Concept and origin
Baumeister and Leary (1995) treated the need to belong as a fundamental human motive. Walton and Cohen (2007) went further, arguing that members of socially stigmatized groups have a more fragile sense of belonging because their membership in a setting can always be questioned. When Black students were led to think they would have few friends in a field, their sense of belonging and fit in that field dropped, while White students showed no such effect. This links to social identity threat.
The social-belonging intervention
Walton and Cohen (2011) had first-year college students read stories from older students saying that everyone worries about belonging at first but that it improves over time, and then put the message in their own words, in a session of about an hour. The intervention raised Black students' grades over three years, narrowed the racial achievement gap and improved health indicators. Good et al. (2012) showed that women's sense of belonging in math predicted their intention to keep studying it.
Extensions and limits
Yeager et al. (2016) reported that pre-college online interventions with thousands of students increased full-time enrollment among disadvantaged students, and Murphy et al. (2020) found that a customized intervention improved retention at a broad-access university. Effects vary with school context and actual support, and do not appear at the same size everywhere. Researchers stress that interventions cannot substitute for fixing discriminatory environments, and that effects last when the environment genuinely supports belonging.
FAQ
- What is belonging uncertainty in simple terms?
- It is the ongoing doubt "do I really fit in here?" that makes even small failures feel like proof you do not belong.
- Can it be reduced?
- Brief interventions conveying that everyone worries at first and that it gets better have shown effects in several studies.
Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26
References
- Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. Classic statement of the need to belong.
- Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2007). A question of belonging: Race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 82–96. The original paper on belonging uncertainty.
- Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331(6023), 1447–1451. Brief belonging intervention with long-term effects.
- Good, C., Rattan, A., & Dweck, C. S. (2012). Why do women opt out? Sense of belonging and women's representation in mathematics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(4), 700–717. Belonging and women's persistence in math.
- Yeager, D. S., Walton, G. M., Brady, S. T., Akcinar, E. N., Paunesku, D., Keane, L., Kamentz, D., Ritter, G., Duckworth, A. L., Urstein, R., Gomez, E. M., Markus, H. R., Cohen, G. L., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Teaching a lay theory before college narrows achievement gaps at scale. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(24), E3341–E3348. Large-scale pre-college belonging interventions.
- Murphy, M. C., Gopalan, M., Carter, E. R., Emerson, K. T. U., Bottoms, B. L., & Walton, G. M. (2020). A customized belonging intervention improves retention of socially disadvantaged students at a broad-access university. Science Advances, 6(29), eaba4677. Customized intervention at a broad-access university.
- Murphy, M. C., Steele, C. M., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Signaling threat: How situational cues affect women in math, science, and engineering settings. Psychological Science, 18(10), 879–885. Situational cues lower belonging.