Mark Leary

Who they are

Mark Leary is the Garonzik Family Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, where he moved in 2006 after posts at Denison University, the University of Texas at Austin and Wake Forest University. His work covers social motivation, self-presentation, emotion and self-relevant thought, which is to say the various ways people monitor and manage how they are seen.

The paper he is best known for is the 1995 review written with Roy Baumeister in Psychological Bulletin. It argued that the desire for interpersonal attachment is a fundamental motivation rather than a preference, and assembled evidence from psychology, sociology, anthropology and evolutionary biology behind the claim. It has been cited tens of thousands of times and it has held. Read the structure of the argument and it is consistent throughout: belonging matters because its absence damages people, in mental health, physical health and cognition. It establishes with unusual confidence that being outside a group is expensive. It says nothing about the terms of getting inside one.

His own contribution is sociometer theory, set out in the same year with Ellen Tambor, Sonja Terdal and Deborah Downs. The proposal is that the self-esteem system evolved as a monitor of social acceptance: it is an internal gauge that tracks the degree to which a person is being included or excluded by others, and it alerts them to the risk of exclusion. What looks like a motive to maintain a good opinion of oneself is, on this account, a motive to avoid social devaluation. He developed the theory further in a 2005 review, reframing what the gauge tracks as relational value, the extent to which other people regard a relationship with you as worth having.

Both lines say the same thing from different angles. Belonging is not a comfort, it is infrastructure, and the equipment that reports on it runs whether you consult it or not.

Key papers

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. The canonical statement of belonging as a fundamental motivation. Leary is second author on the paper the field files under Baumeister's name.

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. Five studies testing the claim that state self-esteem tracks perceived acceptance and rejection.

Leary, M. R. (2005), "Sociometer Theory and the Pursuit of Relational Value: Getting to the Root of Self-Esteem," European Review of Social Psychology, 16, 75-111. The theory restated around relational value.

Key ideas

The need to belong is a fundamental motivation rather than a preference, supported across four disciplines and thirty years of citation.

Self-esteem is a gauge, not a reservoir. It reports on how acceptable you currently are to other people.

The apparent motive to protect self-esteem is better read as a motive to avoid social devaluation and rejection.

What the gauge measures is relational value: whether others treat a relationship with you as worth keeping.

The belongingness literature prices the cost of exclusion very well and has never priced the cost of membership.

Concepts on this site

Need to Belong

Ostracism

Belonging

Find them elsewhere

Duke faculty profile confirmed, and the Scholar profile is verified at duke.edu with a matching Duke affiliation. A markleary.bsky.social account exists but carries no biography, so it was not recorded

Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.

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