I think one of the more eye-opening studies I ever came across was done by Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman, and Kipling Williams back in 2003.
Imagine you were one of their participants. You come to their lab and they hook you into an fMRI machine (just a fancy machine that monitors your neural activity as you complete tasks). They then put a computer screen in front of you and explain “On this screen, you’ll see three avatars. This one at the bottom, that’s you - you control that avatar. These other two are controlled by other players like yourself who are hooked up in separate rooms. In a moment, we’re going to ask you three to do something very simple: play a game of catch with each other. A ball will appear on the screen and all you have to do is pass that ball around with the other players. Make sense?”
You nod, the researchers exit the room, and - just as was explained - moments later a ball appears on the screen and the game begins.
For the first 20-30 seconds or so, things are going well. You’re passing the ball around with the other players and having a (mildly) good time.
But then something strange happens. After a period of everyone sharing the ball equally, the other two players suddenly stop passing the ball to you. For seemingly no reason, they’ve suddenly decided to exclude you and just pass the ball back and forth between themselves.
This continues for what seems like minutes. You try to be a good sport, but you can’t help feeling a bit confused and, honestly, a little irritated - I mean, that’s kind of a jerk move on their part, right? It’s like they were taunting you. And once the game ends, the researchers unhook you from the fMRI, thank you for your time, and send you on your way.
You smile as you leave the lab, but you’re a little bothered. “Why did they suddenly stop sharing the ball with me?” you think to yourself. “Did I do something wrong? They don’t even know me.” Silly as it seems, you can’t shake this negative feeling you’ve gotten from the interaction.
But unbeknownst to you, this was the whole point of the study.
Eisenberger, Lieberman, and Williams designed the “cyberball” game as a way of testing how people respond to social exclusion. Although you were told that you were playing with two other players, in reality, it was a computer program that was designed to, at first, share the ball with you, and then to abruptly stop sharing and exclude you for the remaining period of time. The team wanted to understand what happens at the level of the brain when we believe we are being excluded by others (even if those others are complete strangers to us).
And what they stumbled upon was groundbreaking.
After examining the brain scans, the team discovered that the areas of the brain that activate when we experience social exclusion overlap significantly - almost identically - with the areas of the brain that are active when we experience physical pain. In other words, at the level of the brain, being excluded quite literally hurts in much the same way that physical pain does.
To understand why this is, we have to go back a few thousand years…
If we were to travel back into our evolutionary past, you’d quickly see how important it was to be part of a group. Humans underwent a different evolutionary trajectory than other animals. While some animals evolved to be solitary creatures, physically gifted enough to hunt, fight, and evade predators on their own, humans gained dominance primarily through mutual cooperation and the coordinated efforts of the group.
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but humans aren’t exactly the most physically gifted of animals. Pound-for-pound, we’re actually one of the weaker species in the animal kingdom, and we’re also not a particularly fast species. Consequently, during our evolution, we regularly encountered predators (such as large wolves and sabre-toothed cats) against whom we (individually) stood no chance of survival (but whom we could fend off in groups). Similarly, we often survived by taking down large prey, such as woolly mammoths, although we could not do so by ourselves - we relied on large hunting parties consisting of dozens of other group members working in tandem.
In short, we relied on the group for survival. Without the protection of the group (against bigger, stronger, and faster predators) or the assistance of the group (to kill prey too large to take down alone), there was very little chance of making it out alive. And herein lies the key to the finding cited by the research team above: because of how critically important being part of the group was to not dying in our evolutionary past, we’ve evolved to experience social disconnection in a similar way to how we experience physical pain because both represented a threat to our survival.
Thus, our desire to belong is not just some superficial urge - it’s a deep biological drive intertwined with our survival instincts.
Because our desire to “belong” to the group is so fundamental, organizations would be wise to remain cognizant of its’ role as they build out their processes, cultural blueprints, and incentive systems. Some ways they can do so while “working with” our social nature include:
Create multiple pathways for participation beyond just speaking up in large groups and design meetings in ways that actively prevent exclusion (round-robin sharing, anonymous input systems, rotating facilitation, etc.)
Deliberately structure team introductions and early projects to ensure new hires feel genuinely integrated and not just present
Create “rituals of connection,” or regular, intentional activities that reinforce belonging and can counteract exclusionary dynamics. Examples include:
Monthly “all-hands” meetings where achievements are shared across teams
Informal coffee chats or virtual hangouts for remote teams to build personal connections
Onboarding programs that pair new hires with mentors or “buddies” to not just teach them skills but to integrate them into the social fabric of the company
Leverage recognition as a leadership and culture tool:
Highlight individual contributions in a way that ties them to the team’s success (e.g., “Sarah’s data analysis was critical to our team’s breakthrough”)
Recognize group achievements publicly, reinforcing the value of collective effort (e.g., “Team X’s innovative solution saved the company $Y”)
Use peer-to-peer recognition programs where colleagues can nominate each other for contributions, fostering a sense of mutual appreciation