AP Psychology

Module 40 - Affiliation Needs

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

The social stigma attached to obesity may bother an overweight person as much as, or more than, the health concerns. Why? We are what Greek philosopher Aristotle called the social animal. Cut off from friends or family – alone in prison or at a new school or in a foreign land – most people feel keenly their lost connections with important others. This deep need to belong – our affiliation need – seems to be a basic human motivation (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Although healthy people vary in their wish for privacy and solitude, most of us seek to affiliate with others, even to become strongly attached to certain others in enduring, close relationships. Human beings, contended personality theorist Alfred Adler, have an “urge to community” (Ferguson, 1989, 2001, 2010). Our psychological needs drive our adaptive behaviors and, when satisfied, enhance our psychological well-being (Sheldon, 2011).

The Benefits of Belonging

Social bonds boosted our early ancestors’ chances of survival. Adults who formed attachments were more likely to reproduce and to co-nurture their offspring to maturity. Attachment bonds helped keep those children close to their caregivers, protecting them from many threats. Indeed, to be “wretched” literally means, in its Middle English origin (wrecche), to be without kin nearby.

Cooperation also enhanced survival. In solo combat, our ancestors were not the toughest predators. But as hunters, they learned that six hands were better than two. As food gatherers, they gained protection from two-footed and four-footed enemies by traveling in groups. Those who felt a need to belong survived and reproduced most successfully, and their genes now predominate. We are innately social creatures. People in every society on Earth belong to groups and (as Module 77 explains) prefer and favor “us” over “them.”

Do you have close friends – people with whom you freely disclose your ups and downs? Having someone who rejoices with us over good news helps us feel even better about the good news, as well as about the friendship (Reis et al., 2010). The need to belong runs deeper, it seems, than the need to be rich. One study found that very happy university students were distinguished not by their money but by their “rich and satisfying close relationships” (Diener & Seligman, 2002).

The need to belong colors our thoughts and emotions. We spend a great deal of time thinking about actual and hoped-for relationships. When relationships form, we often feel joy. Falling in mutual love, people have been known to feel their cheeks ache from their irrepressible grins. Asked, “What is necessary for your happiness?” or “What is it that makes your life meaningful?” most people have mentioned – before anything else – close, satisfying relationships with family, friends, or romantic partners (Berscheid, 1985). Happiness hits close to home.

Consider: What was your most satisfying moment in the past week? Researchers asked that question of American and South Korean collegians, then asked them to rate how much that moment had satisfied various needs (Sheldon et al., 2001). In both countries, the peak moment had contributed most to satisfaction of self-esteem and relatedness-belonging needs. When our need for relatedness is satisfied in balance with two other basic psychological needs – autonomy (a sense of personal control) and competence – we experience a deep sense of well-being, and our self-esteem rides high (Deci & Ryan, 2002, 2009; Milyavskaya et aL 2009; Sheldon & Niemiec, 2006). Indeed, self-esteem is a gauge of how valued and accepted we feel (Leary et al., 1998).

Is it surprising, then, that so much of our social behavior aims to increase our feelings of belonging? To gain acceptance, we generally conform to group standards. We monitor our behavior, hoping to make a good impression. We spend billions on clothes, cosmetics, and diet and fitness aids – all motivated by our search for love and acceptance.

By drawing a sharp circle around “us/, the need to belong feeds both deep attachments and menacing threats. Out of our need to define a “we” come loving families, faithful friendships, and team spirit but also teen gangs, ethnic rivalries, and fanatic nationalism.

For good or for bad, we work hard to build and maintain our relationships. Familiarity breeds liking, not contempt. Thrown together in groups at school, at band camp, on a hiking trip, we behave like magnets, moving closer, forming bonds. Parting, we feel distress. We promise to call, to write, to come back for reunions.

This happens in part because feelings of love activate brain reward and safety systems. In one experiment involving exposure to heat, deeply-in-love university students felt markedly less pain when looking at their beloved’s picture (rather than viewing someone else’s photo or being distracted by a word task) (Younger et al., 2010) . Pictures of our loved ones also activate a brain region associated with safety – the prefrontal cortex – that dampens feelings of physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2011). Love is a natural painkiller.

Even when bad relationships break, people suffer. In one 16-nation survey, and in repeated U.S. surveys, separated and divorced people have been half as likely as married people to say they were “very happy” (Inglehart 1990; NORC 2010). After such separations, loneliness and anger – and sometimes even a strange desire to be near the former partner linger. For those in abusive relationships, the fear of being alone sometimes seems worse than the certainty of emotional or physical pain.

Children who move through a series of foster homes or through repeated family relocations know the fear of being alone. After repeated disruption of budding attachments, they may have difficulty forming deep attachments (Oishi & Schimmack, 2010b). The evidence is clearest at the extremes – the children who grow up in institutions without a sense of belonging to anyone, or who are locked away at home and severely neglected. Too many become withdrawn, frightened, speechless. Feeling insecurely attached to others during childhood can persist into adulthood, in two main forms (Fraley et al., 2011). Some display insecure anxious attachment, constantly craving acceptance but remaining vigilant to signs of possible rejection. Others are trapped in insecure avoidant attachment, feeling such discomfort over getting close to others that they employ avoidant strategies to maintain their distance.

