Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

by Robert D. Putnam

social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called “civic virtue.” The difference is that “social capital” calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.

The term social capital itself turns out to have been independently invented at least six times over the twentieth century, each time to call attention to the ways in which our lives are made more productive by social ties.

individuals form connections that benefit our own interests. One pervasive strategem of ambitious job seekers is “networking,” for most of us get our jobs because of whom we know, not what we know—that is, our social capital, not our human capital.

a well-connected individual in a poorly connected society is not as productive as a well-connected individual in a well-connected society.

A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. If we don’t have to balance every exchange instantly, we can get a lot more accomplished. Trustworthiness lubricates social life. Frequent interaction among a diverse set of people tends to produce a norm of generalized reciprocity. Civic engagement and social capital entail mutual obligation and responsibility for action.

Therefore it is important to ask how the positive consequences of social capital—mutual support, cooperation, trust, institutional effectiveness—can be maximized and the negative manifestations—sectarianism, ethnocentrism, corruption—minimized.

Of all the dimensions along which forms of social capital vary, perhaps the most important is the distinction between bridging (or inclusive) and bonding (or exclusive).

Bonding social capital is good for undergirding specific reciprocity and mobilizing solidarity. Dense networks in ethnic enclaves, for example, provide crucial social and psychological support for less fortunate members of the community, while furnishing start-up financing, markets, and reliable labor for local entrepreneurs. Bridging networks, by contrast, are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion.

Bonding social capital is, as Xavier de Souza Briggs puts it, good for “getting by,” but bridging social capital is crucial for “getting ahead.”

Moreover, bridging social capital can generate broader identities and reciprocity, whereas bonding social capital bolsters our narrower selves.

Bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue, whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40.

In short, bonding and bridging are not “either-or” categories into which social networks can be neatly divided, but “more or less” dimensions along which we can compare different forms of social capital.

The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.

No doubt diligent detective work would turn up equally interesting and nuanced stories behind each of the plunging memberships, but the common features across these very diverse organizations—rapid growth to the 1960s, abruptly halted, followed by rapid decline—is a significant piece in the mosaic of evidence on changing civic involvement in American communities.

if the current rate of decline were to continue, clubs would become extinct in America within less than twenty years. Considering that such local associations have been a feature of American community life for several hundred years, it is remarkable to see them so high on the endangered species list.

Privatized religion may be morally compelling and psychically fulfilling, but it embodies less social capital. More people are “surfing” from congregation to congregation more frequently, so that while they may still be “religious,” they are less committed to a particular community of believers.

Both individually and congregationally, evangelicals are more likely to be involved in activities within their own religious community but are less likely to be involved in the broader community.

Today’s mainline Protestants and Catholics are more likely to be involved in volunteering and service in the wider community. Among mainline Protestants, and to a lesser extent Catholics, church attendance is less closely tied to religious volunteering but more closely tied to secular volunteering.

In both evangelical and mainline congregations, the religiously involved learn transferable civic skills, such as management and public speaking, but mainline Protestants are more likely to transfer them to the wider community.

Work-related organizations, both unions and business and professional organizations, have traditionally been among the most common forms of civic connectedness in America.

Perhaps the problem with union membership is not so much skepticism about the idea of “union” as skepticism about the idea of “membership.” As labor economist Peter Pestillo presciently observed two decades ago, “The young worker thinks primarily of himself. We are experiencing the cult of the individual, and labor is taking a beating preaching the comfort of coalition.”

Since more of us are working outside the home today than a generation ago, perhaps we have simply transferred more of our friendships, more of our civic discussions, and more of our community ties from the front porch to the water cooler.

Changes in the character of work, not just its quantity, might mean that it could account for a greater fraction of our social interaction. After a solitary day’s plowing, a farmer might welcome a church social or a Grange meeting, but many of us nowadays work in large, complex organizations, and attending yet another meeting in the evening is the last thing on our minds.

When philosophers speak in exalted tones of “civic engagement” and “democratic deliberation,” we are inclined to think of community associations and public life as the higher form of social involvement, but in everyday life, friendship and other informal types of sociability provide crucial social support.

In dorms and student unions of the 1960s and 1970s hundreds of thousands of college students spent millions of nights in seemingly endless games of bridge. The primary attraction of bridge and other card games was that they were highly social pastimes.

As recently as the mid-1970s nearly 40 percent of all American adults played cards at least once a month, and the ratio of monthly card players to monthly moviegoers was four to one. Between 1981 and 1999, however, the average frequency of card playing among American adults plunged from sixteen times per year to eight times per year. By 1999 card playing still outdrew movies four to three, but the gap was closing fast. Were this same steady rate of annual decline to continue unabated, card playing would disappear entirely in less than two decades. For a social practice that is more than six centuries old—and one that was booming only a few decades ago—the end is coming with dramatic suddenness.

In fact, because card playing is necessarily a social activity (except for a few solitaire addicts), its demise will probably accelerate toward the end. If no one else in your social circle plays cards, there is no reason for you to bother learning the game. For precisely the same reason that populations of endangered species often implode, so too card playing seems likely to become extinct even more rapidly than a straight-line projection would suggest.

