The Need to Belong 1 Running head: THE NEED TO BELONG An Update of the Empirical Case for the Need to Belong

Since Baumeister and Leary (1995) published a seminal paper on the need to belong, research in this area has proliferated. We review the current state of the literature, highlighting inconsistencies in findings, and suggesting future avenues of research. We focus on research findings on immediate cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions to social rejection and acceptance, the processes that underlie responses to threats to belonging, some possible biological underpinnings of the need to belong, the role of individual differences in reactions to threats to belonging, and long term consequences of an unmet need to belong. A more complex picture of the need to belong is emerging, but greater focus on underlying processes and the influence of individual differences is needed. The Need to Belong 3 An Update of the Empirical Case for the Need to Belong Alfred Adler (1930; Ferguson, 1989) formulated that humans have a fundamental need to belong. As Adler stated (1930, p. 11), “social feeling is the crucial and deciding factor in normal development. ” However, this important formulation did not have a major impact on psychological research until, in a landmark paper, Baumeister and Leary (1995) presented a litany of evidence supporting the argument that belongingness is a fundamental human need. However, because the studies they reviewed were not designed to directly evaluate the belongingness hypothesis, most of the evidence they presented provided only indirect support for their arguments. Since then, empirical research on the need to belong has expanded rapidly. The last few years, in particular, have seen a focus of research attention on immediate reactions to experimental manipulations of social exclusion and, to a lesser extent, social acceptance. This work has provided a fledging body of knowledge on the processes underlying short-term reactions to fluctuations in belonging, biological responses to belongingness status, individual differences in reactions to exclusion threats as well as subsequent coping efforts, and the longterm consequences of a thwarted need to belong. This paper reviews the current state of research in these areas and suggests avenues for future research in an effort to point interested researchers and thinkers to questions that have not yet been adequately resolved. Immediate Reactions to Belongingness-Relevant Events Baumeister and Leary (1995) argued that if belongingness is a fundamental need, then threats of social exclusion should affect individuals’ cognition, affective reactions, and behaviors. Just as hunger or thirst disrupts normal patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior in order to facilitate satisfaction of unmet needs for food and water, so should unmet belongingness The Need to Belong 4 needs influence human functioning. In this section, we will review the research evidence pertaining to short-term reactions to threats to belonging and signs of acceptance. Cognitive Reactions Baumeister and Leary (1995) argued that threats to belonging should lead to increased cognitive focus on relationships and social connections, which, by consuming limited cognitive resources, may lead to impairments in processing in other domains. Research conducted with individuals either randomly assigned to experience social exclusion or high on measures of chronically unmet belonging needs has shown that unmet belongingness is associated with better memory for interpersonal and social events, greater attention to and processing of vocal tone in speech, greater accuracy in indentifying emotions in faces, and more accuracy in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings (Gardner, Pickett, Jefferis, & Knowles, 2005; Pickett, Gardner, & Knowles, 2004). These studies suggest that threats to belongingness and chronic unmet belonging needs are associated with greater attention to and processing of socially relevant information. Relatedly, when participants’ belongingness was threatened by delivery of false feedback that they would suffer a future alone, performance on a variety of complex cognitive tasks that were framed as diagnostic of social skills was improved relative to participants who either received feedback of future acceptance by others or no feedback (DeWall, Baumeister, Vohs, 2008). That is, participants whose belongingness was threatened appeared to focus cognitive energies on tasks that could demonstrate improved social prospects. Furthermore, after recalling an episode of rejection, the salience of social groups appears to increase. Following a belongingness threat, individuals have been shown to complete more word fragments with group-relevant words, to identify group identity words faster, to describe themselves in reference The Need to Belong 5 to groups, and to rate their own groups as more important and cohesive than participants who recalled an episode of acceptance, physical distress, or academic failure (Knowles & Gardner, 2008). Participants whose need to belong is threatened by feedback of a future alone or by watching a movie clip that induces loneliness also report stronger beliefs in supernatural agents and describe pets with more social-connection traits than participants who received future acceptance feedback or watched a neutral or a fear-inducing movie clip (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008). Thus, belongingness-deprived individuals appear to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents, perhaps to provide a social outlet. Research has also demonstrated that when the need to belong is threatened, cognitive processing of non-social, complex stimuli appears to suffer, consistent with Baumesiter and Leary’s (1995) suggestion that belongingness threats may tax cognitive resources. For example, participants who received false feedback that they would have a lonely future subsequently performed worse on an intelligence test, on recalling complex passages, and on answering complex analytical questions compared to participants who received future acceptance or future non-social misfortune feedback (Baumeister, Twenge, & Nuss, 2002). Participants who relived an episode of betrayal have also been shown to perform worse on complex cognitive tasks than participants who relived an experience of severe physical injury (Chen, Williams, Fitness, & Newton, 2008). However, participants’ performance on easy tasks or on simple recall in these studies was not affected by rejection experiences (Baumesiter et al., 2002; Chen et al., 2008). These findings suggest that threats to belonging lead to impairments on complex, higher-order cognitive processing, but more basic cognitive processing is not affected. Some research has also examined cognitive reactions to events that suggest the possibility of future acceptance, offering fulfillment of one’s need to belong. For example, in a The Need to Belong 6 study of the effects of minimal belonging cues, participants told they shared a birthday with a high achiever in math persisted more on unsolvable math puzzles and expected greater feelings of belongingness in a university math department (Walton & Cohen, 2009). Mediation analyses suggested that greater feelings of math-related belonging led to persistence on the math tasks. Furthermore, being randomly assigned to work alone on math problems after being designated as part of a math group (rather than as an individual “math person”) increased persistence on math puzzles. Finally, when the math department was portrayed as encouraging social relationships, participants again persisted more on math problems and also reported greater motivation for math than participants to whom the department was portrayed as encouraging individual achievement. These findings suggest that even subtle cues that suggest the possibility of future acceptance is enough to motivate better performance and higher persistence in an achievement domain. Analogous to other motivational drives, Baumeister and Leary (1995) argue that the need to belong should be subject to satiation, meaning that once the need is satisfied, the motivation to pursue additional social relationships should be diminished. For example, participants told they would have a future full of good social relationships performed worse on subsequent cognitive tasks that were framed as diagnostic of social skills compared to participants who received future alone or no feedback, suggesting that participants with adequate levels of belonging were less willing to work for evidence of further social success (DeWall et al., 2008). However, when these same tasks were not framed as evidence of social skill, the performance of participants who received the acceptance feedback did not decline. These findings suggest that the need to belong is indeed subject to satiation and perceptions of opportunities to fulfill this need only lead to social effort when the need is threatened or unfulfilled. A corollary of the satiation hypothesis is The Need to Belong 7 that opportunities for social connection should only be motivating when belonging needs are not satisfied. In one study, participants who expected to meet a fellow university student rated the potential for social reward (i.e., meaningful connection) they saw in the interaction, then recorded a video greeting for their interaction partner (MacDonald, Tackett, & Borsook, 2009). Among participants randomly assigned to a control condition, opportunities for social reward were unrelated to prosocial video greetings. Only among participants who had just relived a past social exclusion experience did perceived opportunity for social reward predict more positive social greetings. These data suggest that only when deficits in belongingness are experienced do social opportunities motivate efforts at social connection. Emotional Reactions Baumeister and Leary (1995) argued that threats to the need to belong should have profound consequences for one’s emotions because such threats to one’s social connections signal danger to one’s s