The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.
— JHUMPA LAHIRI
The annual holiday party at Munchester Industries is a raucous event. The company has about seven hundred employees, and for the holiday gala they all gather with their families in tow. The party has a huge buffet, an open bar, people dancing to the sounds of a DJ’s music, and a clown making balloon animals for the children. People are gathered in small clusters, either at tables or standing around chatting. On the surface this looks like any number of company parties we have all seen before. However, this year the party has a different tone, coming just six weeks after the 2016 presidential election. The room is abuzz with conversations about politics, mostly people celebrating or commiserating with their friends. Waiting for drinks, three employees stand together in awkward silence, their countenance seemingly different from most of the people around them, suggesting politeness but not much more. A tall, blond-haired white woman, with two children at her side, shifts from foot to foot, her eyes looking around the room, almost as if she wants to escape. A shorter, darker-skinned woman stands quietly by the side. The third person, a tall white man, appears friendly, even gregarious, alternating between trying to make conversation with the two women and making side comments to a shorter, brown-skinned man who stands behind him. Who are these people? What’s going on?
To answer these questions, let’s rewind the clock to that morning. . . .
Joan Smith woke up at 7:00 AM, as she usually did on a workday. After her morning rituals, she proceeded to one of her regular patterns: looking at her smartphone. Joan checked for any emails and then went directly to her news feed, where she saw the morning headlines from some of her usual sources: Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and the Drudge Report. Her newsfeed was still humming with a sense of victory and celebration over the surprising results of the election. She checked her Facebook page and her Twitter account, where she found articles posted by several of her friends, including an interesting one on religious suppression, posted by one of the women in her church’s book study group. Almost all the posts agreed with her politically. She then wandered down to her basement to put in some time on the treadmill, while watching the morning news on Fox and Friends.
Joan has been working at Munchester Industries for the past two years in a clerical position. She was able to get the job after her marriage ended following several years of stress that were triggered by her husband’s layoff from his job of sixteen years at the local processing plant. The divorce has been hard on her because of her strong religious values and belief in keeping families together, but her husband’s work challenges resulted in changes in his behavior that made staying together untenable. He is still looking for fulltime employment. Though he does make some money as an Uber driver, he has very little to contribute to Joan and their twelve-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter. Joan is fortunate that she has benefitted from both material and emotional support from her church community, which has helped her get through these hard times.
At the encouragement of her family, Joan has started dating again. She went out with a man she met at a friend’s dinner party, however, the conversation was somewhat limited because Joan quickly realized that he was a Democrat and she didn’t want to get into any political arguments. As it is, she doesn’t talk about her politics at work; most of the people who work at Munchester tend toward the liberal side.
After finishing her exercise, Joan showered and got ready for work. Today is the company party, and the office would be closed in the late afternoon for the festivities, which would go into the evening. Just last night she was getting her mother’s advice, because she was feeling nervous about the party, not wanting to find herself in a position of having to defend her political stance. She planned on having her friend drop the kids off at the party. Given all of the alcohol that they have at these events, she has mixed feelings about them being there, but she received a lot of pressure from her coworkers that this was a must-attend event, family included.
Barry Jones sat at the breakfast table with his husband, Sam, and their eighteen-year-old daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer is Sam’s birth daughter from his previous marriage, and she has recently come to live with them. Barry and Sam have been together for almost sixteen years, and last night they celebrated their third wedding anniversary with Jennifer and a small group of family and friends. The event was very pleasant, although family gatherings have been considerably more muted since the election. Most of Barry’s family are Republicans, and most of Sam’s are Democrats. In addition, Sam’s father is a Mexican immigrant, having come to the United States more than twenty years ago; he became a naturalized citizen in 2006. The tension somewhat limited conversations to superficialities and pleasantries, which was just fine for Barry and Sam—they didn’t want a repeat of the incident that occurred at Thanksgiving, when Sam’s sister and Barry’s father got into a political debate that was so heated it threatened to ruin the holiday dinner.
The family was watching the morning news on MSNBC as they ate, but Barry was, as usual, multitasking between breakfast conversation, watching the news, and looking at his news feed, mostly articles from BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos. The news seems increasingly bothersome to Barry, who voted for Hillary Clinton, though he was a Bernie Sanders supporter in the 2016 primaries. He had no problem making the switch because he was so offended by Donald Trump’s comments about Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, and women, not to mention the Republican platform positions on LGBTQ rights. Being Jewish and having had family members who were lost in the Holocaust, Barry is highly sensitive about examples of what he perceives to be bigotry. He also didn’t want their daughter to have a president who would speak and act the way he perceives that Trump did about women. As a result, watching the news over the last month or so has felt like a living nightmare to Barry, and he has been spending a lot of time with a community organizing group of late, trying to figure out how to get more Democrats elected to Congress.
At 7:45 AM, Barry and Jennifer said goodbye to Sam and got in the car. Barry planned to drop Jennifer off at school and then drive about twenty minutes to his job at Munchester Industries, where he is the director of human resources. He plans to see Sam and Jennifer this evening at the company holiday party, although for many of his fellow employees, the mood lately has been more funereal than celebratory.
