“Should I study alone or with other people?” usually gets a one-word answer, but there are really three options. You can study alone. You can study with people, in a group that talks and works together. Or you can study alongside people: in a library, on a video call where everyone works in silence, with a “study with me” video, or with a 24/7 stream playing in the background.
Each one solves a different problem. Here is what each is good for, what the research says, and how to combine them.
What other people do to your focus
Psychologists have been studying the effect of simply having other people around for more than a century. In 1898, Norman Triplett reported that young people wound fishing reels faster when someone next to them was doing the same task. In 1965, Robert Zajonc proposed the explanation that still frames the topic: the presence of others raises arousal, which makes simple, well-practiced responses come more easily but makes new or complex tasks harder.
When Charles Bond and Linda Titus pooled 241 studies with nearly 24,000 participants in 1983, the picture was more modest than the theory. The presence of others sped up simple tasks, slowed down complex ones and impaired accuracy on complex tasks, but all of these effects were small, accounting for between 0.3% and 3% of the variance in a typical experiment.
Two practical lessons follow. Company helps most with tasks you already know how to do (practice problems, review, flashcards, tidying notes) and least with hard, new material. And the effect is small either way, so how you organize a session matters far more than whether someone else is in the room.
Studying alone
Solo study is where most real learning happens, especially the first pass through difficult material. Reading a dense chapter, working through a proof, writing an essay draft: these need sustained attention and your own pace, and other people mostly get in the way.
The downsides are familiar. It is easier to procrastinate, harder to tell whether you really understand something, and it can get lonely. A few things help:
- Structure the time. A timer with short breaks makes it easier to start and to keep going. See our Pomodoro guide.
- Test yourself. Explaining a topic out loud to an empty room, or answering questions from your notes, shows the gaps that rereading hides.
- Plan a check-in. A study partner you report to once a week, even briefly, adds accountability without the time cost of a group.
Studying in a group
A study group is worth the time when everyone does something they couldn’t easily do alone. The activities with the best support are the active ones.
Explaining to each other. Teaching and self-explaining are two of the eight “generative” learning strategies that Logan Fiorella and Richard Mayer reviewed in 2016, along with others such as summarizing, mapping and self-testing. All of them make you reorganize material and connect it to what you already know. Explaining a concept to someone who asks follow-up questions is a demanding version of that.
Quizzing each other. Retrieval practice works in a group just as it does with flashcards, and taking turns asking questions exposes the things everyone thought they knew.
Comparing notes and solutions. Other people catch what you missed in a lecture, and seeing a different solution to the same problem is often more useful than seeing the official one.
What works less well is rereading together, or treating “studying” as a social event. Memory research adds a specific caution. When people try to recall material together, the group typically remembers less than the same number of people recalling separately and pooling their answers, an effect known as collaborative inhibition. Recalling together can also spread errors from one person to the others. Under the right conditions, though, collaboration can improve memory.
A format that uses the strengths and avoids the traps:
- Prepare alone first. Everyone studies the material before the meeting. The group is for testing and explaining, not for learning things for the first time.
- Recall individually, then compare. Each person writes down what they remember, or solves the problem alone, before the group discusses it. This helps avoid collaborative inhibition.
- Take turns explaining. Give each person a topic to teach in five minutes, followed by questions.
- Quiz round. Ten minutes of questions drawn from everyone’s notes.
- End with a list: what is still unclear, who will look it up, and when you meet next.
Keep groups small enough that everyone has to take part, and agree on a start and an end time. A focused hour is worth more than a vague afternoon.
Studying alongside someone: study-with-me videos and body doubling
The third option is to work in parallel with people without really interacting. The oldest version is the library. Newer ones include video calls where everyone works with cameras on and microphones off, “study with me” videos (hours of footage of someone studying, often with a timer on screen) and 24/7 live streams.
A 2021 study by Yoonjoo Lee and colleagues, presented at CHI, the main academic conference on human-computer interaction, analyzed 30 “study with me” videos and interviewed 12 regular viewers. The viewers used the videos to create a study atmosphere they liked at very little cost, to get what the authors called “controllable peer pressure,” and for emotional support. In other words, the videos gave them some of the benefits of a library without leaving home.
In ADHD coaching and other neurodivergent communities, working in someone else’s presence is called body doubling. It is widely recommended there, but research on it is still thin. One small study presented in 2025 by Schuenke, Dickenson and Moore had 26 participants, some with ADHD, take reading-comprehension tests alone and with a body double while their EEG was recorded. It found no statistically significant differences between the two conditions, no consistent negative effects, and some promising trends for participants with ADHD who were not taking medication. The authors called body doubling a safe strategy that deserves more research, which is a fair summary of where the evidence stands.
A lofi stream like the one on our homepage is a lighter version of the same idea: no camera, no chat, nobody watching you. What it offers is a consistent signal that study time has started and a background that doesn’t change from day to day. For some people that is enough, and others need a real person on the other side. It costs nothing to find out which group you are in.
If you have ADHD, or think you might, strategies like these can be useful additions, but they don’t replace a professional assessment or support. A doctor or psychologist can help you work out what fits your situation.
Choosing for the task in front of you
| What you need to do | Best setting |
|---|---|
| Learn hard, new material for the first time | Alone, with a timer and few distractions |
| Memorize facts | Alone with flashcards, or a group quiz round |
| Check whether you really understand something | Explain it to a study partner or a group |
| Practice problems you already know how to solve | Alongside others, or a group that compares solutions |
| Get started when motivation is low | Alongside someone: library, silent video call, study-with-me video, stream |
| Prepare for an exam | Alone first, then one structured group session |
Most students end up with a mix: solo sessions for most of the week, one structured group session for testing and explaining, and some kind of company on the days when starting is the hardest part. For the solo sessions, a calm study space and good note-taking habits do a lot of the work.
Sources
- Triplett, N. (1898). The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition. The American Journal of Psychology, 9(4), 507–533.
- Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149(3681), 269–274.
- Bond, C. F., & Titus, L. J. (1983). Social facilitation: A meta-analysis of 241 studies. Psychological Bulletin, 94(2), 265–292.
- Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Eight ways to promote generative learning. Educational Psychology Review, 28(4), 717–741.
- Rajaram, S., & Pereira-Pasarin, L. (2010). Collaborative memory: Cognitive research and theory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(6), 649–663.
- Lee, Y., Chung, J., Song, J., Chang, M., & Kim, J. (2021). Personalizing ambience and illusionary presence: How people use “study with me” videos to create effective studying environments. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
- Schuenke, Dickenson, & Moore (2025). Reading between the lines: Exploring body doubling in ADHD using EEG. Proceedings of the 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025).
