows a decades-long decline in face-to-face socializing that predates the pandemic. The two measures are not asking the same question, and conflating them obscures what each can actually explain.
6 November 2025
National loneliness estimates for U.S. adults range from roughly 1 in 3 to well over half, and much of that spread traces to how each survey was fielded rather than to any real change in the population.
3 November 2025
Social prescribing has been adopted across health systems as a response to loneliness in older adults, but the randomised evidence behind it remains almost nonexistent.
19 October 2025
A methods-level look at how the WHO Commission on Social Connection handled the uncertainty behind its headline mortality estimate, and how carefully it treated technology's contested role as a cause rather than a correlate of loneliness.
13 October 2025
The comparison between loneliness and smoking a pack and a half a day appears in nearly every major loneliness report since 2010. The underlying claim has never been independently retested; it is one analogy, restated.
12 October 2025
AARP's 2018 and 2025 surveys of adults 45 and older used the same UCLA Loneliness Scale, making them one of the few genuinely comparable measures of change in this literature. What the comparison shows, and where it still leaves questions unanswered.
9 October 2025
A single 2021 survey finding on young-adult loneliness has propagated through press coverage, a Surgeon General advisory, and a WHO report — while a differently instrumented figure a third its size travels alongside it, largely unreconciled.
7 October 2025
The World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection attributes 871,000 annual deaths to loneliness. The estimate deserves scrutiny for what it aggregates, not dismissal.
27 September 2025
In 2010, a landmark meta-analysis pooled social relationships into one mortality risk factor. In 2015, the same lead author split it into three. That revision reshaped a decade of policy documents.
23 September 2025
Multiple independent surveys, using different instruments, agree that young adults report more loneliness than older adults. The consistency across methods is real; the explanation for it is not settled.
22 September 2025
National loneliness figures are cited as though they measure a single stable thing. Differences in instrument, timing, and construct mean many of the comparisons policy documents rely on are not valid.
17 September 2025
Self-reported loneliness has risen sharply across a decade of surveys, but the American Time Use Survey's diary method shows a slower, longer decline in face-to-face contact. The two measures are not tracking the same thing.
6 September 2025
A look at the effect sizes behind older-adult isolation policy, comparing odds ratios and hazard estimates across the major studies rather than treating statistical significance as the relevant threshold.