Belonging

Belonging is not simply proximity to other people; it has specific, testable criteria. Baumeister and Leary (1995) define it precisely: "human beings have a pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships. Satisfying this drive involves two criteria: First, there is a need for frequent, affectively pleasant interactions with a few other people, and, second, these interactions must take place in the context of a temporally stable and enduring framework of affective concern for each other's welfare." Belonging, on this account, requires both frequency and stability together; neither alone is sufficient.

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Dr Peter Wyman explains that having connections within ones community give us a sense of Belonging, meet core relational needs, and reduce risk of suicide.

When this need goes unmet, the consequences are not mild discomfort but measurable harm, which is what separates a need from a preference. Baumeister and Leary conclude that "deprivation of stable, good relationships has been linked to a large array of aversive and pathological consequences. People who lack belongingness suffer higher levels of mental and physical illness and are relatively highly prone to a broad range of behavioral problems, ranging from traffic accidents to criminality to suicide." A lack of belonging, in other words, functions as a genuine risk factor, not an unpleasant feeling to be managed.

Critically, belonging is not satisfied by relationship quantity alone; quality determines whether contact actually protects someone. Baumeister and Leary are explicit that "it is not the mere fact of having an interpersonal attachment, but rather having an attachment that brings positive interactions, that is decisive," citing research finding that "the quality rather than the quantity of social interactions predicted health." This same distinction, arrived at independently, is embedded in how Wyman et al. (2020) interpret their own trial: "Wingman-Connect classes became increasingly unified around healthy norms and encouraged classmates who were vulnerable to mental health or occupational problems at a key juncture of military training, in addition to meeting their needs for belonging" (Discussion). The mechanism credited with the trial's effect, cohesion, is framed by the authors themselves as belonging by another name.

The population-level stakes of this are substantial. Holt-Lunstad (2024), synthesising the wider evidence base, reports that "a meta-analysis of 148 studies found that adequate social relationships were associated with a 50% increased likelihood of survival." Belonging's absence is not a niche concern; it scales to mortality risk across entire populations.

Two honest limits apply. Baumeister and Leary's own synthesis draws substantially on correlational studies, which they acknowledge directly. And Wingman-Connect did not measure "belonging" as its own construct; the trial measured cohesion and bonds, then interpreted the results through a belonging lens after the fact, so this link should be read as a compatible interpretation rather than a direct test.

Context: Belonging in Schools

Baumeister and Leary's (1995) two criteria translate into a concrete school design principle: a single assembly or one-off workshop cannot build belonging, because it satisfies neither frequency nor stability, "these interactions must take place in the context of a temporally stable and enduring framework." But frequency without positive quality is equally insufficient; the same authors stress that "it is not the mere fact of having an interpersonal attachment, but rather having an attachment that brings positive interactions, that is decisive." For schools, this means a repeated activity that participants experience as awkward, coerced, or poorly facilitated will not produce belonging merely because it happens often. Wyman et al. (2019) supply the school-specific evidence that this matters at scale: friendship integration and cohesion, not isolated one-off events, predicted lower rates of suicidal ideation and attempts across the 38 schools studied.

Context: Belonging among Remote Workers in IT and Technology

Distributed IT teams often satisfy one of Baumeister and Leary's (1995) two belonging criteria without the other: contact can be frequent through constant messaging, yet lack the "temporally stable and enduring framework of affective concern for each other's welfare" that in-person teams build incidentally. Herbsleb and Mockus (2003) documented this gap directly in software teams: distant colleagues reported markedly less "teamness" than colocated ones, which the authors trace to how "distance interfered with the usual stages by which individuals become coherent groups or teams." Yang et al. (2022) add that remote work also reduces new-tie formation itself, finding that firm-wide remote work caused workers' networks to become "more static," with fewer ties added or dropped month to month. For distributed developers, frequent contact through tools may not be building the stable, affectively invested relationships that actually requires.

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497

Herbsleb, J. D., & Mockus, A. (2003). An empirical study of speed and communication in globally distributed software development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 29(6), 481–494. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2003.1205177

Holt-Lunstad, J. (2024). Social connection as a critical factor for mental and physical health: Evidence, trends, challenges, and future implications. World Psychiatry, 23(3), 312–332. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.21224

Wyman, P. A., Pickering, T. A., Pisani, A. R., Rulison, K., Schmeelk-Cone, K., Hartley, C., Gould, M., LoMurray, M., Brown, C. H., & Valente, T. W. (2019). Peer‐adult network structure and suicide attempts in 38 high schools: Implications for network-informed suicide prevention. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 60(10), 1065–1075. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13102

Wyman, P. A., Pisani, A. R., Brown, C. H., Yates, B., Morgan-DeVelder, L., Schmeelk-Cone, K., Gibbons, R. D., Caine, E. D., Petrova, M., Neal-Walden, T., Linkh, D. J., Matteson, A., Simonson, J., & Pflanz, S. E. (2020). Effect of the Wingman-Connect upstream suicide prevention program for Air Force personnel in training: A cluster randomized clinical trial. JAMA Network Open, 3(11), e2022532. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.22532