The decline in card playing is concentrated among baby boomers and their children. A growing fraction of all card games occurs in retirement communities, the sociological equivalent of isolated ecological niches where endangered species often make a last stand.

My informal observation of Internet-based bridge games suggests that electronic players are focused entirely on the game itself, with very little social small talk, unlike traditional card games. Even fanatics of Microsoft Solitaire rarely play in a group, and any visitor to the new megacasinos that dot the land has chilling memories of acres of lonely “players” hunched in silence over one-armed bandits.

Individuals send more greeting cards as they age, especially if they are living alone, so card sales have been boosted in an aging America. However, at any given age Americans are now sending fewer greeting cards than people of that age did a generation ago.

A 1998 Department of Justice survey of twelve cities nationwide found that 11 percent of all residents had ever attended a neighborhood watch meeting to help protect themselves from crime (6 percent in the last year), as compared with 14 percent who kept a weapon at home, 15 percent who owned a guard dog, and 41 percent who installed extra locks.37 In short, we invest more in guns, dogs, and locks than in social capital for crime defense.

This decline in sports participation is not due to the aging of the U.S. population. On the contrary, the declines are sharpest among the young, whereas athleticism is actually growing among older Americans.

Virtually alone among major sports, only bowling has come close to holding its own in recent years.53 Bowling is the most popular competitive sport in America. Bowlers outnumber joggers, golfers, or softball players more than two to one, soccer players (including kids) by more than three to one, and tennis players or skiers by four to one.

The decline in league bowling threatens the livelihood of bowling lane proprietors, because according to the owner of one of the nation’s largest bowling lane chains, league bowlers consume three times as much beer and pizza as do solo bowlers, and the money in bowling is in the beer and pizza, not the balls and shoes. The broader social significance, however, lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo.

Human nature being what it is, we are unlikely to become hermits. On the other hand, our evidence also suggests that across a very wide range of activities, the last several decades have witnessed a striking diminution of regular contacts with our friends and neighbors. We spend less time in conversation over meals, we exchange visits less often, we engage less often in leisure activities that encourage casual social interaction, we spend more time watching (admittedly, some of it in the presence of others) and less time doing. We know our neighbors less well, and we see old friends less often. In short, it is not merely “do good” civic activities that engage us less, but also informal connecting.

As a matter of fact in contemporary America, those of us who belong to formal and informal social networks are more likely to give our time and money to good causes than those of us who are isolated socially.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century a new theme became a more prominent part of the rationale for altruism—helping the less fortunate was a part of our civic duty. As Andrew Carnegie, one of the new millionaires who emerged from the period of rapid growth following the Civil War, proclaimed in his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” wealth was a sacred trust which its possessor was bound to administer for the good of the community.

In round numbers, joiners are nearly ten times more generous with their time and money than nonjoiners. Social capital is a more powerful predictor of philanthropy than is financial capital.

As fund-raisers and volunteer organizers know well, simply being asked to give is a powerful stimulus to volunteering and philanthropy. When volunteers are asked how they happened to get involved in their particular activity, the most common answer is, “Someone asked me.” Conversely, when potential blood donors are asked why they haven’t given blood, the most common response is, “Nobody asked.”

When each of us can relax her guard a little, what economists term “transaction costs”—the costs of the everyday business of life, as well as the costs of commercial transactions—are reduced. This is no doubt why, as economists have recently discovered, trusting communities, other things being equal, have a measurable economic advantage.

A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life.

Generalized reciprocity is a community asset, but generalized gullibility is not.6 Trustworthiness, not simply trust, is the key ingredient.

In short, people who trust others are all-round good citizens, and those more engaged in community life are both more trusting and more trustworthy. Conversely, the civically disengaged believe themselves to be surrounded by miscreants and feel less constrained to be honest themselves.

To be sure, social distrust is not purely objective. It also to some extent reflects personal cynicism, paranoia, and even projections of one’s own dishonest inclinations.

According to a study by the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety, “violent aggressive driving” increased more than 50 percent between 1990 and 1996. The head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration conjectures that “road rage” (now common enough to have acquired a name) is a factor in twenty-eight thousand deaths per year.

Another automotive indicator of the decline in thin trust and reciprocity—the virtual disappearance of hitchhiking—seems to have left no statistical trace but is undeniable to motorists who lived through the 1940s and 1950s.

nearly 5 percent of all the people with whom Wuthnow spoke claimed to participate regularly in a self-help group, such as Alcoholics Anonymous or a local chapter of the Association for Retarded Citizens, and nearly as many said they belonged to book discussion groups and hobby clubs.

the small-group movement as a “quiet revolution” in American society, redefining community in a more fluid way, an antidote to social disconnectedness.

In some respects support groups substitute for other intimate ties that have been weakened in our fragmented society, serving people who are disconnected from more conventional social networks. For example, the rate of participation in such groups is two to four times higher among divorced and single people than among married people.

The social activism of the sixties greatly expanded the repertoire of readily available and legitimate forms of civic engagement.