No matter how secure our early years were, we all experience anxiety, loneliness, jealousy, or guilt when something threatens or dissolves our social ties, Much as life’s best moments occur when close relationships begin – making a new friend, falling in love, having a baby – life’s worst moments happen when close relationships end Garemka et al., 2011), Bereaved, we may feel life is empty, pointless, Even the first weeks living on a college campus away from home can be distressing,

For immigrants and refugees moving alone to new places, the stress and loneliness can be depressing, After years of placing individual families in isolated communities, US, immigration policies began to encourage chain migration (Pipher, 2002). The second refugee Sudanese family settling in a town generally has an easier adjustment than the first.

Social isolation can put us at risk for mental decline and ill health (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009). But if feelings of acceptance and connection increase, so will self-esteem, positive feelings, and the desire to help rather than hurt others (Blackhart et al., 2009; Buckley & Leary, 2001).

The Pain of Being Shut Out

Can you recall feeling excluded or ignored or shunned? Perhaps you received the silent treatment. Perhaps people avoided you or averted their eyes in your presence or even mocked you behind your back. If you are like others, even being in a group speaking a different language may have left you feeling excluded, a linguistic outsider (Dotan-Eliaz et al., 2009), In one mock-interview study, women felt more excluded if interviewers used gender-exclusive language (he, his, him) rather than inclusive (his or her) or neutral (their) language (Stout & Dasgupta, 2011).

All these experiences are instances of ostracism – of social exclusion (Williams 2007, 2009). Worldwide, humans use many forms of ostracism – exile, imprisonment, solitary confinement – to punish, and therefore control, social behavior. For children, even a brief timeout in isolation can be punishing. Asked to describe personal episodes that made them feel especially bad about themselves, people will – about four times in five – describe a relationship difficulty (Pillemer et al., 2007). Feelings of loneliness can also spread from person to person like a disease, through one’s acquaintances (Cacioppo et al., 2009).

Being shunned – given the cold shoulder or the silent treatment, with others’ eyes avoiding yours – threatens one’s need to belong (Williams & Zadro, 2001). “It’s the meanest thing you can do to someone, especially if you know they can’t fight back. I never should have been born,” said Lea, a lifelong victim of the silent treatment by her mother and grandmother. Like Lea, people often respond to ostracism with depressed moods, initial efforts to restore their acceptance, and then withdrawal. After two years of silent treatment by his employer, Richard reported, “1 came home every night and cried. I lost 25 pounds, had no self-esteem and felt that I wasn’t worthy.”

To experience ostracism is to experience real pain, as social psychologist Kipling Williams and his colleagues were surprised to discover in their studies of cyberostracism (Gonsalkorale & Williams, 2006). (Perhaps you can recall the feeling of being unfriended or having few followers on a social networking site, being ignored in a chat room, or having a text message or e-mail go unanswered.) Such ostracism, they discovered, takes a toll: It elicits increased activity in brain areas, such as the anterior cingulate cortex, that also activate in response to physical pain (Kross et al., 2011; Lieberman & Eisenberger, 2009) , That helps explain another surprising finding: The pain-reliever acetaminophen (as in Tylenol and Anacin) lessens social as well as physical pain (DeWall et al., 2010). Across cultures, people use the same words (for example, hurt, crushed) for social pain and physical pain (MacDonald & Leary, 2005), Psychologically, we seem to experience social pain with the same emotional unpleasantness that marks physical pain,

Pain, whatever its source, focuses our attention and motivates corrective action. Rejected and unable to remedy the situation, people may seek new friends or relieve stress in a strengthened religious faith (Aydin et al., 2010). Or they may turn nasty. In a series of experiments, researchers (Baumeister et al., 2002; Twenge et al., 2001, 2002, 2007) told some students (who had taken a personality test) that they were “the type likely to end up alone later in life,” or that people they had met didn’t want them in a group that was forming. They told other students that they would have “rewarding relationships throughout life,” or that “everyone chose you as someone they’d like to work with.” Those excluded became much more likely to engage in self-defeating behaviors and to underperform on aptitude tests. The rejection also interfered with their empathy for others and made them more likely to act in disparaging or aggressive ways against those who had excluded them (blasting them with noise, for example). “If intelligent, well-adjusted, successful ... students can turn aggressive in response to a small laboratory experience of social exclusion,” noted the research team, “it is disturbing to imagine the aggressive tendencies that might arise from ... chronic exclusion from desired groups in actual social life.” Indeed, as Williams (2007) has observed, ostracism “weaves through case after case of school violence.”

Connecting and Social Networking

FOCUS QUESTION: How does social networking influence us?

