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The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. |
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Notes for this articlethe major hypothesis here is as follows:
A need to belong is a fundamental human motivation. That is, human beings have a pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum of quality of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships. Satisfying the drive involves two criteria: First, there is a need for frequent, affectively pleasant interactions with a few other people, and, Second, these interactions must take place in the context of a temporally stable and eduring framework of affective concern for each other’s welfare… A lack of belongingness should constitute severe deprivation and cause a variety of ill effects. A great deal of human behavior, emotion, and thought is caused by this fundamental interpersonal motive.
To start out, this paper has been a huge influence on much of my thinking over the last 5 years or so, and I keep coming back to it as my research topics change.
Baumeister and Leary do a great job summarizing a huge amount of research on human relationships, human relatedness, depression, loneliness, forced and unforced separation, children, death, bereavement, divorce, residential mobility, longing, love, friendship, changes in life cycle, etc. etc. Their main argument is that there is, indeed, a need to belong and, although they admit that this may not be substantially different from attachment theory, they do point out that the main difference between their theoretical framework and attachment is that they do not focus on specific needs that must be satisfied via specific relationships, instead, they suggest that this need can be satisfied in a variety of ways. In short, the focus here is on the commonality of a need to belong - across all cultures, across all people - whereas the attachment theory really focuses on differences in attachment styles (the need, however, is universal).
The theory starts off with the argument that people are social creatures for a reason and that reason is this need to belong - that is, people will take steps towards satisfying this need no matter where or who they are. These steps may or may not be succesful and failure at satisfying the need could have adverse health consequences (physical and psychological). They go through a set of arguments, backing up each with review of current and prior empirical results:
1. People are, on average, good at forming social bonds (granted some are better than others). Research has illustrated that we find the mere presence of people comforting and are capable of rapidly forming in-groups and exibiting in-group behavior around the silliest things (just take a look at Tajfel’s studies). 2. People do not like breaking bonds and will take steps to maintain established bonds as much as possible. In fact, they will exhibit behavior that is directed towards at least making assurances that bonds will be maintained even if it is known to both parties that maintenance is unlikely if not impossible. Even in temporary groups, formed for a specific reason or for an allocated time period, people tend to exhibit resistance to disbanding the group and, in some cases, attempt to organize reunions. Even though some relationships are limited in time by external factors, in general, people try to preserve relationships and avoid ending them. 3. People think about their relationships often, and their relationships affect their thinking. For example, people spontaneously classify incoming information in terms of social relationships (in terms of storage and recall). They store information differently for different kinds of relationships and very differently for people they know vs. people they do not know (the latter tends to receive a shallower treatment unless there is a perceived potential for a relationship) and even more strongly about in-group vs. out-group members (the latter tend to receive an extreme black-and-white treatment, while the former is far more nuanced). Belongingness has also been implicated in transactive memory studies. In general, people think about their relational partners far more than about other people. 4. Real, potential or imagined changes in one’s belongingness status will produce emotional responses - both positive and negative. In general, here they argue that if people feel a sense of belonging, they tend to be healthier and happier. If they feel ostracised or excluded, they tend to feel unhappy and, at times, can exhibit extreme physicial and psychological negative effects. Under the heading here goes positive and negative affect, depression, jealousy, loneliness, guilt, divorce and death - these are direct effects. There are also indirect effects such as feeling more upset when outperformed in a competitive environment by a relational partner than by a stranger. Positive achievements of partners, in other situations, tend to reflect positively on self, while when these achievements are in the same domain from which the self defines their identity, then they can generate substantial negative effects. In the end, many of the strongest emotions, people exhibit in response to belongingness and its changes. Research has shown that positive relationships and a good feeling of belongingness can have a very real positive impact on physical health, while ostracism and feeling of loneliness can literally make people physically sick. In other words, belongingness can assuage stress while absence of belongingness can produce it. 5. Deprivation of belongingness should lead to a variety of affiliative behaviors and cause various undersirable effects, including decrements in health, happiness, and adjustment. <== argument in paper! Deprivation of belongingness has been shown to be maladaptive and in fact, effects