Heterogeneity of Effects in a Prosociality‐Based Intervention to Reduce Loneliness and Increase Social Contact
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This study evaluates the effects of an act of kindness intervention on increasing daily social contact and reducing loneliness among community adults experiencing loneliness. It also explores heterogeneity in effects and potential moderators, including individual differences in baseline social health and intervention implementation. METHOD: In a randomized controlled trial, 208 adults were randomly assigned to perform daily acts of kindness for others (Kindness condition) or take a short break for themselves (Control condition) for 2 weeks. Dairy assessments of loneliness and social contact were collected 3 days before and after the intervention. RESULTS: We did not find consistent average effects. Although loneliness decreased in the Kindness condition, the reduction was not significantly greater than in the Control condition. In contrast, a group difference was observed in social contact, which remained stable in the Kindness condition but declined in the Control condition. Notably, significant individual differences emerged: the intervention was more effective for participants with higher baseline social anxiety and loneliness, and when a greater proportion of prosocial acts targeted weak social ties and a smaller proportion targeted strangers. CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the importance of identifying individual differences-for whom and under what conditions prosociality-based interventions are most effective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".