Poor social performance of lonely people: lacking a skill or adopting a role?

A substantial literature has shown that lonely people differ from nonlonely people on a variety of measures of social performance. These differences have usually been conceptualized as a social skills deficit, which implies that lonely people lack the ability to perform appropriate and effective social behavior. Rather than a lack of this ability, the authors hypothesize that the adoption of passive interpersonal roles predisposes lonely people to exhibit inadequate performance.