The Evolutionary Roots of Belonging

Why do we fear social exclusion as much as we do? What drives our powerful desire to belong to social groups?

Social exclusion, or the threat of it, is a complex and mysterious phenomenon that permeates all of our relationships and almost all aspects of our lives. Indeed, we are deeply social creatures. Since the beginning of our collective history, we lived, loved, mourned and worked with others. We knew these others and they knew us. We flourish when we belong. Not belonging and being a social outcast is very bad news for human beings. For our ancestral brothers and sisters, it meant death. For us, it kind of means the same. Sure enough, the world has changed. Our social ties to others have become much less personal and much more complex, yet for many of us, social isolation is a scary prospect that should really be avoided, whatever it takes. If our fear for social banishment materializes, we will surely feel (it's empirical), bad. Studies show that social outcasts are anxious and depressed, they think about and do destructive things and die sooner than people who are socially well connected. This strong reaction to the new status of outcast can be blamed on, at least in large part, our primordial drive to survive, which, for our ancestors entailed group membership. After all, without the benefits of the group, our ancestral sisters and brothers would have had no protection from the weather and or predators and isolation from the group would have been a death sentence. These evolutionary roots might be one good reason why even in our more technical and less personal world, the desire for social connection and the fear of losing it is pretty well universal. True, there are cultural differences in the ways in which way this desire is enacted differs but the desire to belong, the fear of rejection and the pain of social isolation are, or so it seems, shared by us all.