WASHINGTON — Americans are making too many solo dinner reservations.

That was one takeaway from the annual World Happiness Report, which was released Thursday and showed that the United States had dipped to its lowest slot in the country rankings — 24th — after being ranked as high as 11th in 2012, the first year of the report.

Americans are increasingly miserable, the report says, and it explored a possible indicator: The number of Americans eating alone has risen exponentially this century.

In 2023, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, about a quarter of Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day, an increase of 53% since 2003.

“The extent to which you share meals is predictive of the social support you have, the pro-social behaviors you exhibit and the trust you have in others,” Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a University of Oxford professor and an author of the report, said in an interview.

— The New York Times