{"id":546699,"date":"2026-03-17T18:34:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T18:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/546699\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T18:34:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T18:34:07","slug":"lonely-people-are-better-off-texting-strangers-than-messaging-a-chatbot-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/546699\/","title":{"rendered":"Lonely People Are Better Off Texting Strangers Than Messaging a Chatbot, Study Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent Gallup\/Lumina survey of higher education, 60 percent of students<\/a> experiencing emotional stress cited loneliness as a factor. Such reports are so common that we\u2019ve spent years casually referring to the \u201cloneliness epidemic<\/a>\u201d as a fact of life. That means that many startups smell money and have pushed chatbots as a potential solution for helping people feel a bit of needed companionship. But that idea may just be a fool\u2019s errand. A new study found that texting with a stranger reduced feelings of loneliness among college students more than chatting with a chatbot did.<\/p>\n

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania tested the two approaches, along with journaling, in an experiment involving nearly 300 first-semester college students. Their findings were published<\/a> earlier this month in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.<\/p>\n

The researchers assigned each participant in the study to one of three groups. One that texted with a randomly assigned peer each day, another that was required to message daily with a chatbot named Sam on a Discord server, and finally a group that was assigned to write a short daily journal entry. Participants in the first two groups were required to send at least one message per day, but on average students exchanged about eight to 10 messages with both the AI chatbot and their human partners.<\/p>\n

After two weeks, the students who texted with a human peer reported significantly lower levels of loneliness. Those who interacted with the chatbot showed some improvement, but the change was roughly similar to that of the group that journaled. In other words, chatting with the AI is more similar to just getting your thoughts out in a diary than actual human interaction, which makes a lot of sense!<\/p>\n

Interestingly, even though the chatbot expressed higher levels of empathy, participants themselves showed less empathy during those conversations than when interacting with another human. This result is notable because the chatbot was specifically designed to \u201clisten actively and show empathy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis pattern raises the possibility that alleviating loneliness may depend not only on receiving empathy; people may also need the opportunity to provide empathy,\u201d the researchers wrote in the study.<\/p>\n

This research arrives as more teens and young adults are incorporating AI into their daily lives. A survey of 5,000 British teenagers<\/a> last year found that two-in-five had used AI to get advice, support, or companionship. Data from Pew Research<\/a> found similar trends, with 16% of teens saying they use AI for casual conversation and 12% saying they use it for emotional support or advice.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, some research suggests this may not be beneficial in the long run. Studies from OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab<\/a> found that people people who were feeling lonely before using chatbots ended up feeling even lonelier afterward.<\/p>\n

And more recent research has found that increased use of AI chatbots was associated with higher loneliness levels<\/a> and vice versa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a recent Gallup\/Lumina survey of higher education, 60 percent of students experiencing emotional stress cited loneliness as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[256,64,63,3070,105],"class_list":["post-546699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-chatbots","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}