In another part of town, Fatima Mohammed, having completed her morning prayers, was also getting ready for work, with the morning news from the BBC playing on her television set in the living room. Her eighteen-year-old son, Malik, is about to head off to school. It has been more difficult lately to get him out the door, as he has experienced some taunting by his fellow students, one of whom “jokingly” asked him whether his family was going to get deported now that Trump was elected. In addition, because of the recent killings of young black men by police officers, Fatima is always concerned about Malik’s safety when he is out driving. Fatima was born in the United Kingdom to parents who had immigrated years before from Afghanistan. She came to the United States on a student visa in 1992 and met her husband, Daanesh, in school. Daanesh was from a family of Somali immigrants who had come to this country when he was just a boy. They were married in 1996 and she officially became a U.S. citizen the following year.
Daanesh graduated from the University of Maryland in 1996 and then went to medical school at the University of Michigan. He has been practicing medicine for more than ten years, but recently has encountered some difficulties due to interactions with several patients who questioned whether they wanted to be treated by a Muslim, especially one with very dark skin.
Fatima watches the news every day with apprehension, because her brother Rashed, who followed her to the United States as a student eight years after she came, decided to enlist in the U.S. Army after he graduated from college, and is now stationed in Afghanistan. Rashed was excited about serving his country and was well received by army recruiters, who thought that somebody with his maturity and knowledge of language and culture would be a valuable asset. He has been trained in mediation and conflict resolution, which often puts him in sensitive situations. He plans on retiring from the military after he completes twenty-five years, and then going to graduate school. Fatima not only worries about Rashed’s safety but also is frightened by the anti-Muslim political rhetoric that she is constantly hearing on the news.
Fatima has worn an abaya and hijab for most of her life, in keeping with her family’s religious traditions; however, at her mother’s request, of late she has decided to go with more typical Western dress when she goes to her job as an engineer at Munchester Industries. On the weekends, and when she goes to her mosque—which she has been attending more frequently lately because she feels comforted being with “her people”—she still wears her traditional dress, but she became tired of being looked at suspiciously and has also read too many articles about Muslim women being harassed, and so she has decided it is safer and easier to “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
As they stand in line at the party, the inner world of each of these three individuals is present in the way they are relating. There is not all that much in the buffet for Fatima, because she follows halal practices and avoids alcohol. Not wanting to bring attention to herself, she eats what she can and drinks a bottle of water. Joan has her children with her, and is somewhat uncomfortable with what feels to her like the public display of affection that Barry is showing toward Sam in front of them. She had heard rumors that Barry was gay from others in the company, but feels somewhat like he is rubbing it in her face, and she doesn’t like her children being exposed to it. Barry, on the other hand, is aware that he and Sam may make people uncomfortable at times, but frankly he thinks that’s their problem. After all, company policy is very clear, and Munchester even recently received a high score on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index.1 Fatima knows Joan fairly well, given Joan’s clerical position in the engineering department; however, she has recently noticed a chill in their relationship, especially during the presidential campaign. While Fatima seems nice enough, the “Muslim thing” still makes Joan feel uncomfortable. Both of them met Barry when they came to work at the organization, and they also attended a human resources training he gave a couple of months ago, talking about new employee practices that have been instituted.
As is often the case these days, the conversation quickly turns to the daily news. Barry is quite outspoken in his views, but both Joan and Fatima find themselves increasingly uncomfortable even being in the conversation. Joan has learned to not discuss her political views at work, because employees of the company are, more often than not, judgmental about conservative views like hers, and she is not interested in getting into debates or being judged by her colleagues. Fatima, on the other hand, finds that any discussion of politics leaves her feeling very vulnerable. She definitely does not feel comfortable talking about her faith in public. The social interaction on the surface is superficial. The silence underneath the conversation is deafening.
The characters depicted above are not real, although they could be. They are a composite of traits, all drawn from people with whom I have met. Most of us can relate to the situation they find themselves in at the party. Questions abound in their minds: What’s normal anymore? What is it safe to say? How much can we disagree without being disagreeable? Will my job be in jeopardy if people find out what I believe in? And often, How quickly can I get back to my people so that I can feel comfortable just being myself?
Most of us like the feeling of belonging to groups around us. Whether it is being accepted by our friends and neighbors or being part of the in-group at work or school, there is something safer and more secure about being accepted and included. The need to belong is essential to human survival. In his landmark 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Abraham Maslow introduced his now ubiquitous “hierarchy of needs.”2 In it, Maslow postulated that “human needs arrange themselves in hierarchies of prepotency. That is to say, the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction of another, more pre-potent need. Man is a perpetually wanting animal.”3
Figure 1.1 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Anybody who has taken a basic Introduction to Psychology course is probably familiar with Maslow’s model, often depicted as a pyramid (Figure 1.1).
According to Maslow, our physiological needs are the first that must be satisfied, followed by our needs for safety, belonging, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization. While Maslow’s model has been challenged for representing a predominantly individualistic cultural model, it has remained a bedrock of the study of human development for more than seventy years.4
Within American culture, this is consistent with our tendency to place a high value on individualism.5 In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his historic study of American culture, Democracy in America, identified individualism as a fundamental distinguishing characteristic of democracies, and the capitalist American democratic model in particular. Tocqueville recognized the essential role that individualism plays in separating people from society: “Individualism is a considered and peaceful sentiment that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and to withdraw to the side with his family and his friends; so that, after thus creating a small society for his own use, he willingly abandons the large society to itself.”6
According to Maslow, the desire to fulfill our personal physiological and safety needs are preeminent, and breed a certain sense of individualism that has each of us seek to get what we need to be fulfilled in those dimensions.
