Loneliness across cultures: Social isolation, cultural models, and coping strategies

Over recent decades, loneliness has increasingly been recognized as a major factor affecting wellbeing, social life, and mental health, particularly in contemporary Western societies. While biomedical and psychological research has identified multiple risk factors associated with loneliness, less attention has been paid to how different cultures understand, evaluate, and respond to social isolation. This article examines the cultural meanings and social regulation of loneliness across societies, asking whether loneliness is mainly a feature of modern Western life or a more general condition of human relational existence. Using a mixed-methods approach based on data from 360 cultures and more than 3,700 ethnographic documents from the Human Relations Area Files, the study shows that (1) loneliness is a widespread human experience generally perceived as harmful or undesirable; (2) societies vary in the norms that define acceptable and unacceptable forms of isolation; and (3) diverse cultural mechanisms exist to prevent, manage, or alleviate loneliness. By situating loneliness within broader cultural models of relatedness and social belonging, the article contributes to a comparative anthropological understanding of loneliness and highlights the cultural and relational conditions that shape experiences of isolation, belonging, and wellbeing across societies.