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Affiliation

This entry reviews theory and research on affiliation, which is the broad class of behaviors that humans and other animals use to initiate and maintain pair bonds, kin relations, resource-trading alliances, friendships, and other kinds of relationships. Like their hominid ancestors, humans are deeply social and have benefitted from affiliation as a means of fulfilling a variety of needs. The motivation to affiliate is shaped by both personal characteristics and features of situations. An interaction partner's personality traits can make affiliation difficult, and social exclusion is a pervasive feature of social living. Under some circumstances, social exclusion can increase affiliation; under others, it can lead to poor judgment and antisocial behavior.

The Origins of Human Affiliation

Within the environments of human and hominid predecessors, social living made it much easier for these ancestors to fulfill their most basic needs. Natural selection has thus favored social tendencies among humans, and today people possess affiliative adaptations that evolved tens of thousands of years ago. Human affiliation varies by kind and degree, and different cultures often provide different norms about how people should affiliate, but extensive affiliation in one form or another is typical among all human populations.

Because not all large primates affiliate extensively with each other (e.g., chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are more social than orangutans), it is worth considering why group living was advantageous to these ancestors. After all, affiliative living certainly has its risks, as cases of divorce, domestic violence, and gang warfare remind us. These risks, however, are heavily outweighed by the benefits of affiliation. Hominids living in groups had a much easier time protecting themselves from predators, hunting large mammals, and finding valued resources than they would have had they lived primarily in solitude. Group living also allowed some hominids to easily communicate with and learn from each other so that the “secrets” of adapting to particular environments could be quickly learned. Perhaps most importantly, group living typically made hominid reproduction easier and more successful because mates were nearby and the group provided greater protection to offspring. These and other benefits help explain why most of the large primates have met the challenges of their environments by clustering into groups. Only in very few environments (such as the orangutan's) is minimal affiliation an adaptive way of living.

Selective Affiliation

Social as they are, however, humans are not indiscriminate in their affiliative tendencies. All human beings prefer to affiliate with some types of people more than others. Donald Brown, an anthropologist who has compiled an extensive list of pancultural human characteristics, has noted that in all cultures people prefer ingroup members over out-group members. Bias favoring ingroup members takes on different forms in different lands, but all normal humans generally prefer people of their own kind (e.g., people of similar heritage, opinion, or purpose) over people from other groups. There are certainly some exceptions to this tendency (e.g., attraction to the opposite sex, nondiscriminatory employment recruiting), but preferring people who are “us” over people who are “them” seems to be a basic characteristic of human nature.

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