KANSAS CITY, June 26 — Remember the old saying about not being able to eat just one potato chip? According to new research, chatbots may work the same way — and the consequences for our social lives are proving far more serious than a salt craving. Valeria Pfeifer, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, was studying gender differences in talkativeness when she stumbled onto something that stopped her cold.
She calculated how many words people spoke in a day, compared the number to data from 15 years earlier, and the difference was so drastic she initially assumed she had made an error. She hadn’t.
The finding, which she confirmed after digging deeper, is this: People are talking to real humans less and less. And in a world where a smartphone is the constant companion in our pocket, the practical upshot is that we may be substituting genuine connection with something that only mimics it. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a stark warning: We are currently experiencing a loneliness epidemic.
A loss of connection to others, the report noted, is leading to poor health outcomes. Now, psychological scientists are trying to make sense of how our social lives have changed, what the consequences are, and what should be done about it.
Think of it like this: Chatbots are like potato chips. They’re easy to consume, they’re always available, and they give you just enough of a hit to keep you coming back. But they don’t actually nourish you.
The concern is that relying on chatbots for companionship may only increase loneliness, not alleviate it. “Everybody has felt this in their daily lives. Things have changed a little bit, but it’s [been] really difficult to pinpoint it,” Pfeifer said.
The challenge for researchers is that our social landscape has fundamentally shifted. We order food through an app.
We attend remote meetings over Zoom. We avoid boredom with the device in our pocket. These changes are so pervasive that their wide-ranging effects can seem unbelievable when you step back and look at the numbers.
In this new landscape, evaluating social interactions requires new frameworks. Researchers studying conditions like social anhedonia — a lack of pleasure and reward from social contact, along with reduced motivation to engage socially — now have to account for the differences between online and offline interactions.
And crucially, they have to distinguish between online interactions with humans and those with artificial intelligence. The practical upshot for ordinary readers is this: The same technology that lets us order dinner without speaking a word may also be quietly eroding the very social muscles we need to feel connected. If we’re talking less, and what talking we do is increasingly with AI, we may be training ourselves to prefer a simulation of companionship over the real thing.
Pfeifer’s research points to a future where psychological science must develop new tools and frameworks to understand what “social” even means anymore. The loneliness epidemic isn’t just about being alone — it’s about what we’re replacing human interaction with, and whether we even notice the difference until it’s too late.