More recent research indicates that Maslow may have missed the mark. There may be no greater human need than the need to belong. Human beings no doubt have remarkable survival skills, and yet we rely on our social groups to survive. Throughout human history, we evolved to live in cooperative societies that have grown larger and more diverse all the time. For most of our history, we have depended on those groups to help us satisfy both our basic physiological needs and our social and psychological ones. Just like our need for food or water, our need for acceptance emerged as a mechanism for survival. For most of our history, it was rare that a solitary individual could survive living in jungles, in forests, or on vast plains. We needed others in order to get our physiological needs met.
Every human being starts life in total dependency. A newborn baby is incapable of meeting its own physiological needs or needs for safety and will survive days, at most, if it “belongs” to nobody. The first imprint that we have on our core psyche is “I exist because you exist.”
This inherent need to belong has created, particularly in more individualistically oriented Western countries, an inherent tension between an ethos of individualism and the need to connect, belong, and rely on others to survive. Many people, even psychologists, have underestimated the impact of social exclusion on the individual experience, even as it contributes to all manner of negative societal behavior, including sociopathic behaviors such as murder.
How does this group connection manifest in our lives?
In his landmark study of social capital, Bowling Alone, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam identified two fundamental ways that we form social connections and identify our sense of belonging that are distinct when we are connecting with in-groups or out-groups; he refers to them as bonding and bridging (Figure 1.2).7
Figure 1.2 Bridging and Bonding
Bonding is generally present in the fundamental connection between members of in-groups, especially homogeneous ones. Because members of a group share cultural norms and values, and because we are naturally more empathetic toward people in our own groups, bonding can be valuable as a sort of social safety net that can protect us from outside groups. In many societies, the maintenance of relationships of family and tribal identification can even help provide basic survival needs, especially when the larger social structure is in breakdown. There are some circumstances in which the decline in trust in the existing leadership structure or political system can encourage people to rely more on their in-groups than at other times.8 This can be especially true when a group is marginalized or oppressed by another group. The networks of support within African American churches in the United States, for example, have provided a necessary social safety net against racism and segregation for generations, as did the NAACP, the National Organization for Women (NOW), and charitable organizations that formed to help support Jewish, Mormon, and Catholic communities. We bond with those we feel we share the greatest and most important connections to, and with whom we have a common perceived fate.
Bridging, on the other hand, generally occurs when people form connections in socially heterogeneous groups. Bridging can be critical to mutually beneficial relationships between groups, as between different countries in a global sense, between a group and its allies in an identity sense (e.g., LGBTQ and heterosexual people; men and women; whites and people of color), or between different individuals in a personal sense. Bridging facilitates the sharing and interchange of ideas, information, and innovation and can be an important factor in building agreement and consensus among groups representing diverse interests.
Bridging can broaden and extend social capital by increasing what has been called the “radius of trust” that people experience.9 This is a particularly important part of a healthy, diverse, and inclusive environment, as well as in an increasingly global world order. Bridging usually occurs as a result of some perceived shared interest or goal that creates something larger or more important than the differences that exist between the bridging parties, and most often includes some expectation of general reciprocity—“If I’m there for you, I expect that you’ll be there for me.”
Bridging often occurs in coalitions that form situationally in order to deal with a common challenge. For example, when apartheid was still in place in South Africa, Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) worked closely with Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) to fight the common enemy of the apartheid government. At that time their destiny was shared, they needed each other in order to win the fight, and they shared the values of democracy over oppression. However, shortly after apartheid fell, they returned to their bonded groups and were back in opposition to each other.
Bonding generally occurs because of a perception of understanding other people and of being understood, whereas bridging is generally formed out of mutual need and desire. Belonging is fundamentally based in bonding; however, bridging can be a way of creating belonging. The challenge, though, can be that one person or group’s bonding can be another’s bridging.
This often happens in relationships between people who are members of dominant and nondominant groups. As a general rule, people in nondominant groups are more likely to maintain an awareness of their group identity and to be seen by people as a member of their group. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, the San Bernardino, California, shootings, the Fort Hood, Texas, shootings, the Boston Marathon bombing, and other terrorist acts are often referred to as “radical Islamist terrorists” (a term that often has racial overtones as well) in the parts of the Western world in which Muslims are a minority group. On the other hand, the white perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Charleston church shootings, the attack at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, or the attack at the synagogue in Kansas are almost never described as “radical terrorists,” and the Christian ones are rarely, if ever, described by their religious affiliation. This often plays out in media coverage.
This dynamic is fluid rather than fixed. When members of different groups interact, this movement between bonding and bridging can sometimes be confusing and upsetting. White women, for example, often see themselves mostly as women, without a particularly strong focus on their racial identity. As members of a nondominant gender group, they feel connected to all women.
My colleague Rosalyn Taylor O’Neale, an African American woman, describes it this way:
African American women, on the other hand, tend to relate from both of their nondominant group identities and are usually very aware of race as a distinguisher. The impact can often be a presumption of more connection on the part of white women in the relationship than is experienced by black women. White women, as a result, can occur as being presumptuously intimate in their connection with black women, who still may see them as “the other.” While the white women think they are bonding, the black women can experience the same exchange as bridging. When people openly discuss these differences, it can ease some of the related social pain.
