Social connectedness is vital to well-being, but members of Gen Z are hesitant about interacting with one another in today’s online and polarized world, says Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki. That disconnection comes at a cost: young adults increasingly report lower levels of happiness than middle-aged and older adults.
Here, Zaki talks about why that is and what to do about it. His research has found that people regularly underestimate how friendly and kind others are, but that with a little encouragement to take chances on one another, they can form new connections that contribute to a greater sense of well-being.
Zaki and Rui Pei, a postdoctoral scholar in his lab, recently co-authored a chapter on the importance of social connection to the mental health of young people in the 2025 World Happiness Report. Zaki is also the author of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness (Grand Central Publishing, 2024).
Why do you think Gen Z reports the lowest well-being among all age groups?
The downward trend of young adult well-being is so widespread and intense that it has reshaped the landscape of happiness. In the past, happiness across the adult lifespan took on a “U-shaped” curve. Young adults were among the most content with their lives, happiness dipped in middle age and then rose again among older adults. In recent years, this decades-old curve has shifted into a straight, upward line. Older adults remain happy, and middle age remains middling, but young adults are now less happy than either group.
It’s impossible to know exactly why this has occurred. History is not an experiment, and we can’t re-run it a thousand times, tinkering with different factors to see which one affects young people’s happiness. That said, the decline in young adult well-being has coincided with two large trends. The first is a rise in economic inequality, which has left millions of young people in a state of relative precarity. The second is a media ecosystem – both social and legacy – that inundates us with negative information. For instance, the presence of sadness and anger in headlines has more than doubled since the beginning of the century. Bathed in negativity, it’s not hard to imagine why young people would feel less positive.
How does social connection affect mental health?
One of the most efficient ways to improve our own well-being is to commune with others. Spending time with friends, helping strangers through volunteering, opening up about our struggles – all increase happiness, decrease stress, and even soften symptoms of depression. It’s ironic that the 2020s have seen a meteoric rise in “self-care,” activities meant to decrease our stress that tend to focus on being alone in nicer ways. There’s nothing at all wrong with caring for ourselves, of course! But flourishing is most often out there, with everyone else.
What gets in the way of social connection?
Spending time in community is fantastic for our health, but that doesn’t mean it always comes naturally. People choose to spend much more time alone than in years past, a trend that’s especially strong among young adults. To me, this signals a sort of social inertia. We can one-click order meals and nearly any product, practice yoga on YouTube, and even pray through an app. Communal activities don’t have to be done in community, so we stay home. Going out has become like working out: we feel better after doing it, but it takes energy to get started. [1]
This intersects with a soft form of cynicism about our fellow human beings. People underestimate how warm, open-minded, friendly, and trustworthy others are. We make these bleak assumptions about each other in the abstract when asked what “people” are like, and less so when interacting with real, flesh and blood humans. This means two things: On the dark side, cynical assumptions cause us to avoid the very social interactions that could make us happier. On the bright side, when we overcome inertia and take a leap of faith on other people, pleasant surprises are everywhere.
What does social connectedness look like in a polarized time?
It’s scarier, harder, and more important than ever. If we underestimate people in general, we vastly underestimate people we disagree with. Our lab and many others have asked both Republicans and Democrats what the average person they disagree with is like. We find that members of both sides imagine their average rival to be much more extreme, twice as hateful, twice as anti-democratic, and four times as violent as they really are.
If you believe this about the “other side,” it makes sense you would avoid them at all costs, and we do. Americans spend far less time conversing and connecting across differences than in decades past. But like general social isolation, avoiding those conversations makes it impossible to correct our misunderstanding, or make progress together.
Also just like other forms of isolation, the best medicine here is often to take a leap of faith. In my lab, we’ve brought Republicans and Democrats together for Zoom conversations about climate change, abortion, and gun control – not exactly easy topics to discuss. People are apprehensive to have these talks, but they come away shocked at how positively they went and how open, reasonable, empathic, and peaceful the other person is. They discover common ground and soften their animus, two shifts we could sorely use in our culture right now.
What are some simple things Gen Z and other young adults can do to strengthen their social connections?
The first is to realize how much other people want to connect with them, and the second is to jump into the social waters – even when staying home would be easier. We recently surveyed thousands of Stanford undergraduates, asking them questions about themselves and their average peers. Our team found that students here are immensely warm and friendly. They desperately want to connect with each other. But they don’t realize everyone else wants that as well, and underestimate their peers’ kindness and empathy.
We changed this by showing students the truth: We put posters up in certain dorms that highlighted real data about how friendly and warm students really were. We also nudged them to take chances on each other. Students who received this intervention were less likely to underestimate their fellow undergraduates and more likely to take chances on them. Six months later, they had a larger number of friends. Stanford is, of course, a special community, different from many others. But what we learn here can matter elsewhere. Too often, we’re sure that conversation and connection will exhaust us, or that we can’t count on others. If we let go of that confidence and explore instead, there’s much to learn, and even more to gain.
