CHAPTER Social Rejection Reduces Intelligent Thought and Self-Regulation

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CHAPTER 13 Social Rejection Reduces Intelligent Thought and Self-Regulation Tyler F. Stillman and Roy F. Baumeister Abstract This chapter reviews evidence that social rejection reduces intelligent thought and self-regulation. Correlational research has demonstrated that social rejection and low intellectual performance are related, as loneliness is associated with poor cognitive functioning. Experimental research has shed light on the correlational findings, as participants assigned to be rejected performed slowly and inaccurately on reasoning problems, relative to participants assigned to control conditions. Hence, social rejection reduces intelligent thought. Evidence also indicates that rejection reduces self-control, as people who are rejected perform poorly on a wealth of self-control tasks. Key Words: intelligence, ostracism, self-control, self-regulation, social rejection Introduction It is widely accepted that humans are social beings (e.g., Aronson, 1972; Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Of course, social creatures are not rare in nature, as a number of nonhuman beings are highly social (e.g., wolves, bees, or bonobos). However, humans relate to each other in ways that are qualitatively different from the ways in which other social animals relate to each other. Baumeister (2005) characterized this difference by describing humans as cultural beings. In particular, Baumeister argued that the distinctly human pattern of within-species interaction is not simply a matter of people being exceptionally social. Rather, human interaction relies on a shared system of meanings, or culture, and culture has been essential to humanity s biological success as a species. Many nonhuman animals are just as social as humans are, but no nonhuman animals approach the extent to which culture permeates human life. The acquisition of food is illustrative of how culture enables humans to deal effectively with the problems that confront other species. Humans rarely get food directly from nature. Instead, most people get at least some of the food they consume from other people in a way that requires a shared system of meanings. This requires language and often involves money or barter, which requires a great deal of shared meanings. In short, Baumeister s (2005) argument is that culture is essential to the biological success of humanity. The benefits of culture require that one be included in a larger group, making social exclusion a threat to both mental and physical well-being (see Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Gruter & Masters, 1986; Seligman, 1975; Williams, 2001; see also chapter 2). Consider the difficulty one would have in meeting one s need for shelter, food, and water alone and without any help from one s social and cultural relationships. Perhaps it would be possible for some people to survive, but clearly belonging to a social and cultural group improve one s chances of survival. In addition to inclusion, the benefits of culture also require specific mental capacities, perhaps especially self-regulation and intelligent thought. One would be hard-pressed to benefit from shared 132 13_DeWall_Ch13.indd 132 9/24/2012 11:59:57 AM

systems of meaning without the intelligence to understand a shared system of meaning. Put differently, human culture makes use of highly intelligent thought. Likewise, human social and cultural life relies on self-regulation. For example, trading money or other goods for food requires that one inhibits aggressive and sexual impulses. One implication of Baumeister s (2005) thesis is that the benefits of intelligent thought and self-regulation are indirect and occur via human social and cultural relationships. The extraordinary human intellect and capacity for self-regulation were not designed to function in the absence of social and cultural relationships. Consequently, rejection could reduce intelligence and self-regulation, as these capacities were meant to function within a social and cultural context. This chapter surveys some research supporting the notion that rejection reduces intelligent thought and self-regulation separately. Rejection Reduces Intelligent Thought Correlational Research Low levels of belonging and low intelligence are both predictors of criminality and could be causally related. Evidence indicates that people with relatively low levels of social belonging are more likely to commit crimes and act aggressively. Children of single parents are more likely to end up in prison than children who are raised with two parents (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990). Likewise, unmarried men are more likely to commit crimes than their married counterparts (Sampson & Laub, 1990). Researchers have consistently found that people who commit crimes demonstrate low intelligence (e.g., Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; National Research Council, 1993; Walsh, Beyer, & Petee, 1987; Wilson & Herrnstein, 1985). These findings are consistent with the idea that social rejection reduces intelligence. Of course, one could offer alternative accounts for this patterns of results. Research on academic performance is also informative regarding the relationship between belonging and intelligent thought. High school and middle school students categorized as having a learning disability are lonelier and less socially accepted than their peers (Valas, 1999). Again, this is consistent with the view that social rejection reduces intelligent thought and conflicts with the idea that rejection increases intelligent thought. To be sure, the reverse causation is highly plausible (as Valas emphasized); namely, that the stigma of having a learning disability elicited rejection and thereby caused loneliness. Bidirectional causation is also plausible. A similar link between loneliness and poor cognitive functioning was found among elderly people (Martin, Hagberg, & Poon, 1997). Loneliness correlated with low intelligence (as measured by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale; Wechsler, 1981) in a