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Contents
- Abstract
- Conceptual Background
- Fundamental Motivations: Metatheory
- The Need to Belong: Theory
- Review of Empirical Findings
- Forming Social Bonds
- Critical assessment
- Conclusion
- Not Breaking Bonds
- Critical assessment
- Conclusion
- Cognition
- Critical assessment
- Conclusion
- Emotion
- Positive affect
- Negative affect
- Indirect effects
- Critical assessment
- Conclusion
- Consequences of Deprivation
- Critical assessment
- Conclusion
- Partial Deprivation: Relatedness Without Interaction
- Critical assessment
- Conclusion
- Partial Deprivation: Interaction Without a Bond of Caring
- Need for relatedness
- Bond of caring
- Mutuality
- Critical assessment
- Conclusion
- Satiation and Substitution
- Critical assessment
- Conclusion
- Innateness, Universality, and Evolutionary Perspectives
- Critical assessment
- Conclusion
- Apparent Counterexamples
- Refusal to help or cooperate
- Nonreciprocation of love
- Shyness
- General Discussion
- Implications for Psychological Theory
- Implications for Other Fields
- Concluding Remarks
Abstract
A hypothesized need to form and maintain strong, stable interpersonal relationships is evaluated in light of the empirical literature. The need is for frequent, nonaversive interactions within an ongoing relational bond. Consistent with the belongingness hypothesis, people form social attachments readily under most conditions and resist the dissolution of existing bonds. Belongingness appears to have multiple and strong effects on emotional patterns and on cognitive processes. Lack of attachments is linked to a variety of ill effects on health, adjustment, and well-being. Other evidence, such as that concerning satiation, substitution, and behavioral consequences, is likewise consistent with the hypothesized motivation. Several seeming counterexamples turned out not to disconfirm the hypothesis. Existing evidence supports the hypothesis that the need to belong is a powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation.
The purpose of this review is to develop and evaluate the hypothesis that a need to belong is a fundamental human motivation and to propose that the need to belong can provide a point of departure for understanding and integrating a great deal of the existing literature regarding human interpersonal behavior. More precisely, 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...