Belong

We may be in our cozy apartment, but after a while, it feels sadly empty if we are not hosting friends, colleagues, or family to hang out. We could be enjoying our newest ride around the neighborhood, but it quickly gets old if we don’t take someone out for a spin. We are enjoying a beautiful sunset in paradise, book in hand, and our favorite drink. Chances are we feel the necessity to take a picture and immediately share the image. Sometimes, we do or say things that go against who we are, just so we are accepted in a group that we think represents us. We work for money, but when needs meet ends, we work for recognition. And what is recognition but feel valued by our community, feeling connected? We can’t, it seems, simply enjoy the good things of life by ourselves. We need the tribe.

Belongingness hypothesis

Humans need a minimum amount of good, long, and stable relationships. Belongingness is essential for our well-being, our happiness. Our desire to form and maintain social bonds has been evolutionarily selected due to its clear benefit: obtaining and sharing food (e.g., from collaborative hunting to crop harvesting), caring for children (e.g., from grandma to daycare), defense (e.g., from predators to the neighbor’s ridings), …

In their classic piece [1], Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary reviewed the evidence of why the “need to belong” is innate to all humans:

Social bonds emerge easily

We tend to identify with one or another given group of people. Even when groups are created artificially for an experiment or an impromptu basketball game, we quickly identify with our given group. In fact, people tend to develop social bonds simply because of their proximity to each other (who are your best friends from childhood?). Once social bonds arise, we tend to invest quite a lot amount of time and energy in maintaining those relationships. Worth the effort or sunk costs?

Breaking bonds is tough

People seek to be connected through positive relationships. Hence, we generally avoid breaking social bonds (especially those that we worked hard to establish, to begin with). Even when our relationships are temporary (e.g., we move to a different town or country), we promise to our loved ones and friends that we will remain in regular contact, send postcards, and even rely on social rituals to seal the deal (e.g., farewell parties). In some cases, it is hard even to break negative relationships due to the stress involved in the process (divorces are not fun).

Good relationships require tons of mental effort

Do you memorize the birthday, favorite food, or music of all your acquaintances? It’s likely that you save the energy and time for your closest relationships only. Group belonging plays an important role here. We tend to categorize others than are not close to us in a more polarize fashion: They are smart or dumb, good or bad. However, when thinking or talking about our closest friends, we invest more effort processing the information about them in a more complex way (e.g., she is not negative; she’s just realistic). It is likely that the more time we spend processing and memorizing details about someone, the more reasons we’ll find to value the person, especially when we start reflecting ourselves on them.

Increased belongingness = more positive emotions (and vice versa)

Happiness is correlated with having some close personal relationships. We feel better when we are accepted as a member of our desired relationships, team, urban tribe. On the other hand, social isolation leads to unhappy, anxious, and depressed humans. When we feel that someone is threatening our relationships (whether it is real or not), we feel jealous. It means that we feel excluded, not belonging, lonely. A basic function of emotions is to drive our behavior towards establishing meaningful bonds with others. Social contact alone cannot substitute true connections: Big cities are full of lonely people.

Belongingness deprivation makes us unhappy and sick

Happily married couples are less likely to suffer psychological or any other health problems after a stressful day than other folks. Some experiments indicate that married people are more likely to survive cancer. It seems that being deprived of belongingness has a direct negative impact on our immune system (as measured by levels of stress hormones in the bloodstream). These effects are parallel to those in mental illness: Admissions in mental hospitals are higher among divorced (or separated) adults. Those with eating disorders tend to have issues of separation from their mothers as children. Veterans that feel more socially supported are less likely to experience PTSD. Some studies link suicide with social integration failure. And crime? Sometimes gangs serve as surrogate “family.”

Caring without interaction

Prisoners might have family and loved ones that they value the most and who care for them. Yet, the lack of sufficient interaction makes them suffer. A perhaps closer example is that of long-distance (or commuter) relationships. In such cases, people develop close interpersonal bonds, but they lack direct interaction. Research on these relationships indicates that the partners are not fully satisfied with, even when regular telephone conversations are involved. In my experience, Zoom, WhatsApp, or Skype calls don’t suffice either.

Interaction without caring

Interactions are not sufficient. Folks need reals bonds with caring. Most people prefer to have a handful of close friends that they can relate to than many acquaintances or other interactions with randos, even when those interactions are intimate.

Are people seeking others that will care for them? Yes, but that’s not enough. One study of relationship satisfaction as a function of costs and benefits found that people preferred relations in which the different parties receive and give care. Surprise surprise, love needs to be mutual to be satisfactory.

The special case of marriage (or functionally equivalent relationships):

Mutually caring bonds are essential for well-being. Happily married people tend to be healthier. It is not the fact of being married, it’s about having supportive social bonds. However, bad marriages are worse than being alone in terms of their effects on happiness and physical or mental health (as measured by decreased immune function). There is a link between a bad relationship with partners leading to depression. Those romantically involved depressed adults tend to be characterized by fearful avoidance and anxious ambivalence to their partners.

Should the relationships be broken if there are children in the mix? Some research studies conclude that the effects on them created by the conflict between the parents are worse than the separation itself.

