Kim Mills: At some point, nearly every one of us has experienced the uncomfortable sensation of feeling out of place. Maybe it was in your middle school cafeteria, or during your first few weeks on an unfamiliar college campus, or in a job interview with a potential boss whom you desperately wanted to impress. We all remember what it feels like to hear that questioning voice in our head, wondering what everyone else is thinking of us and whether we really belong there.
The desire to belong is a fundamental part of human nature, according to psychologists. And when people feel out of place, when their sense of belonging is threatened, then that discomfort and self-doubt can have far-reaching effects. In fact, according to some psychologists, threats to belonging help drive problems as varied as racial and gender achievement gaps, political polarization, and even physical health problems.
So why is belonging so important? Are there ages or life stages when belonging matters most to us? How are social media, remote work, and other technology-driven changes affecting our sense of belonging? How does the need to belong figure into the clubs we join, our political affiliation and even where we choose to live? And what tools can teachers, employers, and others used to increase people’s sense of belonging, especially for people who are most at risk of feeling like outsiders?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
My guest today is Dr. Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of psychology and the James G. March professor of organizational studies in education and business at Stanford University. He studies the processes that shape people’s sense of belonging and the threats to belonging that people face at school, at work, and in healthcare settings. He also designs what he and others call wise interventions, that aim to increase belonging and help solve social problems such as racial and gender achievement gaps. His new book is called Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides. Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Cohen.
Geoffrey Cohen, PhD: It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.
Mills: Let’s start with a line from your book. You wrote, “A sense of belonging isn’t just a byproduct of success, but a condition for it—in school, work, homes, healthcare settings, negotiations, politics, community policing, and virtually every domain in which humans deal with other humans.” We’ll get into the details later, but first, let’s talk broadly. Why is belonging so important and as you say so necessary for success?
Cohen: As a social species, we’ve evolved to be exquisitely attuned to whether or not we belong in our group, with our tribe, with our kin, and that includes our fictive kin. As human beings, we’re physically pretty helpless, especially when we’re first born. Compared with other animals, we really don’t have much going for us, except for one superpower and that’s the ability to work together to solve common problems. I mean, of course, there’s other superpowers that we have, language, thought, consciousness, but the ability to learn and work together is one of the most important assets we have as human beings, which enables us to survive, thrive, take over the planet. And it’s that fundamental concern about belonging to a larger group, being accepted in that group and having something to contribute to that group that motivates so much of our day-to-day thought, feeling and action.
Mills: So what happens psychologically and even physically to people who lack that feeling of belonging?
Cohen: I’ve been thinking about this. I think that you really start to appreciate the importance of a sense of belonging when it’s taken away. For many of us, it’s so easy to take that for granted. One of the things that I like about, for example, traveling abroad or going to a strange town that I’m unfamiliar with, is being jarred out of that familiar feeling of, “Hey, I know what I’m doing here. I feel like I’m part of the in crowd.” Oftentimes when we’re in a novel situation, a stranger in a strange land, we suddenly feel, “Oh, this is what it feels like not to feel like I belong.” And for a lot of people, for a lot of members of historically underrepresented groups or stereotyped groups, that feeling is a continual reality in many of our institutions.
The answer to your question of what is it like to feel like you don’t belong is uneasy. People feel anxious. And one of the best demonstrations of the effects of being ostracized comes from work by Kip Williams, where he has people passing a ball using an avatar as kind of a computer game. They pass a ball as kind of a computer game of catch to other avatars in a video game. And all of a sudden, the avatars, the other two avatars start passing the ball amongst themselves, excluding you. And unbeknownst to the participant, these two other avatars are actually preprogrammed entities. And the effects of that, as Kip Williams says, is pain, social pain. And in fact, the same regions associated with the experience of physical pain are activated when people experience social ostracism. So it seems like we’re wired in such a way to be, to feel not just biological threat, but that reputational threat, that threat to our social image when we’re ostracized in a way that’s biologically really similar to the experience of pain.
Mills: And it’s interesting that people can get upset, even when an avatar stops throwing a make-believe ball at you. I mean, it seems so simple.
Cohen: That’s right. It’s surprising. The triviality of the experience, the impact, the big impact of a trivial experience to just how powerful the need and the motive is.
