Collaborative Research: The spreading of perceived exclusion

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Loneliness is a public health concern. People who feel socially disconnected from others show reductions in psychological and physical well-being. They behave in more antisocial or aggressive ways and they suffer declines in cognitive abilities and motivation. Given the pain and harm of being socially disconnected, it is unfortunate that people often incorrectly perceive others as being the cause of social exclusion even when they are not. This research seeks to identify the factors that make people vulnerable or resilient to false perceptions of exclusion. It will examine people's responses to these social misunderstandings. The long-term goal is to develop interventions that can help people identify when they may be falsely perceiving exclusion and how such misunderstandings can be addressed before they lead to harmful consequences.This research focuses on a common, but ambiguous, social dynamic: one-person exclusion. This unfolds when one person (the excluder) includes another (the included) while excluding a third (the rejected). Such dynamics are very common in everyday life. They may occur, for example, when one person (the excluder) invites another (the included) to an event while not inviting another person (the rejected). Past work shows that although the included has not contributed to the exclusion, the rejected incorrectly perceives the included as having exclusive inclinations and likely to perpetuate exclusion in the future. This phenomenon has been called the involuntary excluder effect. This project examines one-person exclusion as it unfolds in naturalistic social settings over time. Using a variety of research methods and measures (self-report, behavioral, cognitive, and neurophysiological), the experiments address questions such as: What gives rise to false perceptions of exclusion? How do rejected persons behave toward those who are included by an excluder? When might included individuals succumb to pressures of the social dynamic and become excluders themselves? Ultimately, the research considers whether social misunderstandings are better corrected by training people to recognize when their perceptions might be faulty or by encouraging those caught in the middle of exclusionary dynamics (the included) to take proactive steps to signal that they are inclusive.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.