A similar example occurred after the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was attacked by Omar Mateen, a Muslim, on June 12, 2016, and forty-nine of the mostly LGBTQ attendees were killed. In the aftermath, many conservatives who had taken anti-gay positions in the past found themselves in the uncomfortable position of deciding whom to align with or against: the gay community, about whom they had expressed homophobic judgment for years, or the “Muslim terrorist” who committed the murders.
These dynamics are occurring today across political parties. It seems profoundly irrational for families to be unable to sit at the same holiday table with their closest family members; however, each has bonded with his or her political brethren, and now they are all faced with bridging with people they have known their whole lives. At that moment the question seems to be “Where do I really belong?” and, even more important, “Where will I be safe?”
It is important to understand that bonding and bridging can be both positive and negative, both healthy and unhealthy. As a general rule, positive bonding and bridging are directed for something. We bridge with another group to get things done or to establish people’s rights, as in the case of the ANC and IFP. Negative bonding and bridging are often against something, as in the coalitions of white supremacist groups that have bonded around their common efforts to suppress people of color, Jews, Muslims and others who are not white Christians.
In either case, we strive to connect because the pain of separation is a prime threat to our sense of survival.
Brandeis professor George N. Appell has described a sense of isolation as social separation syndrome.10 Consider your own experience. Can you remember a time when you were not invited to a friend’s birthday party or other social event? Or times when you felt like your friends were ganging up on you or teasing you? It’s not hard to recall how insecure these circumstances can make us feel. We often begin to question ourselves and our worth because of the reactions of others. The same feelings can emerge when we find ourselves to be the “only”: the only woman in a group of men, the only person of color in a group of whites, the only lesbian or gay person in a group of heterosexuals, and so on. There is an increased sense of conspicuousness and a vulnerability to this kind of isolation that almost anybody can relate to.
One of the places where social separation has been found to be particularly powerful is in its impact on addiction. For some time, addiction has been characterized as primarily a chemical dependency. To combat such addictive tendencies, counselors have used counteracting chemical agents (such as methadone for heroin addicts) to reestablish normalcy to our altered neurotransmitters, opioid receptors, and mesolimbic pathways.11 While it would be foolish to ignore the role physical dependency plays in catalyzing addictive tendencies, it appears equally foolish to ignore the role that social connectedness can play in moderating the likelihood of engaging in such addictive practices to begin with.
How many people do you know who have tried to curb addictive behaviors such as overeating, laziness, too much TV, drug use, or drinking and found it much easier when doing it in partnership with somebody? How much easier is it to get out of bed to exercise when you know somebody is meeting you at the gym or waiting outside for you to go for a run? How much harder is it to eat that thing you shouldn’t when everybody at the table with you has jointly committed to eating healthier?
Social environments impact addiction. Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander and his colleagues Robert Coambs and Patricia Hadaway started by getting laboratory rats hooked on morphine.12 For fifty-seven consecutive days, the rats would have access to only a morphine solution to consume in order to meet their need for water. Once they were addicted, a second option of unlaced tap water was introduced, giving the rats an opportunity to choose between the new, drug-free water or the water laced with morphine. Addiction models that rely on the theory of drug-induced addiction would have predicted that rats would continue to indulge in the morphine solution regardless of their social circumstance, but Alexander and his team questioned this traditional view.
In their studies, the researchers divided the rats between two distinct social environments: a small, barren cage where a rat would be housed by itself, or Rat Park (Figure 1.3), a large, open space where rats were housed among many others and had access to a variety of toys, tunnels, and opportunities for stimulation. They then observed the rats to see how those who had become addicted in the solitary confines of a small, cramped cage would react when placed in Rat Park.
