Everyone has been single

The strange hole in the middle of singlehood studies

As I talked about in a recent post, a strong preoccupation in singlehood studies is society’s attitudes towards single people. In many ways, singlehood studies emerged from single people feeling devalued and discriminated against and the early work could be accurately characterized as an attempt to put this mistreatment on the map. This was an important contribution, both to society and to academics, and as a result a robust conversation is happening today about single people’s place in society.

I think it’s fair to say that research in singlehood studies quite consistently supports the conclusion that people generally have more positive attitudes about partnered people than they do about single people. Studies generally show that singles are rated lower on dimensions like life satisfaction and sociability. So I think everyone in singlehood studies agrees that the data suggest that singles are evaluated more negatively than partnered people in multiple domains.

Are people wrong that singles are lower in well-being?

Where the work remains is in understanding why this is true. Singlehood studies, with its roots in social structural understandings of human behaviour, seems to take this phenomenon as prima facie evidence that individuals have been falsely conditioned by society to see partnership (and especially marriage) as superior to singlehood. Ideas like the Ideology of Marriage and Family have been presented as top-down structures that socialize members of society into exaggerating the benefits of partnership.

This framework has led to research focusing on the hypothesis that these negative attitudes towards singles do not line up with reality. For example, one often-cited study by Tobias Greitemeyer assessed people’s evaluations of single and partnered people, and then compared those assessments to actual scores from single and partnered people to see if people’s views about singles were accurate or not. The findings suggested that although partnered people were rated more positively in domains such as life satisfaction and personality, there were no differences between singles and partnered people in these domains in reality (the paper did find that participants were accurate that singles reported less satisfaction with their relationship status than partnered people).

Actually, people are right

However, like many pre-replication crisis studies, this research suffered from low statistical power as a result of a relatively small number of participants. This is particularly a problem when trying to make arguments that your data support the presence of null effects (i.e., no differences across groups), as a null effect is more likely to emerge just by chance if your statistical power is low.

Although the Greitemeyer paper is still often cited as evidence of the supposedly illusory nature of differences between single and partnered people, more recent research using highly powered samples has not just demonstrated but replicated robust effects such as singles, on average, reporting lower life satisfaction and lower extraversion than partnered people. So I think we can take as our conclusion that people generally rate singles lower on factors like life satisfaction, and that singles are on average actually lower on factors like life satisfaction.

Well-being differences do not mean that singles are unhappy

One very important point to make here is that a difference between groups in life satisfaction is not the same as saying that one group is happy and the other is unhappy. Like partnered people, the average single person is above the midpoint on measures of well-being like life satisfaction. So, from what I can tell, the most accurate statement is not that singles are unhappy, but that singles are less happy relative to partnered people.

But how do we explain this discrepancy in well-being between single and partnered people? As noted in an earlier post, the hypothesis that is primarily entertained in singlehood studies is that such a difference is best explained by singlism, or the negative attitudes society directs at singles. But as that post detailed, there is simply no evidence that singlism is a causal driver of lower well-being for singles. That is not to say that the singlism hypothesis is wrong or outlandish, but there is simply no evidence in favour that lives up to the “cheater technique” standards championed by singlehood studies.

Maybe we’ve been overthinking this

So having said that, I would like to introduce another potential explanation that is seemingly never considered in singlehood studies despite its meat-and-potatoes obviousness:

Everyone has been single.

In trying to assess why people might accurately detect singles’ lower well-being, it strikes me that the most parsimonious place to start is that people might be reflecting on their own experience. And even those who have not been single for many years certainly have many people in their lives who are single from whom they can also extrapolate answers to the question of singles’ happiness.

Indeed, there is reason to believe that, in cases where you have regular exposure to the group in question, perceptions of that group can be quite accurate. Alice Eagly and Judith Hall recently conducted a meta-analysis of the accuracy of gender stereotypes, and found that people were remarkably accurate in assessing the direction and strength of gender differences. These authors suggest that because men and women encounter each other frequently, there is a good base of experience on which people make judgements about gender, thus leading to accurate judgements.

Extrapolating this idea to singlehood, not only do single and partnered people encounter each other frequently, but all partnered people have themselves been single. Indeed, most single people have also themselves been partnered. Thus, although there is no doubt room for people to be influenced by various ideologies, it is remarkably curious to me that people’s own experience is left out when considering where people may come up with their judgements of single people’s characteristics.

Researchers shouldn’t just believe people when they tell us what we want to hear

I think this insight has important implications. For example, singlehood scholars will often write about perceptions of single people as biased misperceptions that have been skewed by social conditioning, and argue that laypeople’s reports of differences between single and partnered people are singlism-fuelled myths. But if it is true that a major foundation upon which people base their judgements of single people is their own experience, then singlehood scholars and activists need to consider that they might be inadvertently asking people to doubt what they see with their own two eyes in favour of the scholar/activist’s preferred reality. I hope that is not how singlehood scholars want to position themselves.

Of course, as with most academic disputes, the answer to this question will almost certainly end up being, “It’s both.” That is, it is highly likely that social narratives about singlehood and partnership influence how single people are perceived. But it is also highly likely that the experiences that people have and see for themselves are highly influential in how people understand singlehood.

Why is singlehood studies dominated by the former and ignoring the latter?