If You Dine Alone, What Will People Think of You?

by Bella DePaulo, author of the Psychology Today blog

On a beautiful summer evening at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, back when I lived on the East Coast, I stopped for dinner at an outdoor café. My server lingered a while each time she appeared, offering conversation along with the refills of my iced tea. I wondered - did she think I was uncomfortable dining alone?

In fact, I was feeling serene. I had spent a busy, boisterous day with three guys I adore - one of my brothers and his two sons. They had already left. I wanted to stay and savor in solitude the warm breezes, fresh seafood, and the parade of people passing by.

It wasn't just my server who seemed surprised and a bit protective of her lone diner. The hostess who seated me also did the solo-diner double take, glancing an extra time or two to see whether there really was someone else with me, who had just wandered off for a moment. At least she did not ask the "just one?" question. (Nor did a spotlight follow me to my table, as happened to Steve Martin in The Lonely Guy.)

While people-watching, it struck me that no one else seemed to be at the Inner Harbor on their own. I observed intently for 20 minutes, and never spotted even one person who seemed to be there without another person or group alongside them. Wasn't there anyone else within driving distance of the Inner Harbor who would have enjoyed heading off on their own to saunter around on such a perfect evening?

I have always thought it odd that in a nation supposedly known for its rugged individualists and daring adventurers, so many people seem reluctant to venture on their own into safe and comfortable places such as restaurants and movie theaters. When I first looked for research on the topic, I didn't find much. There was a study published in 1981 that reported that people seem more distressed at the prospect of walking into a restaurant alone than walking into an empty room alone, staying home alone, or living alone.

Why the hesitation? The celebrated sociologist, Erving Goffman, offered one explanation: "To attend alone is to expose oneself as possibly not being able to muster up companionship."

Yeah, I know. You didn't need a sociologist to tell you that if you go out to dinner on your own, other people will think you are a loser.

I'm a social psychologist, though, and a numbers-loving one at that. No matter how strong my intuition may be, and how many others may seem to agree with me, I want to see the relevant research. What do other people really think when they see someone dining alone?

Because there were no relevant studies out there, I decided to do my own. My collaborators (Wendy Morris and Cathy Popp) and I took pictures of pairs of heterosexual couples dining together - one couple on each side of a table in a restaurant. Some of the couples were in their 20s or 30s, and others were a decade or two older.

Then we took each of the pictures and used some computer wizardry to make people disappear. Erase one of the men, and now a woman appears to be dining with a couple. Erase the other man, and she appears to be dining with another woman. Erase the other woman instead of the man, and she appears to be dining with a man. Erase all of the other people, and now she is dining alone. (We did the same thing with each of the diners - male and female, younger and older.)

We thought it was important to do the study this way so that each of the people we photographed (with their permission) would have the exact same posture and expression regardless of whether she or he appeared to be with other people or alone. If our intuitions were correct, the diners would be perceived (for example) as sadder when seated alone than with others - even though they actually had identical expressions each time.

We brought our pictures to a shopping mall, and asked adults to tell us why a designated person in the picture went out to dinner that evening. When the picture was of a person dining solo, we asked them to tell us why they thought the person went out to dinner alone.

Now we had hundreds of responses and comments made by the shoppers. What do you think they said? Focus especially on the solo diners. Can you guess what the shoppers said about the people who appeared to be dining on their own, compared to when the same people were pictured with others?

Do you think that particular categories of solo diners were judged more harshly than others? (For example, men vs women? Older vs younger?)

Study Results:

I don't mean that no one ever has a snide thought about a person who is dining solo. The shoppers who commented on our photos did have some unkind things to say about the solo diners [...]. But, they also made many neutral and positive observations. Most importantly, the people who commented on the pictures were no more likely to say anything negative (and no less likely to say anything positive) when the person in the picture was dining solo than when the same person was with other people.

We looked at all sorts of factors to see if they mattered - for example, was the person in the picture a male or a female? A younger adult or an older one? Were the people making the comments male or female? Single or married? No matter what we included in the analyses, the answer was always the same - there were no consistent differences in how a person was judged depending on whether that person was dining solo vs. with one or more other people.

Let me explain. Some negative comments were made about the solo diners, as we anticipated. For example, people said things like, "He is lonely," "Doesn't have many friends," "She looks depressed."

But look at some of the other comments we got:

"Enjoying a few good peaceful moments."
"She just wanted to eat by herself."
"Wanted to relax."
"Traveling."
"He seems to be enjoying his dinner."
"Wanted time to ponder."
And my favorite: "He is secure."

For comparison, let me tell you about some of the comments that were made about the pictures that showed one man and one woman dining together. We expected those pictures to elicit mostly kind words. We did get some positive comments. For example, people said that the man was out to "dinner with his wife for fun;" or that the two are having a "fine, quiet conversation." Others said that "they are very close," or that "they enjoy spending time together."

But now look at some of the other comments that were made about the male-female pairs:

They went to dinner "to have a talk because their relationship needs some mending."
"She is upset."
"He thought he liked her."
They wanted to "get away from the children."
She went out to dinner with him "out of obligation - she's married to him."

We found the same mix of some positive, some negative, some neutral comments for all of the different sets of diners we studied - same-sex pairs, one person sitting across from a male and a female, or a male and a female on each side of the table.

[...]

The studies were conducted by Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues to document what they call "the spotlight effect" - "people's tendency to overestimate the extent to which their behavior and appearance are noticed and evaluated by others."

Here's an example of one of the studies. College students were assigned to wear a t-shirt with a picture of Barry Manilow - how embarrassing! Then they had to knock on a door of another room, where students were filling out a questionnaire, and speak briefly to the experimenter in that room. Subsequently, they were asked to estimate how many of the students had noticed that they were sporting a Barry Manilow t-shirt. They were far more mortified than they needed to be - only half as many students had noticed and remembered their t-shirt than they feared.

[...]

So here's to all the cool solo diners out there!

Bella DePaulo (Ph.D., Harvard, 1979) is a social psychologist and the author of Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (St. Martin's Press).