Figure 1.3 Bruce Alexander’s “Rat Park”
The findings were stunning. While rats who remained in cages continued to opt for the morphine cocktail, the addicted rats who were transitioned to Rat Park overwhelmingly chose the plain water over the morphine solution. It appeared that addiction depended heavily on social variables. For rats confined to a small, cramped cage, a morphine kick might be a way to cope with the otherwise bleak nature of their lives. However, for rats afforded the luxury of Rat Park, such a coping mechanism proved unnecessary. These findings are not unprecedented. Drake Morgan, an addiction specialist at the University of Florida College of Medicine, and his colleagues conducted a similar study with macaque monkeys.13
The same can be true for human beings. Forced separation can be devastating to the human psyche. Researchers at seven medical schools collaborated to study the impact of solitary confinement on a group of recently released prisoners and found that they were two and a half times more likely to show post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms than prisoners who were not in solitary.14 There was also an increased number of suicide attempts among the group. Dr. Aaron Fox, associate professor of medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and one of the lead authors of the study, said, “If exposure to solitary confinement causes PTSD, then it may be harmful and dangerous and something we should think twice about. If people with PTSD are placed in solitary confinement, that’s also a problem, as it’s exacerbating their mental health problems.” Robert King, a prison reform activist who himself was wrongly incarcerated for thirty-two years, including twenty-nine years in solitary confinement, said, “I can tell you from experience: If you’ve done time in solitary confinement, you’ve been damaged. Even if you survive it, it has an impact on you.”15
During the Vietnam War, a large number of soldiers became addicted to heroin. While many still struggled with addiction when they returned home, a remarkable percentage of them simply stopped using.16 From a traditional viewpoint of addiction as a purely chemical dependence, this seems exceptionally peculiar, but when viewed through the lens of the rat and monkey studies, it makes perfect sense. These soldiers were regularly exposed to horrific atrocities, immense stress, and extended periods of anxiety while in Vietnam. They were thrown into an environment with people they didn’t know and for whom the normative behavior included drug abuse. Their social environments were often nightmarish, so they sought refuge in the temporary fix afforded by drug use. When they returned home to social environments devoid of such carnage and despair and were back with people they had known and loved all of their lives, the need for such a coping mechanism dissipated. In fact, it wasn’t just addiction that was impacted. Lt. Col. Angel Lugo, of the U.S. Air Force, shared this example with me:
Early in my enlisted career, I was an Airman Leadership School instructor. As part of our program, we invited a few of our local “living history” icons (POWs, Tuskegee Airmen, etc.) to speak to the students from time to time. I soon became good friends with one retired officer who was a Vietnam POW for more than seven years, including time at the notorious Hanoi Hilton during his ordeal. He talked about the tap code that prisoners used to communicate with each other. He highlighted the tap code methodology and greatly emphasized how the communication system soon became the lifeline for the prisoners. It established their sense of community; they taught each other different languages, mathematics, and other subjects. But the next words out of his mouth blew me away. He soon realized it wasn’t the beatings and torture that drove some prisoners to their demise; it was their hopelessness and loss of faith and ultimate decision to unplug from the tap code system. They literally isolated themselves, crawled up in a corner, and died.
One of the greatest examples of the benefits of social support in addressing addiction are twelve-step programs, particularly Alcoholics Anonymous. AA was founded by Bill Wilson (or “Bill W.” to those in the program) and Dr. Bob Smith in Akron, Ohio, in 1935. Wilson had joined the Oxford Group, a nondenominational movement that had been created to help members get and stay sober. Wilson had felt a “kinship of common suffering” that drew him to the group, and he put himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program just days after attending his first meeting, never to drink again. After focusing more on the “science” of sobriety, rather than solely on religion, he was able to achieve his first success at helping another to achieve sobriety with Smith, another member of the Oxford Group. By 1937, Wilson had separated from the Oxford Group and formed what is now AA.
Over the years, AA has become the best-known sobriety network in the world. Including the original program and other spin-offs for drug abuse, overeating, and other issues, millions of people every year use the program, largely because of the sense of belonging that it gives them. Consider these testimonials from participants I interviewed in the program:
Lydia: Before coming into the program, I felt lonely in general. I always had a group of friends with common interests, but I didn’t know what a genuine connection was. I come from a single-parent family and was raised where everybody else seemed to have Mom, Dad, and the white picket fence, so I felt like an outsider. I drank to numb the feelings of loneliness. When I came into my first meeting, I found so many different kinds of people who didn’t fit in. People from sixteen to their eighties, representing all races, creeds, and economic walks of life. The ease of knowing that they know exactly where I’m coming from is such an important part of it. Not being judged makes it easier to open up to things that are challenging for me. I know I have people who will be there anytime, day or night, for anything I’m going through.
Emily: In every way, shape, and form the alcoholism tried to make me alone. Before, I always had a support group, my mom and dad and friends. It was never a lack of support; it was a lack of me using it. The way my mind played me was by convincing me that I was so different that nobody would support me. But when I was drunk, I wasn’t miserable anymore. Alcohol gave me a break from me. People were trying to get me to stop but I wouldn’t, so I decided to try to find another group of people who wouldn’t try to stop me. They were more hard-core. I didn’t feel lonely at that point because I had finally found people who acted like me, so finally I wasn’t alone or rejected because of my behavior. I could feel like I was normal. AA for me is the home that I never knew I was missing. Now I have a safe place. We can share about anything. We laugh about stuff that other people wouldn’t be able to hear. I now see that I’m a small part of a large community. The relief I get for myself now is by supporting other people.
The message comes across loud and clear: belonging keeps them sober.
The same can be true about people who join gangs as a means of protection, as a way of dealing with the torment and threats from other gangs, or if their friends or family members belong. In order to fit in with other gang members, they may also begin to wear certain colors, distinctive hairstyles, or other types of clothing. They may use gang terminology and get involved with gang activities. And they often may find themselves engaging in behavior that would be considered inappropriate, illegal, or insane in other circumstances. Belonging, it seems, brings rules of normalcy of its own making.
In many workplace environments, employee resource groups (ERGs) can play a similar role. An evolution of what we use to call “affinity groups,” ERGs (sometimes called business resource groups) provide a way for people in underrepresented groups (women, African Americans, LGBTQ employees, etc.) to bond and create mutual support networks that can help them function more effectively within the dominant environment.
Our relationships with our social groups, either through social isolation or through blind belonging, can contribute not only to outward acts of violence but also to violence against oneself. A study conducted at San Francisco State University found that LGBTQ teens who experience high levels of rejection from their families during adolescence (when compared with young people who experienced little or no rejection from parents and caregivers) were more than eight times as likely to have attempted suicide, more than six times as likely to report high levels of depression, more than three times as likely to use illegal drugs, and more than three times as likely to be at high risk for HIV or other STDs.17
It is also important to recognize that the more threatened we feel, the more we pull back into our most core group identities. It is no coincidence that hate crimes or other rampant discriminatory behaviors tend to occur with far more frequency when people are in times of high stress and insecurity. Think about the rise of intolerance in Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, and so on. During times of upheaval, it’s all too easy to find a scapegoat to blame for our discomfort. Our current indictment of Muslims and immigrants clearly follows this same pattern.
