Leary, M. R. (2010). Affiliation, acceptance, and belonging: The pursuit of interpersonal connection. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., pp. 864–897). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. https://
https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470561119.socpsy002024
Given the centrality of social interaction in human behavior, understanding how and why people seek contact with others is of central concern to social psychology. People are highly motivated to spend time with certain other people and make choices on an ongoing basis regarding with whom they will interact. However, affiliation is a two-way street. People can sustain both single interactions and ongoing relationships with other people only to the extent that they can entice others to want to relate to them as well. As a result, people are interested not only in being with and developing connections with other individuals but also in showing other people that they have something to offer as social interactants, relational partners, and group members. As a result, interpersonal behavior is rooted in two complementary processes by which people simultaneously seek to relate with other people and try to get others to want to relate with them as well. This chapter focuses on these two fundamental interpersonal processes. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section examines factors that motivate people to affiliate and spend time with others. Most work in this area has focused on the effects of stressful situations on affiliation, but people obviously desire to interact with others under nonstressful conditions as well, and we examine an array of reasons that people affiliate with one another. As noted, people who are interested in interacting with others must also induce the others to interact with them, so we also touch on the ways in which people promote counter-affiliation. As discussed in this chapter, much of this research was conducted in the 1950s and 1960s; although social psychologists once devoted a good deal of attention to understanding the bases of affiliation, interest has nearly disappeared since then. Because merely affiliating with other people is of limited usefulness in providing many desired outcomes, people are motivated not only to get others to affiliate with them, but also for others to value and accept them as well. The chapter discusses ways in which people foster and maintain their relational value by showing other people that they possess attributes that make them a good relational partner (friend, romantic partner, group member, or whatever) and monitoring their relational value in others' eyes for signs that their value to other people is low or declining. Of course, people are often not successful in being accepted as a relational partner or group member, so the chapter also examines the causes and consequences of interpersonal rejection, with sections devoted to the effects of rejection on emotion, self-esteem, and interpersonal behavior. The chapter concludes with an examination of the effects of interpersonal rejection on physical and psychological well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)