It is your second week. Someone in the meeting makes a joke that depends on a project from two years ago, and the whole room laughs. You laugh too, about half a second late, the way you do when you're checking everyone else's faces to see how. Nobody noticed. You noticed. On the walk back to your desk you replay it, and the replay gradually turns into a conclusion: I'm not one of them, and everyone can tell.

That conclusion is the interesting part. Nothing happened. A room laughed at a joke you weren't there for. But your mind did not file it as "a joke I wasn't there for." It filed it as evidence.

The need underneath the awkwardness

In 1995, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary published a widely cited review arguing that the desire for lasting, positive social bonds is a fundamental human motivation, closer to a need than a preference. We are built to monitor whether we're accepted, because for most of human history being cast out of the group was dangerous.

That monitoring system doesn't switch off when you walk into a conference room. It runs quietly in the background of every meeting, and it runs loudest when you're new, because you have no track record to quiet it.

Belonging uncertainty: when ambiguity gets read as a verdict

The psychologists Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen gave a name to the specific trap. In a 2007 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they described belonging uncertainty: a state of doubt about whether you fit in a new environment, and whether people like you will be accepted there.

The key finding is about interpretation, not about how people actually treat you. When you are uncertain about your belonging, small and ambiguous events carry far more weight. A colleague doesn't reply to your message. You aren't copied on a thread. Someone finishes your sentence, or doesn't look up when you speak. For a person who feels secure, these are noise. For a person who is uncertain, each one becomes a data point, and the data points all seem to point the same way.

This is why a new hire can leave a perfectly ordinary meeting convinced they've been frozen out. The meeting was ambiguous, and ambiguity is exactly what an uncertain mind fills in with its worst guess.

It also explains a cruel loop. If you feel like an outsider, you speak less. If you speak less, you give people less to connect with. If people connect less, there's more ambiguity to misread. The feeling manufactures its own evidence.

Why meetings are the worst place for it

Meetings concentrate the problem for three reasons.

They're full of shared history you can't see. Inside jokes, acronyms, "as we discussed," and the unspoken knowledge of who really decides things. All of it signals insider to the people who have it and outsider to the person who doesn't.

They're public. Every awkward moment happens in front of an audience, which makes it feel larger than it is.

They're short and infrequent. You might get a few hours a week of group time with your new team. Each one has to carry a huge weight of interpretation, so each one feels high-stakes.

The encouraging part: the feeling is often temporary, and a story can change it

Walton and Cohen followed their 2007 work with a well-known 2011 study in Science. First-year college students read a short set of survey results and stories from older students saying that worries about fitting in were common at the start and faded with time. The students then wrote a brief reflection connecting that idea to their own experience.

The intervention was small. But among Black students, who faced a particular risk of reading ambiguity as proof they didn't belong, it was associated with better academic outcomes over the following years and a narrowing of the achievement gap. The researchers' explanation was not that the students had been taught a trick. It was that they had been given a different way to interpret the same events: this feeling is a normal phase, not a verdict.

That is the idea worth taking from this article. Belonging uncertainty is not a character flaw and not an accurate reading of your team. It is a predictable state with a typical arc, and the story you tell about it changes how much weight each awkward moment gets.

A fair caveat: that study was about students, and workplaces differ. Some teams really are cliquey, and no reframe fixes that. But the first weeks and months are precisely when your read of the situation is least reliable, so it is worth distrusting the verdicts your mind hands you.

What this looks like in practice

Say a colleague skips your idea in a meeting and moves straight to the next speaker. The uncertain mind says: they think I'm out of my depth. Other explanations, all at least as likely: they were watching the clock, they didn't hear you, they planned to come back to it, or they were absorbed in their own anxiety about the next item.

You don't have to believe the charitable version. You only have to hold the question open long enough to gather more evidence than one meeting provides.

Your next moves

  • Write down three "verdict" moments from this week, each with two alternative explanations. Take the thing you've been replaying (the late laugh, the unanswered message) and write a boring, plausible alternative for each. The point isn't positivity. It's showing yourself that your first reading was one of several.
  • Book a 20-minute one-on-one with one teammate this week. Ask: "What do you wish you'd known in your first month here?" It builds a direct connection outside the group setting, and it usually reveals that they felt the same way.
  • Ask your manager what a good first 90 days looks like, and which meetings matter most. Specific expectations replace vague dread. If you know what success looks like, you read less into silence.
  • Plan one small contribution before your next meeting. One question or one piece of relevant information, written down ahead of time. Early, low-stakes participation breaks the loop where silence creates distance.
  • Ask about the context you're missing, out loud, once. "I wasn't here for that project. What's the short version?" Most people are glad to explain, and you convert an exclusion signal into a connection.
  • Put a date on the feeling. Write down today's date and "re-check in six weeks." You're not promising it will vanish. You're treating the feeling as a phase to revisit, which is exactly the reframe the research suggests helps.

Where a meeting debrief fits

The hard part of belonging uncertainty is that the evidence lives in your head, replayed at 11 p.m. with the edges sanded off. It helps to get the meeting out of your head and onto something you can look at later, a short note on what was said, what you read into it, and what actually followed. Over a few weeks, the notes tend to show you which fears came true and which never did. That is the idea behind Meeting Mortem, a place to debrief how a meeting really went and what you made of it. If you're in your first months somewhere new, you can look at it at meetingmortem.lumenlabs.works. But the exercises above work with a notebook and a calendar reminder, and they're worth doing either way.