Mills: Are there ages or stages in life when the need for belonging looms largest? We think about middle schoolers and teens desperately trying to fit in with their peers for instance, but not as much about adults’ need for belonging. So when are the times when the need to belong is most acute?
Cohen: The need to belong is most acute, of course, in the early years when we’re first born. The importance of early attachments has been heavily researched by pioneers of the 20th century, such as John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth. In addition though, it’s important throughout the life course, but especially during certain phases of our life. I would say preadolescence and adolescence are key stages where we’re trying to figure out our place in the wider world. So that’s one point that I think often gets a bit of short shrift, but that now with the crises in teen health, teen anxiety, depression, suicidality among boys, cutting among girls, I think there’s going to be, and there is increasing attention to the importance of connection and belonging during the adolescent years. In fact, one of the big predictors of teen reckless behavior and mental illness or mental health problems is a sense of connection, both in school and in home.
Those two perceptions that, “I belong at school and I belong in my home”, turn out to be among the strongest predictors in large representative samples of teen reckless behavior, risk behavior, and mental health issues. So the teen years are important, but as you said in your opening remarks, I think it’s something that we all encounter and it may not be really marked by chronological age as much as it is by transitions. So I think in these liminal stages of life where we’re making a transition from one social world to the next, a new school, a new job, a new role as a parent or caregiver, whatever the case may be, we experience acute doubts, or we can, we are susceptible to what Greg Walton and I call belonging uncertainty, where we’re just wondering, “Do I belong here? Do I want to belong here? And can I make it? Do other people accept me here?” So I think it’s important throughout the life course, but especially in the early years in adolescence and at transitions, at major transitions.
Mills: A lot of your work has focused on how very brief interventions that increase people’s sense of belonging can have surprisingly powerful and long lasting effects on, for example, student achievement. You’ve looked at this in the context of using these interventions to help close racial and gender achievement gaps. Can you talk about that work? How do these wise interventions as you call them work?
Cohen: Well, the term wise intervention actually has a history. Greg Walton has applied it to the idea of—to describe interventions that are psychologically attuned to people’s sort of thoughts and feelings that are precisely targeted at underlying psychological processes. But the term actually goes back to Erving Goffman, right? My all-time favorite sociologist. And he borrowed the idea, the term “wise” from the gay subculture of the 1950s and among the gays, the term “wise” referred to straight people who were kind of in the know, who understood the full humanity of gay people in spite of their wider stigmatization by the rest of society. So we use the term “wise” similarly in a lot of our research to describe interventions that reassure people of their belonging, when simultaneously people are being discriminated against, stereotyped, susceptible to larger messages of degradation.
How do you do that in day-to-day social life, convey that a person is fully seen? And as that sort of study that I describe with Kip Williams, one of the big triggers to feeling like you don’t belong is feeling like you’re not seen, right? Those two avatars are passing the ball back and forth as if I’m invisible, not here. So what wise interventions do is to send the message often in word, but sometimes in deed, that you are seen.
And just to take one example, in some research that I did with my colleagues, Claude Steele, Lee Ross, David Yaeger, Valerie Purdie Greenaway, on the problem of how to give good, critical feedback across racial lines. One of the things that we found works really well when giving feedback, say a White teacher is giving feedback to a Black student, where there is this sort of possibility that the feedback could be seen as untrustworthy and as a sign that I’m not being fully seen and I’m being stereotyped. One of the things we found that works really well, a good wise intervention, is to say that this criticism that I’m giving you is a sign of my high standards. And I’m giving it because I have high standards and because I believe in your potential to reach them. When the criticism was just given in this way, Black students responded to the same feedback as positively as did White students, they were even slightly more motivated to revise their work.
And one of the amazing things about these wise interventions that we’re still trying to get our heads around is that sometimes they can set in motion a virtuous cycle, such that even days, weeks, years later, you see the aftereffects. So in the case of wise criticism, when we had teachers deliver this wise feedback to their students in middle school, these were seventh graders, not only did the kids, were the kids more likely to revise their essays, but the following year, they reported more trust in their teachers. They were less likely to get into disciplinary trouble. And then years and years later, just as a result of this one experience of feedback, they were more likely to make it to college, 20 percentage points more likely to make it into college.
So what’s interesting about these wise interventions isn’t so much the power of them. The power of them is really interesting. What I see them as demonstrating is just how much untapped potential there often is in individuals that we just don’t see, that’s just waiting there to be tapped into, through the right change in the situation.
