Need to belong
Also known as: Belongingness hypothesis, Belonging
A fundamental human drive to form and maintain lasting, caring relationships.
What it means
The need to belong is the hypothesis that humans have a pervasive, fundamental drive to form and sustain a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships. Satisfying it requires both frequent, pleasant interactions and a sense of ongoing, mutual care within a stable bond, so neither relationships without affection nor affection without continuity fully suffices. The drive is theorized to be evolutionarily rooted, because group living aided survival and reproduction, and its frustration through social exclusion produces wide-ranging harms to emotion, cognition, health, and behavior. The nuance is satiation and substitution: people seek belonging up to a point and can partly replace lost bonds with new ones, but chronic unmet need is corrosive. It matters as a master motive underlying conformity, relationship maintenance, the pain of rejection, and the functioning of the self-esteem sociometer.
Examples
A new employee who can't form real connections feels persistently distressed and distracted, even if the job and pay are excellent.
Someone with hundreds of pleasant online exchanges but nobody who notices when they go quiet still feels lonely: contact without continuing care does not satisfy the need.
A retiree who loses the daily rhythm of colleagues joins a choir within months, partly replacing the lost bonds rather than simply doing without them.
First described in Roy Baumeister & Mark Leary (1995).