UC Berkeley

As scientific research on human happiness has flourished over the past 40 years, so has the evidence for the supreme importance of social connection to its cultivation. Scientific measurement of this connectedness, however, has been relatively coarse and porous. The field lacks clarity in our definition of what it means to be socially “healthy,” which aspects of social life are most crucial to well-being, and what interventions might improve it. In other words, we lack a comprehensive science of “social nutrition.” This dissertation reviews approaches to the conceptualization and measurement of social health to date, identifies two key gaps impeding its development, and describes the results of three studies to address them.

The first gap is a lack of granularity. Research is limited on the differential consequences of interacting with various types of people (family vs. friend vs. strangers, etc.), over various media (in-person vs. video vs. phone, etc.), and in various quantities. To this lacuna I offer the results of two studies which find that only in-person contact with close others is reliably and positively related to well-being. Video chat and phone calls with close others are experienced positively in the moment, but do not relate to how subjects later evaluate their day. This suggests, but does not causally establish, that these may be something of a “simple sugar” in terms of social nutrients; one enjoys them, but they provide no enduring nourishment. Text messaging, and any contact with strangers, colleagues, and others, had no association with well-being at all.

The second obstacle to a full science of social nutrition is a lack of comprehensive theory. Each research direction to date has emerged from a hypothesized aspect of social need – interpersonal support, loneliness, and the like. This top-down approach begins with a construct in the researcher’s mind and ends with a validated instrument for its measurement. These instruments that can be quite useful, but do not purport to encapsulate human social health in its entirety. To date, no approach has agnostically sought to identify, in a bottom-up fashion, all of the aspects of social life that might influence well-being. Without such a procedure, we can never be certain that our instruments capture the true breadth of what makes a person socially well. To this need, I develop a semi-structured interviewing procedure that aims to surface the attributes of social life that are of greatest cognitive weight in subjects’ minds. Findings from such interviews may unearth previously unconceived constructs and hypotheses. I defend the design of this procedure, describe the results from an initial study, speak to its limitations, and articulate the path from here to a reliable and valid instrument for psychological research.The ultimate aim of this body of work is to illuminate what it means for a human to be socially well, thereby unlocking doors to its improvement.