Mills: Is this research making its way into teacher training? I mean, it sounds incredibly valuable. And I know that there’s a long time between research and psychology and application in the real world.
Cohen: It is. It is. Over the past—I didn’t know it would take this long, but it takes about two decades. So over the past two decades, it’s made its way into a lot of schools of education. One of my positions is in a graduate school of education. So I assume since they invited me there, they were interested in this kind of work. There’s also some lovely work by Christine Davis Rubies, demonstrating how you can teach teachers to be responsive to the dynamics of the classroom and to these sort of psychological concerns that students have that’s had really positive results. So I think that more and more of these ideas are percolating into schools of education.
The question I always come back to is, well, what is the big lesson of this research? And one of the things I try to emphasize in my book is I think it’s a mistake to think that the big lesson is the interventions like you do. You just say, “I have high standards and believe that you can make it” and magic happens. Or we do some work on what’s called values affirmations, where you have kids reflect on their core values and bang, suddenly some of them start to excel at school and in ways that they hadn’t before. They break free of a harsh history. The lesson isn’t so much about the power of any wise intervention, per se, as much as it is about the power that we all hold as engineers of one another’s situations to bring out one another’s best.
And that’s one of the things I try to really emphasize in my research and the talks I give in the book is just how much of a superpower we have in our day-to-day encounters to warp situations, shape situations in ways that tap into untapped potential. Of course, you need the right way of altering situations to bring about that change, but the research suggests that it is possible to bring about more change than we often think. And we hold some power as educators, as parents, as coaches, as mentors to do that day-to-day. A lot of times we’re often doing it and we have no idea that we’re doing it. That’s one of the tragedies being an educator is that you often have a powerful impact, but don’t see it.
Mills: You used the word affirmation a moment ago, and I know that’s an area where you’ve done some work. Can you explain how that works and the impact that it has on kids who learn affirmation, who learn how to use this?
Cohen: Yeah. Well, this is some work that Julio, my close colleague, Julio Garcia and Valerie Purdie Greenaway and Jonathan Cook and I did many, many years ago. At least we started many years ago. We’re still doing it. And it drew a lot on Claude Steele’s self-affirmation research, which basically says that one of the things that people work hard at in their lives is maintaining an image of themselves as globally competent people with moral and adaptive adequacy. I’m sure people want to feel that they have self-integrity. And one of the hard things about being a member of a historically stereotyped or stigmatized groups, such as an African American or Latinx student in an academic predominantly White institution, is the threats to self-integrity that they’re continually confronting day-to-day in the form of microaggressions, stereotypical messages, teacher expectations.
So given the world as it is while we’re still pushing the cultural ball forward to rid our institutions of bias and prejudice and these overt, and sometimes subtle acts of bias, what can we do to armor people against the threats to self-integrity that they experience day-to-day?
And one answer is these values affirmation activities. And with values affirmations, what we do is we create a sort of safe situational space for students to assert what they value, their core values and to reflect on why they’re important to them. And so the way that this typically works is in a classroom, the teacher will ask kids to complete a writing activity where they circle their most important values, and then they just write about, “Why are my values so important?” And what that does is it sends the message to kids that, “Hey, I have a voice here. What I care about is recognized and acknowledged in the classroom. My teacher cares about it.” Eric Smith had some really nice research showing that that’s the message that these sorts of activities send. And then the student sort of shores up their self sense of identity and self-integrity by asserting what’s most important to them.
It’s a way to ground ourselves in these situations where we can get a little, feel a little under assault, a little battered about, one way to deal is to just ground ourselves in our most important values. And what we found, and a lot of other researchers have found, is that this small but potent act of reflecting on core values can sometimes under certain conditions have pretty positive benefits, including increasing GPA and college prospects of minority youth years and years later. A little small thing at the right time, can have a big effect.
Mills: So I want to change the topic a little bit and talk about political polarization, something that’s been in the news a lot lately, especially as another election season approaches. And one section of your book describes how people’s need to belong drives our political behavior and beliefs. How are issues around belonging contributing to political polarization?