This threat dynamic is exacerbated by the increased diversity in the world around us, and especially by increased worldwide migration. There is substantive scientific research showing that humans benefit tremendously from diversity in domains such as decision-making, problem-solving, and creativity.18 But we also know that sudden increases in diversity can present challenges to social cohesion. When diversity expands rapidly, and in especially visible ways, it causes people of all races to withdraw into their own groups and disengage from social institutions that we generally think of as community-building, such as civic associations, PTAs, and bowling leagues, creating a “turtling effect,” as if people were proverbially pulling back into their shells.19 This effect may be motivated by different stimuli, depending upon the group, but it is generally driven by some manifestation of fear of the other, real or imagined.
We define ourselves by the groups we are a part of and are accepted in. Those groups might be at our very core (family), or they might be social, religious, political, identity, cultural, and/or economic groups that share some sense of common purpose, experience, or goal.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines belonging as “close or intimate relationship.” My experience is that in terms of our experience of groups, belonging has five major qualities:
• A sense of shared identity, in that we see people in the groups we belong to as “us”
• A shared destiny: the belief that what happens to you might also happen to me
• A sense of interdependence, in that we rely on each other in some way, either directly or indirectly
• A general sense of shared values: we may not agree on everything, but we generally share a set of overall values that connect us
• An ability for people to feel fully able to be themselves
The last is probably the most important of all because it distinguishes a true sense of belonging from those times when we feel like we have to go along with the crowd in order to be accepted. It requires permission for people to bring their full selves to the group, and doing so takes enormous courage and vulnerability for most human beings.
Belonging tends to build a feeling of security in which members may feel included, accepted, and related, and generally conform to some agreed upon way of being, thereby enhancing their sense of well-being and security. In more simple terms, people who experience belonging feel less alone and less isolated, and they experience a greater sense of wellbeing. This doesn’t mean that we don’t disagree; however, in groups of belonging, those disagreements do not alter our shared identity.
Brené Brown has emphasized that belonging is built on our ability to experience and share our sense of shame and our vulnerability, and certainly most of us think of the groups we are most deeply bonded with as places where we can safely expose those parts of ourselves. In that sense, our feeling of belonging is deeply tied to our feeling of self-acceptance, because without self-acceptance we are more likely to be more tentative as to how much of ourselves we share with others.20
When we do not belong, it is significant, and the impact can be dramatic. Isolation is a complicated topic, primarily because there are multiple ways in which it can be conceptualized. We can think of objective social isolation as a definitive state of being, where one is physically cut off from social contact. Individuals in solitary confinement or on a deserted island would qualify as isolated, as they literally have no sources of connection available to them. However, social isolation can occur in a subjective manner as well: we may experience ourselves as isolated, even while we are surrounded by people and opportunities to connect.
In his 1994 autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom, the late South African president Nelson Mandela wrote about his twenty-seven years in captivity under the apartheid government. “I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one’s mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.”21
Yet even Mandela, deprived of his freedom and locked away in objective isolation, refused to internalize his experience of being a prisoner. “I have never regarded any man as my superior, either in my life outside or inside prison,” he said in a letter to the South African commissioner of prisons in July 1976, while he was still incarcerated.22 Knowing that he was in the right and that his imprisonment was the fault of an immoral system actually gave him the strength to maintain himself, even in the face of unbearable conditions. Even while isolated, he remained connected, psychologically and spiritually, to his community.
So how do we ensure that people feel connected? Contrary to what many cynics have abrasively suggested, ensuring that people feel included is not simply a matter of unnecessary coddling or indicative of a generation plagued by weakness and entitlement. We now have a litany of studies that demonstrate the profound negative repercussions of ignoring our fundamental need to belong, to be part of a group that we identify with. What’s more, it’s not objective social isolation that’s fueling the majority of these findings, but rather subjective social isolation; simply feeling lonely leads to dramatic health deficits. Although loneliness is an inherently mental construct, its implications for our health are by no means limited to simply our mental health; loneliness also manifests in serious physical symptoms.
The three people in the opening scenario of this book all live and work in environments with many people around them, yet Fatima feels isolated at times because of her religion, Joan because of her political views, and Barry because of his sexual orientation. Isolation and loneliness can be more about our experience than whom we are with.
