Prosocial Behavior and Loneliness during Young Adults’ Everyday Life

Recent meta-analytic findings indicated that feelings of loneliness among young adults have increased over the last 40 years (Buecker et al., 2021). Although recent findings from a randomized controlled trial highlighted the role of prosocial behavior (PB) in reducing loneliness (Lanser & Eisenberger, 2023), the extent to which the enactment of PB could be related to lower loneliness during young adults’ everyday life remains a research question partly unexplored. In the present study, we explored the protective role of PB on loneliness in a sample of 178 Italian young adults (18-35 years of age) followed over 21 days. Dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM) revealed that, while taking under control stable inter-individual differences in PB and loneliness at the between-person level, within-person peaks (i.e., higher-than-usual levels) of prosocial actions on a given day were related to lower-than-usual levels of loneliness on the same day (β = -.12, 95%CI: -.17, -.08). Moreover, this negative effect was stronger for those young adults who, on average across the 21 days, had higher level on loneliness compared to their counterparts (r = -.47; 95%CI: -.67, -.19). The practical implications of these findings for counteracting young adults’ loneliness via the daily promotion of prosocial, other-oriented actions are discussed.