Cohen: We live in an era where there is, as Pete Buttigieg put it, a crisis of belonging. The usual sources of belonging, such as religious affiliations, church, the workplace, family, extended family, those are not as robust as they used to be. So there’s a crisis of belonging. And as a result of that, people are finding identity and belonging in political tribes to some degree. And what that does is it can make people now religious in terms of their adherence to the positions of their political party. One of the things that is contributing to political polarization is the need to belong. That a lot of times people gain a sense of belonging by identifying with their political party, embracing its positions, even when it may be dangerous or ridiculous to do so.
To give one example of this in some early research that we did on what we called the party-over-policy effect, we simply gave Democrats and Republicans a description of a welfare policy that was either very generous in its benefits or really draconian in its benefits. And then we asked Democrats and Republicans, which policy do you support? How much do you support it? And as you might expect, Republicans like the more draconian policy, Democrats like the more generous policy. However, for a separate group of subjects, we told them that Democratic lawmakers supported the draconian policy and Republican lawmakers supported the generous policy. And so the question was what would drive people’s attitude towards the policy? Would it be the content of the policy or the perceived position of their political party? And the answer was the perceived position of their political party. People went with their party, even when it defied ideological content or the factual content of the policy, that the position of their party trumped the impact of the policy content.
So that was a kind of early demonstration of wow, how the degree to which people conform their views to the position of valued reference groups. It seems to be a really powerful effect. And as you might imagine, of course, sometimes it’s very rational to do this. Our groups are who we trust, and maybe it makes sense for Democrats to give heavy weight to what Democratic lawmakers think. But the problem is if we can’t even agree on a policy that is really congenial to our ideological beliefs, if we can’t even agree on the most congenial policy when it’s proposed by our political adversaries, what could we ever agree on?
Mills: That raises the idea that I’ve been toying with in my head, which is that the idea of belonging is sort of a two-edged sword. I mean, the word itself has a positive connotation, but many people have used the lure of belonging to convince people to do things that aren’t really in their best interest and might be harmful or cruel or illegal. So how can individuals be more aware of when and how they’re being manipulated by this need?
Cohen: I don’t think there’s enough research on this, but for sure, one thing to watch out for is when you’re with your own group or when you’re thinking of your own group, what social psychologists call your reference group. One of the enduring messages of social psychology is that groups are a powerful part of our situations. Groups, as Stanley Schachter, one of the sort of wizards of social psychology, put it, exert pressures to uniformity. And a lot of the classic social psychology studies are demonstrations of this that people will conform their judgments, even when it defies the evidence of their own senses to some degree, to some degree. So I do think one answer to your question is just being aware of the power of group influence on us. I think that’s the first step—is knowing that we’re susceptible, understanding that we’re susceptible.
And we see this time and again, in a lot of research, not only by us, but by Emily Pronin and others, that the people who are often the least biased and the most able to break free of the influence of group pressures and other biases on their judgments are the people who recognize that their introspection can be flawed. It’s the people who have confidence in their own objectivity who paradoxically or ironically often prove the most susceptible to bias and group pressures. So I do think that just simply being aware, it’s like that old Richard Feynman quote, I’m going to paraphrase it: “The first mandate is to not deceive yourself in science and you are the easiest to deceive.” I love that. It applies not just to science, but to social life. First principle, don’t deceive yourself. You are the easiest to deceive. It is so easy for our thoughts to be contaminated by stereotypes, by group pressures, by whatnot. And the first step to trying to have some agency over their influence on us is just to be aware of their impact.
Mills: You mentioned earlier the idea that there’s a crisis of belonging, it might sound familiar to some listeners. I mean, even the book Bowling Alone came out about 20 years ago and people have been talking for decades about how Americans are more isolated and lonely than ever, and less connected to our communities. Do you think those worries are warranted? Do we actually feel less belonging than we used to?
Cohen: There’s talk of an epidemic of loneliness and the figures aren’t as high as commonly conveyed. A lot of reports on the media say it’s like 50% of people are suffering from severe loneliness. The figures are more like 20%, which is still a lot. Loneliness, prolonged and chronic loneliness is a national problem. Our surgeon general has made it in his interviews and in his book together, he’s made it clear that this is really a major national crisis now. The sense that people have of being disconnected, not just from their community, not just from their country, but from the rest of humanity. Loneliness is a major crisis, both in our country and in other countries. So I think it is a huge problem now. It’s a huge problem now for a lot of different reasons. I mean, I feel like the word loneliness doesn’t really capture the depth of and in severity of the despair.
