Do I live longer with more social contact?

More social contact is on average associated with a lower risk of premature death. But the effect is more specific than the well-known message suggests. A meta-analysis¹ found that people with less social contact had a 13% higher chance of dying than people with more contact. However, this only held for women and for contacts outside the family. For men and for exclusively family contact, there was no significant association.

Whether the feeling of loneliness itself shortens your life is less certain than is often assumed. An Israeli long-term study of people aged 70 to 90² followed participants for seven years. The researchers found no association between feeling lonely and dying sooner or declining faster, even after accounting for depression.

What you count as 'social contact' also matters a great deal. A 14-year Danish study of older adults³ showed that most network measures were weak and not statistically significant. Only the quality of the network, assessed by an outside observer, reliably predicted longevity. Notably, the feeling of loneliness in men was associated with higher mortality from cardiovascular disease. That is almost the opposite of what the meta-analysis found for women.

A larger network also has drawbacks. Research among two hunter-gatherer populations⁴ showed that women with a more central position in the network had more living children. But in one of the two groups, that same central position was associated with more illness, probably due to greater exposure to infections.

Finally, the Georgia Centenarian Study⁵ found that centenarians with more social resources more often lived independently rather than in a nursing home. Whether this extended their lifespan itself cannot be determined on the basis of that study. The effect also depended on which measurement instrument was used.