Americans are spending less time with their friends than they used to, but new research finds that shift has not made the country any lonelier.
A study from the American Friendship Project, a multi-university research initiative, found that people are simply changing how and where they connect rather than losing their social ties altogether.
What the research found
Research from the project conducted in 2025 with more than 2,000 participants found that people may be spending less time with friends than they used to, but not necessarily because they have fewer friends.
The project is led by communication studies researchers who have tracked friendship patterns across multiple national surveys in recent years.
Jeffrey Hall, professor and chairperson of communication studies at KU, is part of the American Friendship Project, along with colleagues Natalie Pennington of Colorado State University and Amanda Holmstrom of Michigan State University, who study how and if people spend time with friends and family.
The American Friendship Project was created after the researchers conducted a study during the pandemic about people losing contact with others. It has since analyzed publicly available data from past surveys from organizations such as Gallup and Princeton Research and conducted its own studies as well to determine how friendship trends are changing, according to University of Kansas News.
Staying home does not mean staying lonely
All that time at home and not with friends may seem to support the idea of loneliness, but the American Friendship Project data suggests otherwise.
A chart from the American Friendship Project shows primary reasons for not spending time with friends, with not having enough time cited by 29.7 percent of respondents.
Researchers also pointed to a more personal factor behind some of the withdrawal, with Pennington noting that mental health concerns can also be a barrier to spending time with friends.
Even so, those who maintained contact with both friends and family tended to fare better. Respondents who prioritize spending time with both friends and family reported higher life satisfaction and less loneliness than those who did not.
Finding connection in new places
Rather than framing the shift as a decline, the researchers describe it as a redistribution of social time. Taken as a whole, the findings show that people are in fact spending less time with friends and more with family. As Hall put it in comments to University of Kansas News, “It seems people have friends, but what they really want is more time to spend with those friends,” he said.
That reframing echoes earlier findings from the same research group, which previously reported that American adults may typically have more friends than indicated by other recent surveys, with fewer Americans having no friends at all, though many would like closer friendships, a pattern GCN detailed in coverage of friendship selection patterns.
The findings arrive as separate Pew Research Center polling shows Americans increasingly skeptical of the platforms shaping their social and civic lives.
A Pew analysis published this week found that about seven-in-ten Americans (69%) say social media companies have too much power and influence in politics today, and a smaller majority (55%) say the same about U.S. news organizations, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey from the Pew-Knight Initiative , per the Pew Research Center report.
That broader wariness toward digital platforms runs alongside other Pew work on how Americans use online spaces to connect, including research on hobby groups online.
Why it matters
The American Friendship Project’s ongoing work suggests that simple measures of time spent together may not capture the full picture of social health.
Researchers say the quality of connection, and whether people maintain ties across both friends and family, may matter more for well-being than the raw number of hours logged together.
The team plans to continue tracking these patterns in future survey waves, aiming to clarify whether the shift toward at-home connection represents a lasting change in how Americans maintain friendships or a temporary adjustment to other pressures in daily life.
