Pacenotes: How to Design for Belongingness

This edition of Pacenotes will be a deeper dive into some specific parts of the Civic Signals research. In the following editions I will follow the lit trail a little bit to dig into some of the papers referenced in the research to look at some of the mechanics of community building that have been examined.

Civic Signals provides in-depth breakdowns of each building block in a research package that you can download here. The signal I’d like to look more closely at is the fifth one, “cultivate belonging”.

Firstly, the concept of “belongingness” is explained. This is described as a process of replacing loneliness and alienation with companionship and mutual obligation. It’s seen as a basic foundational need, with no further scrutiny required.

What is belongingness and how is it created? The literature from behavioural research to psychology gives us this check list:

• Bonnie Hagerty’s work in the ’90s tells us that belongingness can be generated even from neutral interactions, like two people watching a movie together. Negative interactions don’t create belongingness.
• According to the psychologist Glenn Malone, belongingness can be created by the environment rather than individuals or groups of people. Think of nature, animals and ideologies.
• Belongingness is heavily shaped by perception. An individual’s sense of belonging or being useful to a group can diverge greatly from the reality. Someone can feel belonging even if they are rejected, for instance.
• Belongingness is not “social connectedness” which is the existence of social relationships through circumstance, and without the component of feeling connected to a specific group. Think of people who happen to work at the same company or office.

Practically speaking, what can communities do to generate more belongingness?

• Increase the time individuals or groups spend with one another. The more time people spend with one another, the greater the likelihood of positive or neutral interactions. This is true even of “disliked outgroups” according to the psychologists Wilder and Thompson.
• The exact composition of groups doesn’t matter as much as time spent together. Belongingness can grow even among people arbitrarily assigned to groups, the pscyhologist Annie Locksley found. They just need the opportunity to have those crucial positive or neutral interactions.
• Design for high-quality bonds, not for quantity. Belongingness has a cap, and once that is hit, people don’t seek out more of it. The psychologists Baumeister and Leary say people prefer a few close friendships over a high number of transient or superficial encounters. A successful community should therefore stay away from bombarding people with too many transient contacts.
• Mix in in-person meetings. Online communities can be significantly boosted with some in-person meetings, according to the psychologists Sacco and Ismail. Online communications that lead to in-person interactions have an impact on belongingness “above and beyond” online interactions.

In the next edition of Pacenotes we’ll dig into work by the researchers Di Lu and Rosta Farzan at the University of Pittsburgh, who are referenced in the Signals research for their work looking at how online-offline hybrid communities are formed on Meetup.com.