Social Exclusion Impairs Self-Regulation

Baumeister et. al. (2005), noting that humans are social baings, looked at the relationship between social exclusion and self-regulation, or the ability to control or alter one's responses. They hypothesized that social rejection might increase or decrease a person's ability to develop adequate self-regulation and noted mixed results in previous studies. They noted that people who have suffered significant amounts of rejection tend to exhibit high levels of self-defeating behaviors that would further tend to encourage rejection by others.

The researchers conducted six separate studies exploring the relationship between rejection and self-regulation. Four studies provided false feedback of rejection and predictions of social failure, and the last two were follow-up studies of one of the first four. Opportunities for self-regulating behavior were provided during the studies, and emotional states were evaluated. In these studies, the participants completed questionnaires and then were given feedback regarding the results intended to induce a state of a feeling of acceptance or of rejection. Some were told that a task which was impossible to complete was a measure of intelligence.

The researchers found that those given negative feedback gave up much more quickly on tasks than those given positive feedback.

The ethics of this study seem somewhat questionable. While participants eventually knew this was false feedback, it seems possible that some of the participants would secretly believe there was a grain of truth in what they had been told. Thus the researchers inflicted deliberate emotional distress on others in order to conduct their research. In addition, the situation was highly contrived. Nothing in the research they cited suggested that people develop poor social self-regulation based on one negative contact with others, and yet this was the basis for the research's conclusions. In addition, the experiments do not resemble the real experience of social rejection. Results of this study should be viewed cautiously.

Reference

Baumeister, R.F., DeWall, C.N., Ciarocco, N.J., & Twenge, J.M. (2005). Social exclusion impairs self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(4), 589-604.