As social creatures, we live for connection. Asked what he had learned from studying 238 Harvard University men from the 1930s to the end of their lives, researcher George Vaillant (2009) replied, “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” A South African Zulu saying captures the idea: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – “a person is a person through other persons.” Mobile Networks and Social Media

Look around and see humans connecting: talking, texting, posting, chatting, social gaming, e-mailing. The changes in how we connect have been fast and vast:

The Social Effects of Social Networking

By connecting like-minded people, the Internet selves as a social amplifier. It also functions as an online dating matchmaker (more on those topics in Module 79). As electronic communication has become part of our “new normal,” researchers have explored how these changes have affected our relationships.

HAVE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES MADE US MORE, OR LESS, SOCIALLY ISOLATED?

In the Internet’s early years, when online communication in chat rooms and during social games was mostly between strangers, the adolescents and adults who spent more time online spent less time with friends (Kraut et al., 1998; Mesch, 2001; Nie, 2001). As a result, their offline relationships suffered. Even in more recent times, lonely people have tended to spend greater-than-average time online (Bonetti et al., 2010; Stepanikova et al., 2010). Social networkers have been less likely to know their real-world neighbors and “64 percent less likely than non-Internet users to rely on neighbors for help in caring for themselves or a family member” (Pew, 2009).

But the Internet has also diversified our social networks. I am now connected to other hearing-technology advocates across the world and perhaps you, too, have found a group of kindred spirits online. Despite the decrease in neighborliness, social networking seems mostly to have strengthened our connections with people we already know (DiSalvo, 2010; Valkenburg & Peter, 2009). If your social networking helps you connect with friends, stay in touch with extended family, or find support in facing challenges, then you are not alone (Rainie et al., 2011). For many, though, being alone is not the problem. If you are like other students, two days of social networking deprivation would be followed by a glut of online time, much as you would eat voraciously after a two-day food fast (Sheldon et al., 2011). Social networks connect us, but they can also become gigantic time- and attention-sucking diversions. For some research-based strategies, see Close-up: Managing Your Social Networking.

DOES ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION STIMULATE HEALTHY SELF-DISCLOSURE?

As we will see in Module 84, confiding in others can be a healthy way of coping with day-to-day challenges. When communicating electronically rather than face to face, we often are less focused on others’ reactions, less self-conscious, and thus less inhibited. We become more willing to share joys, worries, and vulnerabilities. Sometimes this is taken to an extreme, as when teens send photos of themselves they later regret, or cyberbullies hound a victim, or hate groups post messages promoting bigotry or crimes. More often, however, the increased self-disclosure serves to deepen friendships (Valkenburg & Peter, 2009).

Although electronic networking pays dividends, nature has designed us for face-to-face communication, which appears to be the better predictor of life satisfaction (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Lee et al., 2011). Texting and e-mailing are rewarding, but eye-to-eye conversation with family and friends is even more so.

DO SOCIAL NETWORKING PROFILES AND POSTS REFLECT PEOPLE’S ACTUAL PERSONALITIES?

We’ve all heard stories of Internet predators hiding behind false personalities, values, and motives. Generally, however, social networks reveal people’s real personalities. In one study, participants completed a personality test twice. In one test, they described their”actual personality”; in the other, they described their “ideal self.” Volunteers then used the participants’ Facebook profiles to create an independent set of personality ratings. The ratings based on Facebook profiles were much closer to the participants’ actual personalities than to their ideal personalities (Back et al., 2010). In another study, people who seemed most likable on their Facebook page also seemed most likable in face-to-face meetings (Weisbuch et al., 2009). Your online profiles may indeed reflect the real you!

DOES SOCIAL NETWORKING PROMOTE NARCISSISM?

Narcissism is self-esteem gone awry. Narcissistic people are self-important, self-focused, and self-promoting. Some personality tests assess narcissism with items such as “I like to be the center of attention.” Given our constant social comparison – our measuring ourselves against others – many social networkers can’t resist comparing numbers of friends. (Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar [1992, 2010] estimates we can have meaningful, supportive relationships with about 150 peoplea typical size of tribal villages.)

Those who score high on narcissism are especially active on social networking sites. They collect more superficial “friends.” They offer more staged, glamorous photos. And, not surprisingly, they seem more narcissistic to strangers viewing their pages (Buffardi & Campbell,2008).

For narcissists, social networking sites are more than a gathering place; they are a feeding trough. In one study, college students were randomly assigned either to edit and explain their online profile for 15 minutes, or to use that time to study and explain a Google Maps routing (Freeman & Twenge, 2010). After completing their tasks, all were tested. Who then scored higher on a narcissism measure? Those who had spent the time focused on themselves.

* * *

We have seen that identifiable physiological mechanisms drive some motives, such as hunger (though learned tastes and cultural expectations matter, too). Other motives, such as our need for affiliation, are more obviously driven by psychological factors, such as the social rewards that come from belonging. What unifies all motives is their common effect: the energizing and directing of behavior.

Before You Move On


ASK YOURSELF: Have there been times when you felt out of the loop with family and friends, or even ostracized by them? How did you respond?
TEST YOURSELF: How might the evolutionary perspective, drive-reduction theory, and arousal theory explain our affiliation needs?