Need To Belong

There is a basic/fundamental need to belong to social groups. People have discovered that to do more in life than merely scrape by, they need to work together with others in order to succeed in living. There are hurdles on the way to this preferred social setting. People need to have common ground upon which to agree before they can come together for the greater good of all involved. They need agreement on beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors to reduce the chance of the group becoming chaotic and erratic. The commonality needed also lends to the good of all. This may be more important than the avoidance of disunity. 

People will learn to bend to rules of others as they move toward unity. This bending becomes contagious because as more people bend, others who see this conformity will likely feel obligated to bend and follow the crowd. People will often conform even when they are in a group of complete strangers. Going along with the flow is the, perceived, easiest way to avoid negatively standing out in the crowd. That being said, the strongest urge to conform and fulfill the need to belong comes when a person loves and cares about the others in the group. Within families and groups of close friends this is called normative social influence. People with self-esteem issues are more easily influenced in this way. 

Non-conformity within the group is often considered deviant behavior even if the behavior is well within the social norms of society at large. Behaving outside of the group’s norms may well get a person ejected from a group. Our religious institutions provide too many examples to even begin to discuss in this forum, but suffice it to say that one of the major failures of the local church is the way they treat people who are different.

Our country is an individualist culture, but there is an irony in the fact that normative social influence is so pervasive. 

What is the social impact of the normative social influence? Fads and fashion are the first two areas that come to mind. The most powerful areas are racial and political. Look at the rhetoric in the news, within congress, and within groups of differing ethnicities, gender, or socioeconomical status where the differences in norms are most acute. 

Changing a person’s behavior in relation to how they view others on this level is never easy because of the context in which they find themselves and their personal preferences. This is the plight of the local church today. Churches need to create environments with guard-rails wide enough to include as many as possible, albeit without compromising Biblical standards. It is my goal is to help churches do this very thing. It should be the goal of every church to gain more understanding about those who are different, welcome them, and to help those outside the perceived socio-normative group with their need to belong.

TJ