Loneliness can impact health at all levels, and a wide range of scientists have been proving it for years. One study found that individuals with fewer social ties were at a significantly higher risk of dying from cancer and heart disease.23 The subjects with the fewest social connections died at more than twice the rate of their well-connected peers during the course of the longitudinal study. John Cacioppo and William Patrick cite scientific evidence to show that it only takes feeling lonely to produce chronic health issues.24 In another study, researchers identified a variable that in terms of being a risk factor for illness and early death was comparable to better-known dangers such as smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure. That variable? Social isolation.25
When we feel like we don’t belong, we also experience a dramatic reduction in our cognitive performance. University of Virginia researchers found that children from schools with elevated rates of bullying perform significantly worse on tests than children from more tolerant, inclusive schools.26 And if you think that the students’ cognitive impairment had something to do with their young age, think again. Roy Baumeister, professor of Psychology at Florida State University, and Jean Twenge and Christopher Nuss, from San Diego State University, had two groups of healthy adults complete a GRE-style test, with the only difference being that one group was told, following a fake personality test, that their results indicated they were more likely to be alone in the distant future, while the other group was provided with neutral feedback. The results were stunning: adults simply made to imagine being lonely in the future answered, on average, 39 percent of the test questions correctly, while the control group averaged 68 percent accuracy!27
Feeling socially rejected can also sap our motivation and willpower. Dealing with social pain for long enough can sometimes lead us to throw in the proverbial towel, and empirical evidence supports this claim. Researchers have found that socially excluded individuals are less likely to “stand up to challenges” and instead respond to obstacles with pessimism, apathy, and avoidance.28 If you’ve ever coped with loneliness by seeking refuge in comfort foods, you’re not alone: disconnected individuals have dramatically poorer health habits, including being 37 percent less likely to exercise but significantly more likely to eat a diet high in fats.29 While people may sometimes say, “I’m sick and tired of being lonely,” the evidence suggests that it might be more accurate to say, “I’m sick and tired because I’m lonely.”
Most of us have any number of groups to which we belong. Our family is, for most people, our most basic source of belonging (and, as we all know, families can be fraught with all kinds of dysfunction). We might also be defined by belonging to a particular racial, ethnic, or national group, a religious or spiritual group, a workplace, an interest group, or a social organization. Our level of belongingness to each group varies, but these places of connection fill a critical need nonetheless.
Though our desire to connect may be a universal impulse, to whom we are wired to connect is far more constrained. Through much of our evolutionary history, we lived in small, often isolated tribes. Being considered a member of a tribe was critical, as membership conferred benefits such as the right to share in communal resources and the luxury of group protection. An individual typically could not belong to different tribes simultaneously. The distinction was a simple one: you were either in our tribe, and hence one of “us,” or out of our tribe, and consequently one of “them.” Survival during this period depended heavily on our ability to differentiate members of our own tribe, who represented safety and security, from members of competing tribes, who represented danger and uncertainty. Tribalism has equipped humans with a hypersensitivity to signals of group membership and a reflexive urge to favor those whom we deem members of our own tribe over out-group members.
Though most of us rarely traverse a landscape as physically treacherous as the ones our ancestors did, the thick residue of tribalism continues to obscure our view of the world. For those hoping to promote untethered connectedness that supersedes racial, ethnic, and geographic barriers, it is crucial to understand that such a goal is, in many ways, counter to our biological predispositions. We have not evolved to facilitate unconditional connection between any and all groups. Extensive research in multiple cultures around the planet has determined that we are likely to experience less empathy for people who are in different racial groups than we are.30 This dynamic happens in all areas of our lives. In schools or workplace environments, it may occur as cliques that include some and exclude others.
This is not to say that there aren’t groups in which people actively try to build connection across differences. In cases such as that, what can unite us is our common desire to connect despite our differences.
The implicit need to categorize individuals into in-groups and outgroups—“us versus them”—is so fundamental to our nature that we automatically do so even when categorizations are purposely trivial. Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel divided individuals into groups based either randomly or on incidental differences (such as what kind of chewing gum they liked).31 Participants were then given opportunities to anonymously allocate money to other individuals within the study. Logically, favoring a stranger about whom you know absolutely nothing aside from his or her preference in chewing gum doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but this is precisely what Tajfel found. When provided with minimal information about those around them, individuals instinctively looked for even benign signals of group membership they could latch onto. The result is people disproportionately giving money to strangers with whom they share an unimportant characteristic. Our penchant to favor members of our own tribe prevails even when the identity under which our tribe is constructed is inconsequential.
This dynamic can lead to situations when an incident, a statement, or a circumstance can cause a relatively sudden shift in the perception of whether someone is in an in-group or an out-group. Whether we look at past events, like the O. J. Simpson trial, or more recent ones, like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or the Colin Kaepernick–inspired protests by football players and other athletes, black and white people who had felt connected before the incident often found themselves suddenly feeling different from each other afterward, knowing that there were two completely different reactions based on race, the level of trust they had in the police or justice system, and how it impacted them personally.32
We also relate to groups differently, depending on both their in-group/out-group status and their dominant/nondominant status in our societal structure. For example, in the United States, whites, men, heterosexuals, and Christians are dominant cultural in-groups based on their prevalence and power. Once people have been labeled as members of an out-group, they tend to be stripped of their individuality. This has been labeled the out-group homogeneity effect. We tend to see the groups to which we belong as a collection of diverse and unique individuals while other groups are perceived to be a uniform assortment of clones and sycophants: predictable, derivative, and otherwise unoriginal. Taken to the extreme, deindividualization leads to dehumanization, which has obvious large-scale consequences, as proven throughout history.
