social media makes it easier than ever to create large groups, but those “virtual” groups are not the same as in-person connections; they do not satisfy the need for belonging in the same way. As Twenge and her coauthors put it: It is worth remembering that humans’ neural architecture evolved under conditions of close, mostly continuous face-to-face contact with others (including non-visual and non-auditory contact; i.e., touch, olfaction), and that a decrease in or removal of a system’s key inputs may risk destabilization of the system.
