As the prominent social psychologists, Baumeister and Leary,
point out, “Groups can share food, provide mates, and help care for offspring
(including orphans). Some survival tasks such as hunting large animals or
maintaining defensive vigilance against predatory enemies, are best
accomplished by group cooperation…. Competition for limited resources could
also provide a powerful stimulus to forming interpersonal connections.” (p.499
need) The need to belong is deeply rooted in human consciousness. Baumeister
emphasizes that the need to belong is a powerful need, and not just a want.
While people can go for long periods of time abstaining from sex without dire
consequences, the absence of social interaction can have lethal consequences. “One
very important motivation that lies on the boundary between natural and cultural
motivations is the need to belong to social groups. It is apparent that people
have a deeply rooted need to have contact with other people.” (p14 Meanings)
“We [Baumeister and Leary] suggest that belongingness can be almost as
compelling a need as food and that human culture is significantly conditioned
by the pressure to provide belongingness.”(p 498 need)
Baumeister cites the evidence presented by James Lynch in his book, Broken Heart. Lynch cites numerous studies done by doctors, and concludes, “Statistics enumerating the mortality ratios of single, divorced, and widowed people suggested the possibility that what caused the sharp rise in premature mortality was human loneliness, isolation, anxiety, or depression.” (p.154) One of the studies Lynch cites is a study done by Hugh Carter and Paul Glick: “In summary then, for both men and women, white and nonwhite, cardiovascular disease (including stroke and hypertension) was listed as the major cause of premature death. For divorced, widowed, and single men, both white and nonwhite, the overall death rates for cardiovascular disease were two to three times higher than for married men. Similar trends were also true for women. For almost every other major cause of premature death there were also marked increases for the nonmarried over the married, with differences in death rates as high as tenfold. Death rates for heart disease, motor vehicle accidents, cancer of the respiratory system, cancer of the digestive organs, stroke, suicide cirrhosis of the liver, rheumatic fever, hypertension, pneumonia, diabetes, homicide, tuberculosis—all these were higher among single, widowed, and divorced individuals. The consistently higher death rates for so many different causes of death is itself remarkable.” (p.43)
James Lynch notes that Lytt Gardner’s psychological report highlighted Frederick II’s ill-fated experiments on human children. (p.75) The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194 – 1250), “A man of extraordinary culture, energy, and ability…” according to Professor Donald Detwiler, besides promoting learning and culture, conducted his own experiments on live people. In one of his “scientific” experiments, Frederick II had a prisoner confined to a cask so that upon the death of the person one might be able to perceive the soul escaping through a hole in the cask. In another experiment, two prisoners were fed the same food. Then he sent one of the men hunting while the other was sent to bed. He then disemboweled both to see which one had the better digestion. Frederick II believed that human beings had a “natural” or instinctive language. To test this he took newborn babies and placed them in complete social isolation.
The caretakers were instructed to nurse, clothe, and bathe the babies. Otherwise they were not to speak to the babies and not to in any way speak in the presence of the infants. Clapping was even forbidden. Frederick II thought in that way the children when they came of the age when children begin to talk that the children would then speak in the natural language endowed by God in human nature. The experiment was a failure. All the children died. The need for social interaction, the need to belong, is a very powerful drive. Prisons use solitary confinement as a severe form of punishment of uncooperative inmates. From experiments on rats and monkeys, it is now known that touch deprivation produces definitive biochemical results. The American psychologist, Harry Harlow, is known for his maternal-separation, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys. Harlow took newborn monkeys and placed them in isolation cages with a surrogate mother made of wire, wood, and terry cloth. Not surprisingly, the total isolation experiments produced severely disturbed behaviors such as “autistic self-clutching and rocking.” It shouldn’t be all that surprising that social animals are preprogrammed for social interaction.
Emotions involved in relationships can be very powerful. There is consistent anecdotal material about spouses who die shortly after their loved one has died, parents dying shortly after losing their children, or siblings (especially twins) who die shortly after a sibling has died. A physician named Dr. Engel kept a record of these incidents. There is the case of a 52 year old man whose wife had terminal lung cancer. Six months before his wife’s death, the man had a complete physical, complete with an electrocardiogram. He was in perfect shape and showed “no evidence of coronary disease.” The day after his wife’s funeral, he dropped dead from a “massive myocardial infarction.” (p.60) Now, coronary disease generally takes some time to develop. Yet, in the case of that 52 year old man, the onset of coronary disease was both sudden and severe.
