If You Think Everyone Else Has More Friends, You're Not Alone

Greg Walton, a psychologist at Stanford University, studies how to correct the belief that we are alone in our fears of being left out. His work focuses on helping minority students who are underrepresented in STEM fields to overcome their own fears that they don't belong, and has demonstrated that doing so helps them improve academically and healthwise.

He says Whillans' study indicates that a broad swath of the population could benefit from things like having older students share stories of how they felt left out socially as freshmen, or encouraging teachers to frame criticism of students' work in a more positive way, he says.

"Everybody starts in different places. It's critical [in college] to explore and find new communities and places and new ways to develop. Sometimes that goes faster and sometimes that goes slower."