Why Do We Need to Belong?
Baumeister and Leary argued in 1995 that belonging is a motivation, not a preference. A motive makes predictions, and experiments since then have tested several of them.
Answer to the question
Why do we need to belong?
Baumeister and Leary argued in 1995 that the wish for frequent, pleasant, lasting bonds is a fundamental human motivation rather than a preference. Later experiments show the motive switching on after minimal links, appearing in 5-year-olds, being tracked by self-esteem and varying between individuals.
Key takeaways
- Baumeister and Leary (1995) reviewed existing research and argued that the need to belong is a fundamental motivation: people form attachments readily, resist losing them, and think and feel in ways shaped by belonging.
- Walton and colleagues (2012) ran four experiments in which minimal links, such as a shared birthday or an arbitrary group, raised motivation and persistence compared with controls.
- Over and Carpenter (2009) found that 5-year-olds who watched a shape being left out of a group copied a model's actions more closely than control children did.
- Leary and colleagues (1995) reported five studies in which self-esteem tracked acceptance, and fell with exclusion only when the reason was personal, not random.
- Will Storr describes a second drive, to get ahead inside the group, that these belonging experiments do not test.
A shared birthday with another student is not much to go on, yet in a set of four experiments links as thin as that raised people's motivation and persistence. A strong claim about belonging predicts results like that. The claim came from Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, who argued that the need to belong is a fundamental human motivation, a wish for frequent, pleasant contact with the same people over time. A motive of that strength should switch on at the faintest cue. Will Storr's The Status Game starts from a pairing he takes from the psychologist Robert Hogan: people need to get along with a group before they try to get ahead in it.
The word need carries a commitment. A preference can be met or ignored, while a need predicts behaviour: people work to satisfy it, resist its loss, and ease off once it is met. Baumeister and Leary checked a large body of existing research for the signs of a need and reported finding them:
- People form social attachments readily, in almost any circumstance.
- They resist losing the attachments they already have.
- Belongingness shapes how they feel and how they think.
- The need can be filled, and partly met by substitutes.
Several apparent counterexamples did not, in their analysis, contradict the hypothesis.
Can a Bond Form From Almost Nothing at All?
The minimal links in those four experiments took more than one form. Some participants learned that they shared a birthday with another student. Others were placed in an arbitrary group tied to a performance domain. Every version of the link raised motivation and persistence compared with control conditions. Gregory Walton and his co-authors published the work under the title Mere belonging, and they expected the effect to come from a goal that feels shared, which even a trivial tie seems able to create.
Children show the same sensitivity early. In a study by Harriet Over and Malinda Carpenter, 5-year-olds watched either a video in which one shape was left out by a group of other shapes or a control video. Afterwards the children who had seen the exclusion copied a model's actions more closely than the others, the pattern known as affiliative imitation, copying that serves to bond. None of them had been excluded. Watching was enough, a milder relative of the exclusion experiments described in The Invisible Weight of Belonging, where the person left out is the participant.
How Does the Mind Keep Track of Its Acceptance?
Before anyone can act on the need, something has to register it. Leary proposed in 1995, with Ellen Tambor, Sonja Terdal and Deborah Downs, that self-esteem does this job. On their sociometer model, self-esteem is a gauge that monitors how included a person is and warns of possible exclusion. Across five studies, state self-esteem moved with whether people expected acceptance or rejection, felt inclusion in a real situation tracked self-esteem, and trait self-esteem went with how included people generally felt.
The sharpest result concerns the reason for exclusion. Being excluded lowered self-esteem only when the reason was personal, and not when the exclusion was random. That pattern suggests the gauge reads acceptance by particular people on grounds that concern the individual, rather than a simple count of company.
People do not carry the same amount of the need to belong, and the variation is a finding in its own right. The Need to Belong Scale measures how strongly individuals want acceptance and belonging, and a 2013 paper gathered nine studies of its construct validity. Scores overlapped with extraversion and with affiliation motivation but stayed distinct from both, so the scale does not simply measure sociability. Higher scores went with stronger emotional reactions to rejection, with values centred on relationships, and with identities defined by social attributes.
By 2010 the evidence had grown enough to need stocktaking, and Judith Gere and Geoff MacDonald reviewed what had accumulated since Baumeister and Leary made their case. Their review covered fast cognitive, emotional and behavioural responses to acceptance and rejection, the biological foundations the need might rest on, and the part played by individual differences. It concluded that the picture had grown more complicated, that findings conflicted in places, and that future work should look harder at underlying processes and at who differs from whom.
What Comes After Getting Along With Other People?
Everything above concerns the first of the two drives, the need to belong and how it behaves. It shows how little it takes to start wanting a place among others and how the wish is reported to the self. It does not say which group a person will choose, what rank they will want in it, or what they will do to improve it. Storr's book is about that second drive, argued for general readers from research across several fields.
He describes people as taking much of their standing from the groups they belong to, and as tending to adopt the views of high-status people within them. On that picture the circle that accepts someone becomes the circle whose esteem they then pursue. Being accepted for something about oneself is already the start of being valued for it, which is where a gauge that responds to personal reasons rather than to chance meets the wish to get ahead.
Common questions
Why do we need to belong?
Baumeister and Leary argued in 1995 that the wish for frequent, pleasant, lasting bonds is a fundamental human motivation rather than a preference. Later experiments show the motive switching on after minimal links, appearing in 5-year-olds, being tracked by self-esteem and varying between individuals.
What is the need to belong scale?
The Need to Belong Scale measures how strongly a person wants acceptance and belonging. Leary and colleagues reported nine validity studies in 2013, finding that scores overlap with extraversion and affiliation motivation without being the same thing.
Does the need to belong explain status seeking?
The belonging research explains why people want a place among others. Will Storr argues in The Status Game that a second drive, to get ahead within the group, operates inside the first, and the belonging experiments reviewed here do not test that second drive.
Sources
Storr, W. (2021). The Status Game. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Status Game.
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). “The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.” Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497 https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
Walton, G. M., Cohen, G. L., Cwir, D., & Spencer, S. J. (2012). “Mere belonging: The power of social connections.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(3), 513-532. doi:10.1037/a0025731 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025731
Over, H., & Carpenter, M. (2009). “Priming third-party ostracism increases affiliative imitation in children.” Developmental Science, 12(3), F1-F8. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00820.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00820.x
Leary, M. R., Tambor, E. S., Terdal, S. K., & Downs, D. L. (1995). “Self-esteem as an interpersonal monitor: The sociometer hypothesis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(3), 518-530. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.68.3.518 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.68.3.518
Leary, M. R., Kelly, K. M., Cottrell, C. A., & Schreindorfer, L. S. (2013). “Construct validity of the Need to Belong Scale: Mapping the nomological network.” Journal of Personality Assessment, 95(6), 610-624. doi:10.1080/00223891.2013.819511 https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2013.819511
Gere, J., & MacDonald, G. (2010). “An update of the empirical case for the need to belong.” The Journal of Individual Psychology, 66(1). Library record: https://library.gunadarma.ac.id/ecollection/jurnal/an-update-of-the-empirical-case-for-the-need-to-belong