UCLA is betting on one professor’s solution to college students’ loneliness crisis.
Resonance, an app created by psychology professor Matthew Lieberman, is partnering with UCLA Student Affairs and Enrollment Management to help users form friendships based on their compatibility. The app, which will be free for all UCLA students for the 2026-27 academic year, matches users with potential friends based on their answers to a series of questions about their personalities, Lieberman said.
Lieberman said he created the app in 2022 after asking his students about their experiences with loneliness. About 65% of the students in his UCLA class reported experiencing loneliness, having difficulty making friends and not having as many close friends as they wanted, he said.
That phenomenon applies beyond Lieberman’s class: 54% of nearly 65,000 students surveyed across more than 120 colleges in the United States reported feeling lonely, according to a 2026 study published in the Journal of American College Health.
“Resonance is built to both find them the friends and then help ease them into actually going from being strangers to real connections,” Lieberman said.
Following a pilot test of Resonance in 2023 – which involved about 2,000 UCLA transfer student users – students reported a 41% reduction in loneliness, Lieberman said.
In addition to one-on-one connections, users can join specific online communities based on shared characteristics or interests, he said. At UCLA, for example, students can join groups with people of the same year or major.
Gavin Liu, a first-year cognitive science student and Resonance user, said he signed up for the app this summer because it offers a less intimidating way to meet people compared to social media.
“If I find a profile on Instagram, I probably wouldn’t DM them because there’s a risk of them not replying to me,” he said. “But with an app like Resonance, being able to know that someone is at least similar with you in terms of personality, or compatible with you in personality, … there’s a lot less risk involved.”
The app could be especially helpful for incoming students transitioning from high school to college, Liu said.
“It’s hard to go through such a big change in your life by yourself,” he said. “If you have somebody who’s going through the same thing and you can share your feelings with, truly, I think anybody would kill to have that.”
Some students might feel less comfortable making connections face to face, said Karen Hedges, the director of UCLA’s Financial Education, Loan and Support Services, who pushed for UCLA to partner with the app.
Hedges said helping students build connections is already a priority for UCLA’s Student Affairs office, adding that she sees Resonance as another tool for students to meet people beyond those they encounter in their classes or residence halls.
Lieberman said he isn’t measuring the app’s success by how long students stay on the platform but by the connections they make through it.
“Our goal is the number of meaningful connections a person makes,” he said. “If a person leaves the app because they’ve made all the connections they can handle, we’ve won. We’ve succeeded.”
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