The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation

As a sociological construct, interpersonal relationships or attachments influence human beings towards specific behaviors and motives in their environment and in society. In essence, relationships are a smaller subsection of a greater working whole. As a sociological topic, no one person fully operates alone, that is without some type of interaction between individuals or groups of individuals.  “All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else (Buddha).” This fundamental concept is interesting because a more comprehensive understanding of the need for relationships or cause, and the resulting effects of the qualitative features of attachments can be useful in the study of social group formations, marriage and family, motivations and perseverance, and in crime in society.

Attachment theorists have recognized both evolutionary and psychological drives contained within individuals to obtain and/or maintain relationships. Historically, relational groups have cultivated because of basic primary drives, such as the survival instinct. When a person stays within a group they are less likely to be harmed, more likely to expand on resources, and contribute to the continuation of the species. According to an expanding body of knowledge about human behavior in a multitude of disciplines, beginning in biological evolutionary theory, these human drives are what cause emotions and therefore the motivation towards some type of action. Moreover, the psychological aspects of human beings to desire relationships are influential to ones personality and character. For instance the need for validation, satisfaction of a personal contribution to a greater cause, or belongingness can have positive or negative effects on self-esteem, confidence and the quality of relationships an individual consequentially pursues.

Finally, in reference to Auguste Comte, a founder of sociology; we can conclude that these sciences integrate and relate their findings into a cohesive whole and can describe the relationship to relationships between the sciences as the resulting field of  sociology, which Comte considers the peek of a hierarchical understanding. “There must always be a spontaneous harmony between the parts and the whole of the social system. . . . It is evident that not only must political institutions and social manners, on the one hand, and manner and ideas on the other, be always mutually connected; but further that this consolidated whole must always be connected, by its nature, with the corresponding state of the integral development of humanity (Comte).” Studying the need to belong and the desire of interpersonal attachments as fundamental motivations from a sociological perspective would involve examining how all these concepts describe relationships and the purposes relationships serve in a larger working and linking network. The purposed hypothesis for research is that the need to belong is a powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation, that is, a need to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of interpersonal relationships, is innately prepared (and hence nearly universal) among human beings and that need positively correlates to behavior resulting from that desire.

In order to conduct a study that analyzes whether or not relationships act as a motivating causation, one would need to identify, experimentally, that relationships are the independent, acting or causing effect, dependent on motivation and behavior thereafter. All of the variables must be specifically and operationally defined in order to be reliable. In other words, the construct must be unambiguously defined into variables that can be measured. A relationship could be defined as a partnership between two or more individuals. Every variable would have to be defined in terms, as well as specific processes used for assessing those variables and placing them into their respective categories.  After formulating the hypothesis and variables, data is collected through surveying in a simple random sample.  This method is consistent with an experimental design in social sciences research. The benefits of using an experimental design are that it is objective, less invasive and if done correctly, can support the hypothesis empirically and render it statistically significant.