The science behind why rejection feels bad, even from people we barely know
Being rejected in the lab generally failed to produce emotional reactions, whereas imaginary ones did.My lab conducted studies on interpersonal rejection for two decades. Things were going well, but one thing puzzled me.
By random assignment, some people were told that no one had chosen them. Many experiments have used this procedure successfully.were substantial. People who were rejected became more aggressive, less helpful, more self-destructive, and more. The answer, or at least a big part of it, emerged recently from Hallgeir Sjåstad and colleagues . True, there is nothing at stake and no practical consequences from being rejected. But people’s reactions to the present often invoke feelings about the future.
For half, they imagined that they tried hard to get along and fit in, but their co-workers did not accept them. They ended up being left out and ignored by everyone. In contrast, the acceptance condition involved imagining oneself being welcomed into the work team and getting along well with them., as compared with people who had imagined being accepted and welcomed into the work team. Crucially, their unhappiness was based on expected future rejections.
An interesting twist on this: Live rejection experiences in the lab generally fail to produce emotional reactions, whereas imaginary ones do. People imagine that rejection will bring a wave of bad feelings. The implications of this may go far beyond rejection. Could there be a general pattern in which responses to right-now events are based on what could happen in the future? We evolved from animals who live almost entirely in the here and now, so there is not much evolutionary preparation for the human pattern of thinking about the future.
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