Collaborative Research: Lessening the Blow of Social Rejection

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Social rejection is a major cause of emotional and physical distress, and it often leads to aggressive retaliation. As one example, individuals who are responsible for school violence often have a history of being socially excluded. This project seeks to understand how best to reduce the harmful consequences of social rejection. Past research has focused considerable attention on those who have been the target or victim of social rejection. Much less attention has been paid to those who engage in social rejection. The research that has been done focuses on those who socially reject others for the purpose of causing harm. Yet, most everyday social rejection occurs by people who do not intend to hurt others. Examples range from those who turn down social invitations to those who reject job candidates for employment. In such cases, people often struggle with how best to soften the blow of their rejection. This project builds on existing research by investigating the specific language that people can use to make their rejection of others hurt less and the conditions under which they are able to use that beneficial language in the moment. Specifically, social psychology theory and research has identified that people experience feelings of elevated power, concern about their reputation, or both in the moment when they are rejecting others. This project examines how those central experiences bolster or hinder people’s ability to learn and implement language principles that make the rejection less emotionally devastating. If people can learn to reject in a way that minimizes hurt feelings, it may offer an avenue to prevent subsequent aggressive retaliation. The project draws on social psychology as well as theories and methods from communications, game design, and computational modeling. The primary aim is to reveal the mechanisms and conditions needed to train people to use the least hurtful language when socially rejecting others.This project is organized around a set of six behavioral experiments that examine the experience of the social rejector and how that experience shapes the language and emotional impact of their rejection. The studies focus on language as a point of intervention because research has shown that people express a desire to not hurt others but feel at a loss about what to say to accomplish that goal. The project considers whether two central experiences of social rejectors, power and concerns about one’s reputation, hinder or bolster the use of language that softens the emotional blow of the rejection. One expected effect is that people who focus on their social power in the moment of social rejection will be less likely to use beneficial language in the moment and will struggle to learn the appropriate language. Another expected effect is that people who focus on how their own reputations may suffer will show enhanced ability to learn the language that softens the blow and greater success at implementing that language in the moment. The research also aims to uncover whether the emotional priorities of the social rejector may come at a cost to the rejected person. That is, do social rejectors find it emotionally draining to craft responses that draw on the beneficial language principles and decide not to put in the effort despite knowing it means the rejection will end up hurting the rejected person more? This research program provides training to a diverse group of students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The results and intervention materials are broadly disseminated to organizations focused on promoting community. Many points of contact are made with other areas of scientific inquiry, including communications, game design, and computational modeling. The project develops an accessible, empirically-supported training program that helps people know what to say to soften the blow of their social rejection as well as develop basic knowledge that could be used as further points of intervention.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.