GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 48 - December 2020

Murray was not the only psychologist to draw attention to the inherent need of people to belong. The need for affiliation or belonging has taken center stage in various other psychological theories. For instance, American psychologist Abraham Maslow includes it into his five-tier model of human needs. He argues that after physiological and safety requirements are satisfied, the third level of human needs is social and involves feelings of belongingness or affiliating. The affiliate marketing business is, in fact, built on the very same principle. s I go through the pages of a recent edition of the The Economist, I imagine thousands of people doing the very same thing at the very same time. An “imagined community” is a concept developed by the political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson in 1983. According to Anderson, members of the community who have similar interests or identify themselves as part of the same group form the so-called “imagined communities.” I might not personally know every person who, just like me, reads the The Economist while sipping their coffee. However, I know that these like-minded individuals are somewhere out there, and I subconsciously belong to their community. It’s this sense of belonging that communities are built on. THE INHERENT NEED TO BELONG You’ve probably heard about Henry Alexander Murray. Back in 1959, the American psychologist interviewed Theodore J. Kaczyns- ki as part of his experimental research at Harvard. Kaczynski’s story as the “Unabomber” went through an online revival leading to the production of a Netflix series of the same name. Murray, however, is also widely known for his theory around human personality. He differentiates between primary and sec- ondary needs and lists “affiliation,” or the need to be close and loyal to another person, as one of the main psychogenic needs of an individual. For the affiliate networks to succeed in creating their own community , they have to engage in a race to attract more players by incorporating more sophisticatedmethods and focusing on their customers more than any competitor . ity 45 G P W A t i m e s . o r g