Think about how much easier it is to distinguish people of one’s own race versus distinguishing those of a different race. All of the statements that we have heard about how “all of them look the same” bear this out. Studies have consistently shown that we attribute greater personal variability to the members of our own in-group while seeing members of out-groups as largely similar in their personalities, tastes, preferences, and motivations.33 In one study, ninety sorority members were asked to judge the degree of differences among their own sorority sisters and two other groups. Every single participant judged their own sorority members to be more dissimilar than the members of the other groups.34
Let’s think of this relative to how racial groups are seen in the United States. Who is more likely to see the differences between African Americans, Caribbean-born blacks, and African-born blacks—people from those groups or people from other racial groups? The same is true for Hispanics or Latinos from Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico; Asians from China, Vietnam, Korea, or Japan; and whites who are Jewish, Mormon, or Catholic and from completely different cultural backgrounds. From the outside, many of these groups seem homogeneous, but from the inside we know that significant differences can exist.
An unfortunate consequence of the out-group homogeneity effect is that it makes it easier and more automatic to stereotype groups of which you do not consider yourself a member. If we already tend to view members of out-groups as being homogeneous, deploying stereotypes becomes not only easier but in a sense a logical (though problematic) labeling device. As I wrote in my book Everyday Bias, this stereotyping contributes dramatically to conscious and unconscious biases that impact not only our beliefs but our behaviors as well.35
Even if you are a member of a group, your survival isn’t guaranteed, especially if your identity is aligned with a nondominant group. People who are in out-groups societally have to pay more attention to group identity in order to survive than do people who belong to in-groups. If you are a woman in a predominantly male environment, it is more necessary for you to pay attention to the gender dynamics of the group in order to be safe and successful in it. This concern is exacerbated by public examples of misogyny or sexism, as we have seen with Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Harvey Weinstein, and as we saw during the 2016 presidential election with Donald Trump. The same is true for race. People of color are more likely to be aware of dynamics of race than whites are because they need to be in order to survive and thrive in a white-dominant culture. It can even impact the way one perceives oneself. If you are heterosexual, for example, how often do you think about your heterosexuality? However, if you are LGBTQ, you probably include that in your thinking in various ways on a regular basis (for example, “Whom do I tell?” “How much do I tell?” “Are they reacting to me the way I think they are?”). On the other hand, imagine if you were the only straight person in a large group of LGBTQ folks. All of a sudden, your heterosexuality is in the forefront of your thinking. You have never felt more straight in your life!
Our identity brings with it a whole set of expectations. Because we belong (or are assumed to belong) to a particular group, we are expected to go along with that group in terms of beliefs and behaviors, and we often do. In the period following World War II, social scientists conducted hundreds of experiments designed to help us understand how the Nazis were able to turn one of the most cultured countries on the planet into a genocide machine virtually overnight. Some of these experiments are well known. In 1951 Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments showed that people will tend to conform to a group’s viewpoint, even when they see that the evidence against it is obvious.36
Other experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo demonstrated how our identification with a group, and particularly authority within our group, can lead to behavior that goes beyond the irrational to downright deadly.37 Once we have identified with a group, their behavior begins to seem “normal” to us, and the behavior of others therefore seems “abnormal,” “sick,” or “evil.” This is especially true when our group is the dominant cultural group, because our view of ourselves then becomes the prevalent view in the broader culture. When faced with a conflict between what we know is right and our desire to go along with the predominant group behavior, we tend to go along. It simply feels like the right thing to do.
Our tendency to identify ourselves by group keeps us safer: we know who our friends and enemies are very quickly and easily. But it is not only about safety, and it starts very young. According to Sarah Gaither, a social psychology professor at Duke University:
If you build your identity around a group, it’s important to define what that group isn’t. That’s what really ends up pushing kids to be more exclusionary to other kids. Over the course of elementary school, physical aggression is replaced by tattling, and then eventually by gossip—both ways of drawing boundaries, and of keeping an errant peer in their place. The act of shutting people out, then, doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the ones on the outside; more often, it’s an act of self-preservation.38
This is a great example of what I described earlier as “bonding against.” Our group identity is clarified and strengthened by knowing that “we’re not one of them.” We ultimately rely on “us versus them” thinking in order to define ourselves, define the other, and figure out how to be safe and successful in our lives. By doing this we allow ourselves to be clear about the norms of group behavior that we are expected to follow; to be clear about whom we should be afraid of and protect ourselves from; to know whom we can trust and whom we must distrust; and to know whom we can harm and whom we must keep safe. Our understanding that we can feel more comfortable when one of the people outside of our group is harmed than we do when one of our own is harmed is the reason we eschew fraternizing with the enemy. It is harder to defeat a foe when you identify their humanity than when you assign them to objectified groups and dehumanize them (e.g., “Japs,” “gooks,” “Islamic terrorists,” “socialists,” “racists,” or “fascists”). We define ourselves by who we are not just as much as we do by who we are, and sometimes even more.
We have a strong pull toward dualism. It is very natural, and sometimes even automatic, for human beings to choose sides. In fact, we have a strong tendency to create either/or, right/wrong, them/us dynamics in our lives. Think about how many times things that are really more along a continuum are divided into two parts so as to increase our ability to deal with them: day becomes night and night becomes day at a moment. The same can be said about hot and cold. We even do this where people are concerned. People or “for us” or “against us,” “one of us” or “one of them.” We have a tendency to want to separate the world into dualities.
This imposed simplicity makes it easier to deal with life at some level, but it also blurs the nuance and complexity of life. This is the case with our tendency to see the world as “us versus them.”
But how do we decide who is “us” and who is “them”? Given our previous look into the world of politics, let’s start there.
