Mere Belonging

What it is

The paper, Mere belonging: The power of social connections, appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2012. It asked whether a minimal social connection, with no shared history and no real relationship, is enough to change how hard a person works on a task.

The authors created minimal links in several ways. In one, participants learned that they shared a birthday with another student. In another, participants belonged to an arbitrary group that was tied to a performance domain. Each manipulation increased motivation and persistence compared with control conditions. The authors expected the effect to arise because even a trivial connection creates socially shared goals around the performance task.

In effect

Mere belonging is a prediction of the need to belong turned into an experiment. If the wish for connection is strong, a thread should be enough to switch it on, and the four experiments found that a thread was enough to change motivation and persistence.

The result sits beside a developmental finding in the article Why Do We Need to Belong?: Harriet Over and Malinda Carpenter reported in 2009 that 5-year-olds who watched a shape being left out of a group went on to imitate a model more closely. Both studies show social motivation responding to very little. One shows it responding to a small link, the other to a witnessed exclusion.

For readers, the useful point is about how little a connection needs to carry. A shared detail, such as a birthday or a group label, is enough in these designs to make another person's goals feel relevant to one's own.

What it does not say

The experiments do not show that a shared birthday would change behaviour in every setting, or that the effect lasts beyond the task in which it was measured. The paper concerns motivation and persistence on performance tasks, and this page does not extend it to other outcomes.

Mere belonging also does not describe a full relationship. A minimal link raises motivation relative to a control condition, which is a different thing from the sustained bonds that Baumeister and Leary described in 1995 as the object of the need to belong.

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