Swedish sample. (The effect was not significant among elderly participants in a US sample, although the measure of loneliness differed across the two samples.) In short, correlational research suggests that loneliness and intelligence are related, with loneliness corresponding to poorer intelligence. Yet the direction of causation is unclear in these studies. To establish whether rejection can actually cause poor intellectual functioning, experimental research is required. Experimental Findings Williams and colleagues (2000) found that ostracism increased how much people conformed to the opinions of others. That is, people who were ignored subsequently adopted others opinions readily. Conformity suggests a lack of thoughtful reflection, although it could also be a manifestation of the desire to connect with others (see DeWall, Baumeister, & Vohs, 2008; Maner, DeWall, Baumeister, & Schaller, 2007). More direct evidence comes from experimental studies that specifically assessed the impact of rejection and exclusion on intellectual performance. A series of studies on precisely that question was reported by Baumeister, Twenge, and Nuss (2002). In the first experiment, participants completed a personality questionnaire and received feedback from the experimenter (see Twenge, Baumeister, Tice, & Stucke, 2001). Part of the feedback legitimately reflected participants responses to the questionnaire (i.e., how introverted/extroverted they were), and part of the feedback was false. The false feedback constituted the manipulation of social rejection. Participants assigned to the rejection condition were led to believe that they would end up friendless and alone later in life, whereas participants in the belonging condition were led to believe that they would have rewarding relationships throughout life. However, the expected effects of rejection on intelligence between these two conditions could simply reflect the fact that some participants received bad news and others received good news. Therefore, the experimenters included a third condition in which participants receive bad news; namely, that their Stillman, Baumeister 133 13_DeWall_Ch13.indd 133

personality inventory indicated that they were accident prone and would likely suffer multiple broken bones. If participants who were rejected demonstrated decreased intelligence relative to those who received news of impending misfortune, then one could conclude that rejection, rather than bad news, reduces intelligence. Consistent with the view that rejection impairs intelligent thought, performance on an accepted measure of intelligence (the General Mental Abilities Test; Janda, 1996; Janda, Fulk, Janda, & Wallace, 1995) varied as a function of personality feedback. Rejection led participants to work more slowly than participants in the acceptance and misfortune control conditions. Participants in the rejected condition also provided fewer correct responses than did participants in the acceptance condition. In short, rejection reduced both the accuracy and speed of responses. In their next study, Baumeister et al. (2002) sought to determine whether the observed effects of rejection on IQ generalized to memory. Memory was assessed using a reading comprehension exercise from the GRE Verbal section, in which a passage of text is followed by questions about that text. As in Study 1, participants were assigned to receive personality feedback that predicted a future life filled with social acceptance, rejection, or nonsocial misfortune. However, the stage at which the feedback was administered varied as well, to shed light on whether the expected deficits in memory occurred during encoding or retrieval. That is, some participants were given the rejection feedback after having read the passage but before answering questions about it (which would affect retrieval but not encoding), whereas others were given the rejection feedback before having read the passage (which would affect encoding) and then debriefed before the questions (so retrieval should be relatively unaffected). As expected, rejection impaired performance on the memory test. However, rejection did not demonstrably affect the encoding of information. Participants responses did not vary due to rejection feedback when they received the rejecting feedback before reading the essay. In contrast, participants who received rejecting feedback after reading the essay but before answering questions about itdemonstrated poorer recall relative to participants who received accepting or misfortune feedback. One could therefore conclude that rejection impairs information retrieval but not information encoding. Put simply, the rejected person seems capable of taking in new information just as effectively as anyone else, but his or her capacity to retrieve and use that information was compromised. There was, however, an alternative way of looking at the results on reading comprehension. Rejected people were in fact able to answer simple, easy questions about the material just as well as controls. These were questions that asked precisely what the person had read. The deficits were found on the more difficult questions that required the person not only to retrieve information, but also to make inferences, deductions, and other extrapolations from it. It is therefore possible that rejection affected not retrieval per se, but rather the sort of effortful thought that operates on information so as to proceed to novel conclusions and insights. To put this in other terms, the findings could be interpreted as indicating that rejection impairs controlled cognitive processing but leaves automatic processing largely intact. A third study was designed to determine whether the effects of exclusion were specific to complex cognitive tasks and controlled processing or whether rejection would reduce performance on simple, relatively automatic tasks as well. Participants were again given false personality feedback to manipulate rejection. Next, they were either asked to solve logical reasoning questions from the GRE analytic section or asked to memorize a list of nonsense syllables (e.g., fum ). For the analytical problems, rejection reduced both the