Being alone is a common experience. Typically, adults spend between 30%–60% of their time alone. Some people spend most of their days alone, whereas others just a fraction of that, depending on their age, marital status, and occupational status. Time alone is increasing due to a myriad of factors, including technological advancements, flexible work arrangements, and improved health systems.
Aloneness is Not (Necessarily) a Negative Experience
Social psychologists have not often studied the experience of aloneness. As a field focused on being with others, aloneness has been difficult to study in lab settings, where real-life aloneness is challenging to recreate. In clinical and developmental writings, aloneness is often depicted as a negative emotional experience—loneliness—that children and adults need to cope with and generally wish to avoid.
But if you imagine being alone, you may come up with some enjoyable, relaxing, and perhaps desirable feelings. Research on aloneness finds that aloneness is not all negative, but a rather complex experience that is sometimes quite positive.
Aloneness is Not Just a Private Experience
Aloneness is often studied as a private experience, starting and ending within a person’s mind. However, could time alone affect how one approaches others, and, more broadly, how people evaluate and behave toward social groups? Our recent article summarized research testing whether aloneness has effects that transcend an individual’s personal experience, affecting group processes as well. Specifically, we tested whether an “alone mindset” (the mere thought of oneself when alone) affects group identity, that is, the extent to which individuals feel part of a group.
We did 5 experiments with more than 1300 participants. Participants were asked to think about a group they belong to—either an existing group or a group newly formed during the study. We then asked them to think of themselves alone or to think about themselves with other people. Participants then expressed how much they felt their group has value and rated how much they identify with their group.
The mere thought of oneself alone—an alone mindset—made participants think that their group is less valuable, and they consequently identified with it less. People who thought of themselves alone did not necessarily think about negative experiences. However, the effects of the alone mindset on judgments of their group’s value and identity were similar to those following the experience of social rejection—a clearly negative social experience.
We also discovered that the alone mindset leads to actions, and not just a shift in attitudes. Participants in an alone mindset allocated similar amounts of money to their in-group and out-group members, reversing the well-known tendency for people to favor their ingroup by allocating more money to in-group members.
Conclusions and Implications
This research highlights potential negative effects that aloneness can have for existing social structures. The mere thought about oneself when alone led people to devalue their group and reduced identification with the group. Real-life expressions of this may be found in many contexts. For example, as remote work gains traction in work settings, work teams may struggle to motivate and retain their members.
More broadly, as more people find themselves alone longer as they age, the self-generated loosening of broad social affiliations may increase loneliness. If aloneness is a catalyst for a vicious cycle of loneliness, interventions to reduce loneliness should be implemented as early as possible.
The implications of the present findings are not all negative. Aloneness allows people to balance the stress stemming from social life and increases their autonomy. Aloneness may push people to rethink their group affiliations, which might be beneficial for people in an unhealthy environment. Moreover, aloneness may assist in reducing prejudices against out-groups by encouraging a more objective perspective on groups. These are just a few potential implications of the present findings which we hope will stimulate more thinking and research toward better understanding the implications of being alone.
For Further Reading
Uziel, L., & Seemann, M. (2025). The alone team: How an alone mindset affects group processes. British Journal of Psychology, 00, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12777
Uziel, L., Seemann, M., & Schmidt-Barad, T. (2020). From being alone to being the only one: Neuroticism is associated with an egocentric shift in an alone context. Journal of Personality, 88, 339-355. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12494
Uziel, L., & Schmidt-Barad, T. (2022). Choice matters more with others: Choosing to be with other people is more consequential to well-being than choosing to be alone. Journal of Happiness Studies, 23, 2469–2489. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-022-00506-5
Uziel, L. (2021). The language of being alone and being with others. *Social Psychology, 52(*1), 13-22. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000430
Uziel, L. (2016). Alone, unhappy, and demotivated: The impact of an alone mind-set on neurotic individuals' willpower. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(8), 818-827. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616657597
Liad Uziel is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he heads the Individual Differences in Social Behavior Laboratory. His research focuses on the effects of social presence, aloneness, social desirability, neuroticism, and self-control.
Martina Seemann is a PhD candidate at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, where she researches design principles of educational media. Other interests include interactions between personality traits and social behavior.