There is a growing body of medical evidence that clearly indicates that if human beings do not have sufficient social exposure their bodies are profoundly adversely affected. James Lynch is careful to emphasize that social isolation is absolutely not the only contributing cause, of course. He brings up the fact that many of the factors “covary” with other variables. He points out that some people who are ill may not get married precisely because of that illness. In the case of unmarried individuals who have coronary disease, it is possible in some cases that the disease came first, which then resulted in a decreased chance of connecting with a partner. So, the statistics may be overstated. Conversely there is some anecdotal evidence that combative and unhappy marriages produce a sense of social alienation. So the statistics of the effects of loneliness and social alienation could, in that sense, be understated. Lynch emphasizes the incredible and mind boggling complexity of issues involving the human mind and body. After summarizing Lynch’s findings, Baumeister later continues, “As already shown, divorce increases people’s risk for a large assortment of bad outcomes, including mental and physical illness, committing a crime (including murder), car crashes and other accidents, and suicide. But remarriage drastically reduces or eliminates those risks.” (p. 112) It would seem that the need to belong is hardwired into human consciousness.
Psychologists conducted an experiment investigating peoples’ sense of social rejection. The experiment had a computer simulation of three “people” throwing a ball back and forth between the three players. Two of the players were actually controlled by computer program. The third was a test subject. At, first, all the “players” threw the ball back and forth between themselves involving all the players equally. Then the two computer driven “people” began throwing the ball just between them, excluding the real person (subject). Even though the subject knew that it was just a computer driven program, the subject still felt a strong sense of rejection. One neuroscientist, talking about music at the time, referred to some aspects of human behavior as deriving from “factory installed software. So, it would seem that human beings have factory installed software to detect social rejection, among others.
Dr. Roger Covin, a psychologist, in his book, The Need To Be Liked, begins by saying how important relationships are, both evolutionarily and socially. After all, what could be more important than relationships with other people? He notes that psychiatrists and psychologists have come to realize how “closely intertwined the systems for physical pain and social pain are. “Specifically, the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC and the Periaqueductal Gray (PAG) receive and process information about physical pain when the body is injured. Similarly, these areas of the brain also become activated and process information when someone is rejected.” (p.19) “In other words, the pain of rejection is very real and similar to processes associated with physical pain.” (p.12)
Solomon Asch, in the 1950’s, conducted experiments in conformity. In his now classic experiment, seven to nine ‘subjects’ were shown three lines of varying length. In turn, each person stated which lines were similar to the length of a ‘standard’ line. It was blatantly obvious which lines were similar and which were not. Of course there was a twist to the experiment. There was only one ‘naïve’ subject. The rest of the participants were confederates. All of the confederates voiced their opinion before it was the turn of the ‘naïve’ subject. The confederates all expressed the opinion that one particular line was similar in length when it was obvious that it was not. While the ‘naïve’ subjects expressed disagreement and showed signs of distress, most of the subjects caved in to the majority opinion: “Only 25 per cent managed to resist the group pressure throughout, 33 per cent conformed on half or more of the focal trials, and 5 per cent conformed on all of them.” (p.162 soc id) Asch’s experiment has been repeated several times with similar results. Various controls were manipulated to discover peoples’ motivations. There was one study done by Penn who used science students for the experiment. Because of the importance of “factuality” in science (after all, in science facts are facts are facts), there was little tendency to conform. As we have seen, social rejection causes pain, so it would be safe to assume that the fear of social rejection played an important role in peoples’ motivation to conform. What is important is that the fear of social rejection was so strong that it overcame what was a clear and distinct rational judgment.
Tania Singer, a psychologist, then at the University College of London, conducted an experiment to test peoples’ responses to others’ pain. First she put female subjects in an fMRI and gave them an electric shock. Then she had their boyfriends present, and gave the boyfriends an electric shock to see what the subject’s response would be. “Singer found that the women activated the pain distress network in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the anterior insula regions of the brain…regardless of who was receiving the painful stimulation.” (p.155 social) Perhaps this is the reason why panhandlers are successful. While no one knows them, perhaps, people feel the pain of others in distress. In later studies, Singer also demonstrated that empathy-related brain responses are influenced by the perceived fairness of others, and distinguishes between ingroup or outgroup. These are hard-wired responses, so it would seem that there is significant social software that is factory installed. For all practical purposes, it could be said that human beings have an empathy instinct.
