Review of BELONGING
A fundamental human need
I work professionally in higher ed at a non-profit research and development hub called WGU Labs. In this work over the past couple years, I’ve grown to know a lot about the field of belonging research and its importance to students in college. Students who feel a sense of belonging are more engaged on campus and in the classroom, tend to persist longer, and have overall more positive learning experiences.
My professional work led to great anticipation for a new book by one of the most eminent experts on belonging in school and elsewhere in life, Geoffrey Cohen. Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides by the Stanford psychologist offers a comprehensive overview of belonging research and, importantly, how such research hold implications for education, careers, health, and politics.
The premise of belonging research is situation-crafting, or the idea that situations are powerful to influence our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. The research area also draws on the foundation of our evolutionary sociality – we have a fundamental need to be part of a social group. These foundations form the core concept of belonging, or the sense that we have a social group in which we are accepted and valued.
What I learned most from this book was how to think about belonging differently than just a concept psychologists measure with some self-report items (though, we certainly do do that!). Rather, belonging really is an umbrella concept (hence, the cover – I think?) that ties together a range of research domains about how people fit in socially. Belonging, then, is more of a “how can we fit all these types of findings into a cohesive whole” rather than a top-down theoretical area of research, per se.
People want to feel like they have people who understand them and value them – this isn’t surprising, or at least is should be. It’s a natural human tendency to gravitate toward like others. And when we feel like we don’t belong, whether it be at college or in the workplace, or even among our social groups, it can have negative consequences – people drop out, underperform, and withdrawal.
Belonging is a true popular science book and is an extraordinarily accessible read for those interested in psychology research, and how research can lead to practical recommendations and applications.
Published: September 2022
Format: Advanced Paperback
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman (2021)
The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code by Michael McCullough (2020)
Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene (2013)
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