Week 8 - Civic Engagement and Social Isolation

What is Putnam's "Bowling Alone" thesis?

Civic engagement in the US has been declining since the ~1970s. Americans are less connected to civil society — reduced voting, voluntary organisation membership, informal socialising, and trust. The bowling metaphor captures the shift: people still bowl but alone rather than in leagues, symbolising the decline of collective life and shared norms.

What are the three definitions of social capital and who proposed each?

Putnam — features of social life enabling collective action: networks, shared norms, and trust. e.g. A neighborhood watch or a local sports club → community and trust building

Bourdieu — aggregate resources linked to durable networks of recognition; emphasises inequality and how elites use networks to reproduce privilege. e.g. exclusive society

Coleman — social capital as productive infrastructure embedded in the structure of relationships, enabling goals that would otherwise be impossible. A study group. On your own, you might fail the exam. But because you have a relationship with classmates, you share notes and quiz each other. The relationship itself is the "tool" that makes passing the exam possible.

What are the negative consequences of social capital? (Portes, 1998)

• Exclusion of outsiders (strong internal ties create barriers to entry),

• forming of criminal and terrorist groups as they also rely on trust networks,

• membership obligations become burdens

• conformity pressures can suppress individual success and autonomy. Social capital is not automatically good.

Why does Putnam's decline in social capital puzzle him?

Because trust and group membership increase with education — and average educational levels rose over the same period. You would therefore expect civic engagement to increase, not fall. This makes the decline harder to explain and rules out simple "uneducated population" arguments.

What is Putnam's explanation for the US civic decline?

Cohort replacement — the unusually civic "Greatest Generation" is dying and being replaced by less engaged cohorts.

Putnam's strongest causal candidate is television: by 1959 ~90% of US homes had TV, shifting leisure toward solitary home-based consumption and away from associations, social evenings, and community participation.

---

Why some people are more involved in their communities than others through age, period, and cohort (APC) effects

• Age (life-cycle) effects — people change as they get older (e.g. becoming more conservative or more trusting with age).

• Cohort effects — Your engagement is influenced by the era you grew up in. societal change occurs through generational replacement.

• Period effects — shocks that affect everyone regardless of cohort (e.g. 9/11, Covid-19, 2009 MP expenses scandal made everyone less trusting of the government).

What is the APC identification problem?

• Age + Birth Year (Cohort) = Current Year (Period)

Problem:

• Age? (Are people just lonely when they are 20?)

• Cohort? (Is there something about people born in 2004 that makes them lonely?)

• Period? (Is 2024 just a lonely year for everyone because of social media or post-COVID vibes?)

You CANNOT tell whether the loneliness is due to their age, cohort or period because they all change at the same time — hence, you need additional assumptions e.g. theory and contextual knowledge.

• Example: If you see a massive spike in loneliness in 2020 across every age group (8-year-olds and 80-year-olds), you "assume" it’s a Period Effect (COVID) rather than everyone just happening to get "lonely-aged" at the same time.

What is Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft vs Gesellschaft that are used to describe human relationships in small towns vs in big cities.

Gemeinschaft — durable, personal, multi-layered ties based on sentiment, shared values, and community solidarity (before in pre-industrial societies).

Gesellschaft — thin, impersonal, transactional ties based on rational self-interest and competition (after shifting to modern urban societies). The classical argument is that urbanisation produces social isolation by eroding Gemeinschaft ties.

What is Dunbar's Social Brain hypothesis and what is Dunbar's number?

Human brains evolved to manage complex social relationships — the neocortex size predicts stable group size across primates. For humans this gives ~150 stable relationships (Dunbar's number). Social media may create the illusion of unlimited connection but cannot overcome this cognitive constraint.

What has caused the surge in mental health crisis - Haidt's "Great Rewiring" thesis? (2024)

Gen Z (born mid-1990s to early 2010s) experienced a transformation from play-based to phone-based childhood, driven by overprotective parenting (less unsupervised free play → lower resilience) and technology (iPhone 2007, front-facing camera 2010, Instagram rise post-2012). Result: disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many interaction with low barriers to exit, replacing embodied synchronous social development.

What are the harms of social media on young people according to Haidt?

Chronic social comparison, impossible beauty standards, strategic self-presentation and brand management mindset, time displacement from real-world activities, and smartphones as "experience blockers" preventing engagement with offline life. Evidence: surge in anxiety, depression, and self-harm ER admissions among young people — especially girls — from the mid-2010s.

What are the criticisms and alternative explanations for the Gen Z mental health crisis?

Experimental evidence from RCTs on reduced social media use is mixed and inconclusive

UK alternative explanation: austerity cuts to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in the 2010s causes lack of resources and reduced system capacity to help children with mental health issues → demonstrating its not the problem of tech alone.

→ social change claims need strong measurement, careful causal inference, and awareness of competing structural explanations.