It is really an awful psychological state to be in, one of the most noxious, one of the most noxious. Going back to the earlier part of our conversation, we’ve evolved to go with our group. And so one of the worst things our central nervous system can communicate to the rest of our body is “you are alone.” And there’s an increasing amount of research that suggests that lacking social connection is as bad for us as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. It’s an awful environmental toxin. And when we go to, say a new house, we are often thinking about, “Well, what about the radon? Let’s get a radon test to make sure we’re not being exposed to some radioactive substance.” We don’t really think about these invisible social, psychological toxins, like loneliness and isolation, which just are incredibly noxious, despite the case had provided pretty strong evidence that in recent years, there has been a huge increase in what they refer to as deaths of despair, people dying through suicide or addiction or overdose.
And they link. I think it’s about 180,000 cases deaths per year. They link this to social pain. So I think it’s a big problem. And I think a lot of the problems that are besieging our nation, from racism to xenophobia, to poor health, to political polarization, to some degree, have a common origin in this crisis of belonging that is roiling our society and other societies.
Mills: So during the pandemic, many people’s lives have moved online, their work, their socializing, school. Does interacting virtually rather than in person change how people experience belonging and could the move to remote offices, for example, make it more difficult for people to develop a sense of belonging at work or at school?
Cohen: I think so. There’s not a lot of research on that yet, but it does seem to be the case that not having those face-to-face encounters is a corrosive agent to our connections. And the great resignation, though it has some understandable origins, may have this side effect of cutting people off from even more, even further from the sense of belonging that they get from having a meaningful job with colleagues. Not that that was always the case before. I mean, one of the things that is really important is that, yeah, face-to-face workplaces could do a lot more to encourage a sense of belonging among their employees, ranging from acknowledging and appreciating their contributions to giving employees more autonomy and sense of influence and voice over their products. But you are absolutely right that as we become increasingly isolated because of this digital world we’re in, belonging is going to be something that is harder for many of us to achieve, especially perhaps introverts, new research suggests might have a harder time creating those bonds of connection that they need.
Also, there’s a lot of attention now to social media, as our lives migrate more and more onto these online platforms, social media platforms, that turns out to be a pretty corrosive agent to our sense of belonging, especially for young people. I mean, of course, of course, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, are ways to connect us, of course, but on average, they seem to be not such a good thing, especially for young people—undermining their well-being, making people less involved in the kinds of civic and face-to-face associations that we know encourage a sense of belonging and purpose. One of the big contributors to mental and physical health.
So I think that that’s another corrosive agent to belonging. There’s some nice research by Liz Dunn, out of Liz Dunn’s lab, just showing that even having our phones out during dinnertime conversation makes us less present, less likely to enjoy the company of friends and family. So I do think that this is one of the major challenges of our era, how to maintain that sense of connection, even as we’re physically being pulled and mentally being pulled in away from the situation as a result of social media and media and the increasingly digital nature of the environments we’re living in.
Mills: So what’s next for you? What are you working on now?
Cohen: Well, one of the things that I am really interested in is not so much wise interventions per se, but how can you teach people, parents, teachers, mentors, to embody the lessons of social psychology in their day-to-day encounters. And one of the big ideas I think here is that we are, in ways more than we appreciate, molders of other people’s psychology. And we have the ability to create connection down on the ground in our day-to-day encounters in surprisingly powerful ways. I think that’s the message of a lot of this research, just simply acknowledging that you see a person through, say wise criticism or values affirmation can have powerful lasting effects.
So given that these little one-off interventions can, under certain circ*mstances, have such large and lasting effects, the possibilities of creating even more meaningful, systemic, widespread change capture the imagination. If only one thing can do that, what could we do if we had not so much an arsenal of wise interventions, but the wisdom of practice, knowing how to create connection in our day-to-day encounters with people with whom we disagree. With our students, with clients, with friends. I really, really believe that we have a lot to learn. I know I have learned so much by studying what I study. There’s so much that we can do to break free of these harmful biases and cultural programming that undermines our ability to create connections and bridge divides.
Mills: Well, Dr. Cohen, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been really interesting and I would encourage our listeners also to pick up your book. It’s very engaging. I don’t always plug my guest’s books, but I think yours is very readable and I think our listeners would enjoy it. Thank you.
Cohen: Thank you, Kim. I really appreciate it.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or in Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you heard, leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for a future podcast, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org.
Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