of such deprivation on mental illness parallel those on physical illness. This manifests both in children and in adults and can persist in adulthood through childhood trauma. Marital status has a strong correlatoin with illness (i.e. divorced and separated people are more likely to end up in the hospital, but I suspect this may be more so for men than for women, although I am not so sure about mental health numbers). Here we can talk about combat stress, crime, suicide, eating disorders, lying, cheating, stealing and the other side of the coin - social support as a buffer to stress, which manifests through presence of sufficient social relationships. In general, research suggests that well-being and happiness in life depend on having some close social ties. Social isolation is strongly related to various patterns of unhappiness and even physical sideeffects. There are, of course, personality effects here (i.e. extraverts are less likely to experience these kinds of maladaptive effects than introverts), but it also depends on childhood experiences, social structure, social opportunities, etc. 6. Not all deprivation is total, of course. Some deprivation can be understood as partial. So if belongingness manifests through two aspects - frequent interactions with a person and a stable, enduring context of concern and caring, absence of either one would constitute partial deprivation. For example, a person might interact with people all day ever day but not believe that any of them care - this would constitute partial deprivation (on the other hand, one might have lots of relationships where people care and exhibit concern but they are away and unavailable for interaction). Consider things like prison-time, especially for women-mothers, divorce where one parent is non-custodial or being a child of such a parent, moving away from friends and family due to an instance of residential mobility (although in this case, deprivation can be dealt with through substitution of relationships left behind by new relationships developed in the new location… hopefully). Researchers repeatedly observe that people cling to relationships and go to great lengths to preserve them despite costs and that these activities may decline in some cases, when relationships get substituted (as in residential mobility instances). Here authors argue that although long distance communication is available and can be used to substitute face-to-face interaction, people find phone (this is 1995) not fully satisfactory. This makes me think of the idea that even online communities sometimes (or at some point) start to experience a need for a face-to-face meeting, which they often organize. could these be related to belongingness as well? Also, mutuality is important. Caring and concern in relationships needs to be mutual for things to work. In fact, lack of mutuality can be extremely stressful and presence thereof can strengthen and improve the relationship itself and the sense of belongingness with it. 7. In the end, there is also the issue of satiation and substitution - people who have sufficient social bonds to satisfy the need to belong should be less interested in forming additional relationshpis than people who do not already have sufficient bonds. At some point in my proposal I suggested that being able to maintain more long distant relationships may play on this aspect of belongingness in precluding movers, especially introverts, from meeting new people, thus endangering their process of social integration in the new location. However, if the earlier point is right, if there is nothing so fulfilliing as face-to-face relationships and that peope will be compelled to seek them out regardless, just how much would the ability to maintain old relationships intervene? And how much would we maintain those relationships anyway? Would we invest the same amount of effort but make more contact more spurious, thus maintaining relationships at a shallower level? Back to the article, research has found that the majority of men and women seem to express a clear preference for a few close friendships over a large number of good but less intimate friendships - that is, closeness and intimacy care for a lot and we are willing to invest in those at the expense of a broader network. When people move, they resist to bonds breaking, but this resistance tends to diminish over time as they susbstitute relationships. So people seem to see a limited number of relationships, consistent with the view that the need to belong is subject to satiation and diminishing returns. The first few close socail bonds appear to be the most important, beyond which additional ones furnish eve lesser benefits. Partners can be substituted to some extent, although the most intimate relationships are extremely difficult to substitute.
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Posting History AbstractA hypothesized need to form and maintain strong, stable interpersonal relationships is evaluated in light of the empirical literature. The need is for frequent, nonaversive interactions within an ongoing relational bond. Consistent with the belongingness hypothesis, people form social attachments readily under most conditions and resist the dissolution of existing bonds. Belongingness appears to have multiple and strong effects on emotional patterns and on cognitive processes. Lack of attachments is linked to a variety of ill effects on health, adjustment, and well-being. Other evidence, such as that concerning satiation, substitution, and behavioral consequences, is likewise consistent with the hypothesized motivation. Several seeming counterexamples turned out not to disconfirm the hypothesis. Existing evidence supports the hypothesis that the need to belong is a powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation.
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