Enough

People only need a small amount of good social bonds to be happy, and these are, to some extent, interchangeable. For example, in terms of happiness, it seems that close relationships with friends could be a substitute, to some extent, for the need of having children. However, not all relationships are the same. Children cannot be substituted for other relationships once you have them. And a friendship doesn’t work as a romantic relationship surrogate. But when a romantic relationship ends (e.g., separation, dead), another of the same kind could help. In general, people without intimate partners spend a good amount of time in activities to find partners, but once they are involved in a serious romantic relation again, they also tend to spend less time with friends. However, when our intimate relationship has problems, having good sympathetic friends is very helpful. Don’t you have any friend that went MIA for a period of time just to re-appear again when things go sour in their personal life?

The belonging biology

Baumeister and Leary conclude that the need to belong was selected over the course of human evolution in relation to living in small groups (due to its various advantages when competing with loners). Our large brain would have evolved as a byproduct to process the necessary information of the social complexities. How does the brain mediate our tendency to form bonds? Drugs. Some studies indicate that forming and validating relationships stimulate the production of opioids, whereas dissolving relationships stops it.

Social implications

The need to belong, our need for inter-personal bonds could be one of the most integrative ways to understand human nature. These are some examples:

• Loneliness, anxiety, depression, and other neurotic and destructive behaviors, they can reflect a failure in meetings one’s belongingness needs.

• In every society, social inclusion is used as a reward, where exclusion is used as a punishment for those who don’t share the same values (don’t play by the rules of the tribe). Fame is an example of the former (e.g., Instagram followers), solitary confinement in prison the worst example of the second.

• Even shy people want to form bonds with other people, but they fear being rejected. Shyness acts as a self-protection mechanism.

• Belongingness may play an essential role in religion: The need to believe or the need to belong?

• People tend to have more prejudices (of every kind imaginable) against members of groups for which they have little to not opportunities to belong. Intra-group belongingness is reinforced at the expense of other groups from which we feel excluded.

• Redefining one’s belongingness is difficult. The cruel violence experienced in Rwanda, D. R. Congo (still ongoing), or former Yugoslavia, to name a few, might reflect the collision between pre-existing rival groups and new national identities.

Most of these express themselves in a variety of forms in our daily life.

Standing

The Baumeister and Leary study dates from the mid-1990s. Are there other sources of information that corroborate their ideas today?

Okinawa is home to some of the oldest people on the planet. These centennial folks have some tips for a long, happy life to share with us. Besides regular exercise, they preach that having a healthy social life is essential. “Ikigai” is a personal driving force that emerges from dedicating oneself to a passion, a hobby, or the care of grandchildren. “Moai” is a local tradition related to companionship and group support between the island residents, one that can last for decades.

A Harvard study has been following men from wealthy and poor backgrounds since 1938 (and their descendants now). The current research leader concludes that “Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.”

Another experiment supports the idea that we interact socially following the “hedonic-flexibility principle.” Essentially, we humans use happiness as a sort of energy source for making and maintaining social bonds. When we feel happy, we go out of our way to engage with others, including foreigners. We risk potentially unpleasant moments for the possibility of making new, better friends or opportunities. When we are sad, we seek the company of our dear friends.

Researchers Shimon Saphire-Bernstein and Shelley Taylor also found a correlation between “Close relationships and happiness” [2]. However, given how human memory works, they conclude:

To what extent does happiness lead people to construe their relationships as satisfying, and to what extent do satisfying relationships lead to happiness?

We worry about our relationships a lot. In some cases, we spend much of our waking and sleeping time figuring out the best way through some tense social situation with a friend, co-worker, spouse, children, parents… Sometimes, we avoid having that necessary but difficult conversation (which most of the time means just being honest) because we fear the impact that they might have on our current relationships. So, we look the other way or escape to the cloud [3]. Sometimes, we chose the comfort of our day-to-day routines at the expense of facing obstacles in search of better possibilities. Some brave ones strive to be a better version of themselves, but it can be at the expense of being expelled from the tribe.

The “need to belong” might have evolved through natural selection due to the advantages of socially cohesive groups relative to isolated individuals. However, it’s not a human trait. It is also present in primates, some other mammals (e.g., canids, naked mole rats), birds, reptiles, fishes, or insects. What are eukaryote cells but a social group of bacteria? [4]

The need to belong, is it a rule of life?

Notes

[1] Baumeister, Roy F., and Mark R. Leary. “The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.” Psychological bulletin 117, no. 3 (1995): 497.

The original paper proposes a long series of predictions derived from the “belongingness hypothesis” and discusses multiples examples from different studies. This essay simply summarizes the essential ideas.

[2] Saphire-Bernstein, Shimon, and Shelley E. Taylor. “Close relationships and happiness.” Oxford handbook of happiness (2013).

The full text can be downloaded through this link.

[3] Social media keep us going with sufficient dopamine micro-rushes. Although it has clear advantages as a tool, the irresponsible use of social media does some nasty things to our brains.

[4] This issue is likely a tad more complex than that. Read more here.

Thanks to Julia Zichello and Bonnie Sumner for inspiring this essay with their comments on this previous piece.

The cover image portrays the main characters in Sons of Anarchy (credit: SutterInk and Linson Entertainment). Behind weapons smuggling operations, murder, and choppers, this story truly represents the struggle of individuals to navigate the need to belong in the family, tribe, and society at large.