number of correct responses and the number of problems attempted. In other words, rejection reduced both speed and accuracy (as it did in Study 1). Yet rejection had no effect on the simple cognitive task of recalling nonsense syllables. These findings are consistent with the view that rejection disrupts active reasoning and other controlled processes, but rejection does not seem to have a generalized effect on simple cognitive functions that depend mainly on automatic processes. Indirect Learning and Emotion There is a second way in which social rejection might reduce intelligent thought and learning. One important way in which people learn is via emotional experiences. Imagine a person who kicks the family dog while in a foul mood. Imagine further that this person immediately feels the sting of regret for hurting the family pet. The experience of regret could be sufficiently aversive that the offender would resolve never to hurt the dog again. This process has been described as indirect emotional learning (Baumeister, Vohs, DeWall, & Zhang, 2007; Stillman & Baumeister, 2010). According to 134 Social Rejection Reduces Intelligent Thought and Self-Regulation 13_DeWall_Ch13.indd 134

this view, an important source of learning how to respond wisely and intelligently stems from experiencing emotions. Anything that would disrupt the normal process of experiencing emotions could interfere with the normal process of learning from emotions. Although one might expect that being rejected would bring about a potent emotional reaction, this has not been borne out by experimental research. Across several studies and a number of social rejection manipulations, the emotional responses of socially rejected participants did not differ from those of accepted participants (e.g., Gardner, Pickett, & Brewer, 2000; Twenge, Baumeister, Tice, & Stucke, 2001; Twenge, Catanese, & Baumeister, 2002, 2003; Twenge & Campbell, 2003; Zadro, Williams, & Richardson, 2004). Some null results could be due to weak effects and small sample sizes. A meta-analysis by Blackhart et al. (2009) combining results from a large number of studies confirmed that rejected people overall feel worse than accepted ones and even slightly worse than participants in neutral control conditions. Still, the absolute level of emotion even among rejected persons was not negative, and if anything the mean emotional state in experimental rejection conditions is either at the neutral midpoint or slightly on the positive side (i.e., indicating more positive than negative emotion, although not much of either). Thus, contrary to intuition, laboratory manipulations of rejection do not cause palpable emotional distress. Instead of acute emotionality, people seem to experience emotional numbness in the wake of social rejection. Indeed, social rejection causes people to become insensitive to both physical and emotional pain (DeWall & Baumeister, 2006). The numbness to physical pain has been more thoroughly documented in the animal literature than among humans (MacDonald & Leary, 2005). The emotional numbing that follows from social rejection may disrupt the correction of stupid behavior, such as kicking the family dog. In other words, the implication for intelligent thought is that emotionally numbed people are less likely to learn something from the kinds of emotional experience that would normally bring about improved behavior and smarter choices, although that is partly speculative. Summary Evidence points to the conclusion that social rejection has a negative impact on intelligence. Experimental findings indicate causality; specifically that rejection causes a decrease in intelligent thought. Correlational research is helpful in demonstrating that the effects of social exclusion observed in the laboratory are not necessarily short-lived and are not dependent on a laboratory procedure. Future research might seek to determine whether affirming close relationships or one s place within a group might momentarily increase intelligent thought. Rejection Impairs Self-Regulation Limited-Resource Model Self-regulation is the capacity to alter one s dominant response to meet a desired goal or standard. Passing up a tempting piece of chocolate cake to meet a health goal is an example of self-regulation. There are a number of empirical findings that are supportive of the view that rejection reduces self-regulation. Most such evidence is based on the limited-resource model of self-regulation (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998). The limited-resource model holds that one s capacity to restrain impulses changes from moment to moment and from situation to situation. This variability in self-regulation reflects fluctuations in self-regulation resources. Put differently, self-regulation is dependent on a limited resource, such that exercising self-regulation temporarily depletes this limited resource and leaves an individual less able to exercise self-regulation successfully. For example, a person who resists a piece of delicious chocolate cake, thereby depleting self-regulation resources, may subsequently be more likely to lash out in anger in response to provocation. Supportive Findings Evidence that rejection impairs self-regulation can be found in studies that look at the effect of rejection on behaviors dependent on self-regulation. Depleting self-regulatory resources by prior acts of self-control leads to increases in aggressive behavior (DeWall, Baumeister, Stillman, & Gailliot, 2007; Stucke & Baumeister, 2006), so the effect of rejection on aggression has implications for how rejection affects self-regulation generally. Evidence indicates that rejection does cause people to behave aggressively (see chapter 11). For instance, in one study some participants were led to believe that a peer reported having a negative reaction to the prospect of working with them. Other participants believed the peer wanted to work with them. Those receiving the rejecting feedback rated themselves as wanting to behave aggressively toward the peer, including wanting to humiliate him or her (Buckley, Winkel, & Leary, 2004). Other experimental studies have similarly found that social Stillman, Baumeister 135 13_DeWall_Ch13.indd 135

