Two preregistered diary investigations tracked the connection between viewing singlehood as an opportunity for personal development and measures of wellbeing among unmarried adults. Researchers found that this belief aligned with greater satisfaction about being single and reduced anxiety about one's unmarried status. However, when they examined whether the specific activities people engaged in on a given day predicted their feelings the next day, those experiences largely lost their predictive power. A third study, designed as an experiment to test whether such beliefs could be deliberately strengthened, failed to produce measurable shifts in how participants viewed singlehood.
The investigation involved 130 single adults at a Canadian university who rated their agreement with five statements, including the assertion that "Being single has the potential to make me grow as a person in the future," on a scale of one to seven. These participants then completed daily diary entries over a fourteen-day period. A separate cohort of 146 individuals completed the same initial assessment but submitted weekly entries across six weeks instead.
According to research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin on August 6 by Elina Moreno, Yuthika U. Girme, Anastasiia Burik and Sarah C. E. Stanton, agreement with growth-oriented statements about singlehood corresponded with increased satisfaction with being single, diminished fear of being single, and somewhat weaker associations with two broader wellbeing indicators. While this finding echoes conventional wisdom about the importance of mindset, the diary data revealed a more nuanced picture that shifted depending on the timeframe examined.
Same-day patterns versus next-day outcomes
In the fourteen-day diary study, the initial belief measurement predicted that day's satisfaction with singlehood (B = 0.70), reduced fear of being single (B = −0.39), and more modestly, psychological need fulfillment (B = 0.15) and life satisfaction (B = 0.18). The belief also correlated with how much self-expanding activity participants reported experiencing that day (B = 0.67), though this particular measure came from only 58 of the 130 participants, making all subsequent Study 1 findings about reported experiences dependent on this smaller subset.
When researchers incorporated the day's actual experiences into the statistical model, the results diverged sharply. Satisfaction and fear remained significant predictors. Need fulfillment and life satisfaction disappeared from significance. The two outcomes that persisted were those specifically about singlehood; the two that vanished concerned general life quality, suggesting that broader wellbeing may depend more on what people actually did than on what they believed, though this comparison involved different sample sizes—all 130 for one model and 58 for the other—limiting the strength of any conclusion.
The following day presented a different story. In analyses the researchers designated as exploratory rather than preregistered, the belief continued to predict the next day's experiences, lower fear, higher satisfaction with being single, and slightly greater need fulfillment (B = 0.10) even after accounting for the same day's scores. The experiences themselves, however, did not significantly forecast any of these outcomes, and the chain of influence that operated within a single day broke down across days: all four indirect effects contained zero within their confidence intervals.
The weekly diary's exploratory lag analysis tightened this finding further. At that frequency, the belief showed no significant prediction of the following week's experiences at all (B = 0.01, t = 0.14), and by the subsequent week only the two singlehood-specific outcomes continued to shift. Life satisfaction remained unchanged in both studies, at both time intervals.
The two components thus displayed different persistence patterns in the data. Actions generated benefits that were immediate. Beliefs maintained their predictive capacity, though primarily for how individuals felt about their unmarried status. The sole exception was Study 1's next-day need fulfillment, which the researchers noted appeared only in that study and failed to extend into the following week.
A prime that shifted mood but not conviction
Since diary studies cannot establish causation, the team conducted a third preregistered experiment involving 324 single adults recruited through CloudResearch in June 2025, with ages spanning from 18 to 76. Participants in one group of 153 enumerated and described three routine, regular or predictable activities they might pursue as single individuals. A second group of 171 listed three novel, exciting or spontaneous activities instead.
The manipulation check did not succeed. Belief scores reached 5.16 in the control condition and 5.36 in the treatment condition, a difference the researchers reported at p = .128, insufficient to demonstrate that the belief had shifted. Fear of being single showed no meaningful difference. Neither did singlehood satisfaction (p = .082), need fulfillment, or negative mood. The paper's heading for this discussion reads "SSEP is Difficult to Prime."
Two outcomes did change, though both were modest: reported self-expanding experiences increased from 5.29 to 5.59 (d = 0.26), and positive mood rose from 2.86 to 3.08 (d = 0.26). The researchers interpreted this as the prompt activating participants' sense of their own experiences and providing a temporary mood boost without producing significant movement in the underlying belief.
Their exploratory analysis of written responses complicated even this interpretation. Among 972 activities listed—459 from the control group and 513 from the treatment group—the two conditions overlapped substantially on physical activity, hobbies and self-care. They diverged markedly elsewhere: basic needs and chores represented 22.44 percent of control lists and 0.20 percent of treatment lists, while getaways and holidays ran opposite, at 3.70 percent of control lists against 30.60 percent of treatment lists. The prompt clearly influenced what people wrote. It simply did not measurably alter what they believed.
All findings presented above appear as statistical coefficients. No researcher involved in this work met a study participant or examined a diary entry that had not already been converted into numerical form, and nothing in the analysis is clinical in nature.
The authors refrain from making a causal claim and explicitly acknowledge the possibility of reverse causation: individuals who are already content with singlehood and already pursuing interesting activities may be those who subsequently develop the belief that singlehood contains room for growth. They reference earlier research by Hughes and colleagues demonstrating that happier individuals show greater motivation to seek novel experiences. Additionally, their exploratory analyses identified that people less inclined to hold the growth belief included those single against their preference, those desiring a committed partnership, those who believed no one is complete without a partner, and those with lower self-esteem, suggesting such individuals may also resist a prompt of this type.
For individuals experiencing genuine distress about being single, professional support from a therapist or counselor represents the appropriate resource. This paper offers no evidence suggesting that a questionnaire item could serve as a substitute.
Half occurred in the company of friends
The weekly study asked participants to describe one self-expanding activity and identify who was present. Two researchers classified thirteen activity categories with 98 percent agreement and coded the social context with 96 percent agreement.
The activities themselves were unremarkable. Physical activity comprised 19.65 percent, parties and celebrations 15.33 percent, ordinary socializing 15.12 percent, dining out 9.29 percent, work or coursework 8.86 percent, hobbies 7.34 percent, holidays 6.70 percent, shopping 6.48 percent. Television watching accounted for 4.10 percent. Activities directed toward a romantic prospect ranked second from the bottom at 1.51 percent.
The social context table contains the paper's central claim and requires careful notation. Table 6 tallies activities rather than individuals: friends 50.11 percent, family 21.51 percent, alone 18.28 percent, acquaintances 6.88 percent, strangers 1.72 percent, a romantic interest 1.51 percent.
Two additional figures addressing roughly the same question appear elsewhere in the paper using different denominators. The Study 2 results section states that 83 percent of participants engaged in these activities with another person and places the solitary figure at 18. The general discussion indicates that 82 percent of single participants did them with non-romantic close others, where the table's friends-and-family rows total 71.62 percent, and gives the alone figure as 18.12 percent, which the authors characterize as approximately one in five. Three numbers, two stated denominators, one underlying question. This account relies on the table throughout, as it is the only version whose rows can be verified against each other.
By the table's own accounting, the solitary version of single-life flourishing represents something under a fifth of what these participants described. Half of it took place with friends. Another fifth occurred with family. The development that happens during singlehood, in this sample, predominantly happened alongside people the individual was not romantically involved with.
This raises a question the diaries were never designed to address. If the advantage resides in the activity itself, and the activity no longer significantly predicted anything by the following morning, and most of the activity occurred with friends and family anyway, how much of what gets categorized as thriving while single actually concerns singlehood itself?
Source: Silicon Canals
