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BACKGROUND Loneliness, especially when chronic, can substantially reduce one’s quality of life. Positive social experiences might help to break cycles of loneliness by promoting more prosocial cognitions and behaviors. Internet-mediated live video communication platforms (eg, Zoom and Twitch) may offer an engaging and accessible medium to deliver such positive social experiences to people at scale. Despite their widespread use, there is a lack of research into how these newer platforms’ socially interactive elements affect loneliness-related aspects of users’ psychosocial well-being. OBJECTIVE We aimed to experimentally evaluate whether a socially interactive live video experience improved loneliness-related outcomes to a greater extent than a non-interactive control experience. METHODS We recruited participants from an online survey recruitment platform and assigned half to participate in a socially interactive live video experience with strangers and the other half to a non-interactive control experience that was designed to be identical in all other regards. Participants completed several baseline measures of psychosocial wellbeing, participated in an hour-long live video experience, and then completed some of the baseline measures again. Four weeks later, we followed up with participants to evaluate their change in trait loneliness since baseline. We pre-registered our hypotheses and analysis plan and provide our data, analysis code, and study materials online. RESULTS 249 participants completed the initial study and met inclusion criteria, 199 of whom also completed the 4-week follow-up. Consistent with our predictions, we found that directly after the more socially interactive experience, participants’ feelings of connectedness increased more (p CONCLUSIONS Including socially interactive components in live video experiences can improve loneliness-related psychosocial outcomes for a short time. Future work should explore how these benefits can be leveraged towards longer-term prosociality. |
