The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation. By: Baumeister, Roy F.; Leary, Mark R.; Source: Psychological Bulletin. Vol. 117 (3) May 1995, pp. 497-529 (on PsychArticles, EBSCO-Host)


"The belongingness hypothesis is that human beings have a pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships. Satisfying this 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 enduring framework of affective concern for each other's welfare. Interactions with a constantly changing sequence of partners will be less satisfactory than repeated interactions with the same person(s), and relatedness without frequent contact will also be unsatisfactory."

[...]

We propose that the need to belong has two main features. First, people need frequent personal contacts or interactions with the other person. Ideally, these interactions would be affectively positive or pleasant, but it is mainly important that the majority be free from conflict and negative affect.
Second, people need to perceive that there is an interpersonal bond or relationship marked by stability, affective concern, and continuation into the foreseeable future. This aspect provides a relational context to one's interactions with the other person, and so the perception of the bond is essential for satisfying the need to belong. When compared with essentially identical interactions with other people with whom one is not connected, a strictly behavioral record might reveal nothing special or rewarding about these interactions. Yet an interaction with a person in the context of an ongoing relationship is subjectively different from and often more rewarding than an interaction with a stranger or casual acquaintance. To satisfy the need to belong, the person must believe that the other cares about his or her welfare and likes (or loves) him or her.

[...]

Pryor and Ostrom (1981) showed that people use the individual person as a cognitive unit of analysis for familiar people more than for unfamiliar people. These researchers began by questioning the basic assumption that the person is the fundamental unit of social perception. That is, information is not necessarily or inherently processed and stored in memory on a person-by-person basis, but it is, in fact, processed and stored on such a basis when it pertains to significant others. Ostrom, Carpenter, Sedikides, and Li (1993) provided evidence that information about out-group members tends to be stored and organized on the basis of attribute categories (such as traits, preferences, and duties), whereas in-group information is processed on the basis of person categories. Thus, social bonds create a pattern in cognitive processing that gives priority to organizing information on the basis of the person with whom one has some sort of connection.

[...]

Group memberships also appear to exert important influences on cognitive patterns. People expect more favorable and fewer objectionable actions by their in-group than by out-group members, and these expectations bias information processing and memory, leading people to forget the bad things (relative to good things) that their fellow in-group members do (Howard & Rothbart, 1980). People also make group-serving or "sociocentric" attributions for the performance of the groups to which they belong. Members of a successful group may make group-serving attributions that put the entire group in a good light, whereas, after failure, group members may join together in absolving one another of responsibility (Forsyth & Schlenker, 1977; Leary & Forsyth, 1987; Zander, 1971).

[...]

Another broad and very basic issue is how often interpersonal belongingness is used as an interpretive category. C. A. Anderson (e. g. , 1991) sought to establish the fundamental dimensions people use for making attributions about the causes of events. His study coded participants' attributional activity along 13 dimensions, including all of the ones featured in the major attributional theories (e. g. , locus, stability, globality, and controllability). To his surprise, however, the strongest single dimension was what he called interpersonalness, which was defined as the degree to which the causes of the focal event reflected on the relationship between the individual attributor and other people (e. g. , doing something because one is married). Thus, although interpersonalness was not a central concern of his investigation (because the major attribution theories had largely ignored it), it emerged as a major dimension in the way people normally think about and interpret the causes of events. The unexpected emergence of interpersonalness as a powerful fundamental dimension of causal attribution is consistent with the view that belongingness is one of humanity's basic concerns.

[...]

Anxiety is often regarded as the extreme or prototype of negative affect, and it is clearly linked to damaged, lost, or threatened social bonds. In fact, social exclusion may well be the most common and important cause of anxiety (Baumeister & Tice, 1990). Horney (1945) identified the source of "basic anxiety" as the feeling of "being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world" (p. 41); of course, that formula mixes two different sources, insofar as isolation is a function of the belongingness need, whereas helplessness is a frustration of control (which is probably another fundamental motivation). Anxiety and general distress seem to be a natural consequence of being separated from important others. Children as young as 1 year old show extreme distress—separation anxiety—on being separated from their mothers (Bowlby, 1973), and adults show similar reactions when they must leave loved ones for an extended period of time. Furthermore, people's memories of past rejections are tainted with anxiety (Tambor & Leary, 1993), and even just imagining social rejection increases physiological arousal (Craighead, Kimball, & Rehak, 1979).

[...]

Anxiety about death, whether of oneself or others, can be regarded as stemming (at least in part) from a threat to belongingness (Baumeister & Tice, 1990). As Lofland (1982) pointed out, when people die, relationships end. Along these lines, Conte, Weiner, and Plutchik (1982) linked death anxiety to fear of loneliness (see also Mijuskovic, 1980). In a study of death anxieties, Bednarski and Leary (1994) found that a primary basis of people's fears about death involved concerns with being separated from friends and family. These interpersonal concerns appeared to be a more important source of death anxiety than fears about no longer existing or uncertainty about what happens after death. This link between death anxiety and separation anxiety may explain why most positive depictions of life after death have emphasized togetherness with family and loved ones, with a broad community of like-minded believers, with a loving deity, or with all of the above (e. g. , Baumeister, 1991). If death anxiety is rooted in threats to belongingness and social inclusion, then fears of death can best be soothed by emphasizing that death will involve a continuation or even an improvement in one's belongingness status.





posted by Lloyd at 7:27 PM