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Why We Need to Feel Connection — According to Dr. Jonathan Haidt
How Our Psychology is Similar to That of Bees
We have this natural desire to be understood. We don’t like loneliness. We crave feeling connected to something bigger than us.
The moral psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt believed that this psychological mechanism — feeling as if there’s something greater than us — evolved because of our tribal days. Consider the example of an army formation marching. As you march, you become one with everyone else. There’s unity, there’s commonality.
Humans Are 10% Bee
It’s identical, according to Haidt, to how bees act in their hive. They are not individual bees; they are a hive of bees. There IS something greater, and that’s the hive itself. This psychological mechanism is what allows bees to fight and die for their hive. Their individual identity gets replaced by the hive identity, and so the survival of the hive becomes more important than the survival of the individual.
This is the same mechanism that human beings have. We don’t have it all the time. In fact, Haidt believes that we are “10%…