In Baumeister’s theory, the need to belong is complemented by other needs and drives. He believes that the need to belong is the primary driver and motivation in moral behavior. He also finds that the need to belong is linked as well to the social drives (caring, generativity, helping). He states, “The need to belong can be subdivided into two more specific desires. These are, first, a desire for frequent interactions, and second, a context of ongoing mutual caring and concern.” (p.112) The natural tendency for reciprocity, the belief that helping another person likely leads to the other helping you in turn, further contributes to the need to belong. Also, it would seem self-evident that the need for self-esteem would reinforce and amplify the need to belong. Social behavior is the product of a number of different needs, wants, desires, and drives. The end result of the workings of the various needs and wants is a social, or, as Baumeister emphasizes, cultural, animal. “The crucial part (regardless of one’s opinion on gender differences) is that some humans go beyond one-to-one relationships in how they satisfy the need to belong. This may be an important step that helped move human beings from social to cultural animals. They connect not just individually with each other, but to larger collectives---teams, companies, ethnicities, nationalities.” (p.111 culture)
M. J. Meggitt, an anthropologist who studied the Walbiri tribe of the Australian Aborigines spoke about how the Walbiri viewed other Aborigine tribes: “There are two kinds of blackfellows,” the Walbiri natives say, “we who are the Walbiri and those unfortunate people who are not. Our laws are the true laws; other blackfellows have inferior laws which they continually break. Consequently, anything may be expected of these outsiders.”” (p.34 desert) Considering the distances involved there are abundant contacts with other tribes, and it should be said that two of the tribes, the Walmanba and the Yanmadjari tribes, the Walbiri consider to be “half Walbiri.” But their general outlook is classic ingroup-outgroup thinking. Ancient Greeks called foreigners “barbarians.” The Nazi ideology, with its portrayal of Jews in dehumanizing ways, is classic ingroup-outgroup behavior.
An important trend in contemporary social psychology is towards embracing the theory of social identity to explain group behavior. The theory was first advanced by H. Tajfel, but has been embraced by M. A. Hogg, D. Abrams, J. C. Turner, and many others. The social identity theory is deceptively simple. The theory states that social identification results from the innate tendency of human beings to categorize things and people – Categorization being an attribute stemming from peoples’ need for order and the drive to make sense of the world. That is, the natural process of categorization results in categorization of people into groups, as well as the self-categorization as a member of a group. Hogg and Abrams state, “The inclusion of self in the categorization process is crucial. It is the fact that one’s self is categorized as being stereotypically the same as the ingroup members which creates social attraction – attraction to others because they are ingroupers, regardless of their personal characteristics.” (p.209 soc id) People tend to look at ingroup members as similar to themselves and outgroup members as different. Hogg and Abrams summarize social identity theory: “In intergroup contexts people strive for positive distinctiveness – they try to differentiate their own group from the outgroup in an evaluatively positive manner because, in so doing, the positive connotations of ingroup membership become positive connotations of self.” (p10 soc id/soc cog) Social identity theory presupposes that a need for self-esteem plays an important role. However, studies on self-esteem in group behavior have yielded mixed results.
The current trend in social identity theory is that several different motivations play into the decision to join and stay in a group. Among those motives are the “needs for self-knowledge, meaning, balance and consistency, power and control and self-efficacy.” (p.792 handbook) Baumeister’s need to belong, of course, implies that the need to belong is a major motivation in and of itself. Hogg and Abrams, two prominent social identity theorists, also have a persuasive theory of subjective uncertainty reduction. “Uncertainty arises, Hogg and Abrams (1993) suggest, when people try to understand and interpret their worlds. Because such understanding is fundamentally a matter of social consensus, rather than intrinsic to events of the world, people need to seek out others—especially others who are seen as relevant and similar—to attain understanding.” (p.791 handbook) Groups provide structure. The norms and ideology of the group shape – and structure – the behaviors of the members. In other words, people join groups because of the need for meaning/ideology.
Sharedness
Meaning can only be obtained and achieved through other people. People are not born with a catalogue of meanings. A person gains understanding, first through interactions with parents, then peers and teachers, and eventually in interactions with the wider society. The vast literature of self-psychology is a litany of how and in what ways others – parents, peers, significant others – shape a person’s self-concept and self-worth. “The social psychological literature contains numerous demonstrations of the dependence of our self-appraisals on comparisons with others, across both judgments of abilities and attributes.” (p.799 handbook) Baumeister observes, “Meaning itself is acquired socially, from other people and from the culture at large. Nature equips the human being with appetites but not meanings.” (p.6 Meanings) Baumeister concludes that: “The fact that belongingness predicts happiness more strongly—far more strongly, in America—than any other external circumstances is another sign that the need to belong is exceptionally powerful. Satisfying the need to belong is more crucial and decisive than satisfying any other need.” (p. 109) In the end, our very definition of happiness (not simply self-esteem) itself depends on others.
Link to Website: https://www.spirittruthandmeaning.com/