rejection prompts aggressive acts (i.e., issuing loud blasts of unpleasant sounds), even against innocent (nonrejecting) people (Twenge, Baumeister, Tice, & Stucke, 2001). Th e effect sizes of exclusion on aggression are generally quite large, although one could question whether these laboratory studies generalize outside the laboratory. An analysis of school shootings suggested that they do generalize (Leary, Kowalski, Smith, & Phillips, 2003). In nearly every school shooting, the perpetrator had been thoroughly socially excluded. A second question one could raise is whether the effects of rejection on aggression really depend on self-regulation, but empirical evidence indicates that stifling aggressive responding does require self-regulation (DeWall, Baumeister, Stillman, & Gailliot, 2007; Stucke & Baumeister, 2006). In short, evidence points to the conclusion that rejection increases aggression and that refraining from acting aggressively depends on self-regulation. This is consistent with the view that rejection decreases self-regulation, although alternative accounts are possible. Rejection reduces the restraint of aggressive impulses, but does it affect help-giving behaviors? Helping people requires overriding one s selfish impulses, so the effect of rejection on helping also speaks to the relationship between rejection and self-regulation. Experimental findings demonstrate that rejection decreases helping and other prosocial behaviors (Twenge, Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Bartels, 2007), which is consistent with the notion that rejection reduces self-regulation. Rejection also seems to promote lethargy, which suggests an absence of active self-regulation. Williams (2001) anecdotally reported that several participants who had been in the ostracism condition sat and did nothing after the experiment had concluded. Researchers have also tested the effect of rejection on lethargy empirically (Twenge, Catanese, & Baumeister, 2003). When asked to explain the meaning of 10 proverbs, rejected participants wrote fewer words than participants in the control conditions, suggesting a preference not to exert effort (although one could also argue that this is due to a decrease in intelligent thought). Rejected participants also behaved more sluggishly than those in control conditions when playing a reaction-time game. In particular, rejected participants reacted more slowly than those in control conditions during an ostensibly competitive reaction-time game. Fast reaction times require that one be focused and attentive, so one implication of this finding is that rejection reduces the regulation of focus and attention. Direct Evidence That Rejection Impairs Self-Regulation One could offer alternative explanations for the effects of rejection on aggression, helping, and lethargy that do not involve self-regulation. A direct test of the hypothesis that rejection impairs self-regulation was undertaken in six experiments by Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, and Twenge (2005). The authors made use of two different means of manipulating social rejection. One procedure involved participants receiving false feedback from a personality questionnaire indicating that they would end up alone in life (described previously). In the second procedure, several participants met each other as a group, and those assigned to the rejection condition were subsequently told that none of the other participants wanted to work with him or her on an upcoming task. The effects of rejection were similar for both social rejection manipulations. In Experiment 1, participants who were rejected drank fewer ounces of a healthy but unsavory drink relative to participants who were accepted or given negative news. Put differently, participants in the control condition persisted in drinking the unpleasant beverage, whereas rejected participants were quick to give in to the impulse not to continue drinking. In Experiment 2, participants were given the chance to eat unhealthy snacks. Rejected participants ate more cookies than control participants. Thus, rejection reduced participants willingness to override their distaste for an unpleasant (but healthy) beverage in Experiment 1, and it reduced their willingness to override the impulse not to eat a tasty (but unhealthy) food in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, the researchers moved beyond measures of consumption and instead used a measure of persistence. In particular, they tested whether rejected participants would persist for less time on an unsolvable puzzle. As expected, participants in the control condition withstood the impulse to quit for longer than did rejected participants, who quickly abandoned the attempt to solve the puzzle. Experiment 4 assessed self-regulation in yet another way, namely, attention control. (See Baumeister, Heatherton and Tice, 1994, and Carver and Scheier, 1981, on the crucial nature of attention control to self-regulation success.) Participants heard different information presented simultaneously to both ears, and their task was to ignore what was said in one ear and record any words that included an m or a 136 Social Rejection Reduces Intelligent Thought and Self-Regulation 13_DeWall_Ch13.indd 136

p in the other ear. Thus participants had to force their attention away from the information presented to one ear and focus it on the information presented to the other ear. Rejected participants demonstrated substantial decrements in the task, relative to control conditions. Th e question addressed in Studies 5 and 6 was whether the self-regulation failure demonstrated by participants was due to an inability to exert self-regulation or an unwillingness to do so. If rejected participants who are given an incentive to self-regulate show no self-regulation deficits, then this suggests they are simply unwilling (and not unable) to selfregulate. Both studies followed the procedures of Study 4 in that self-regulation was measured by the dichotic listening task. In Study 5, participants were made self-aware (by placing a mirror in front of them), which stimulates self-regulation. In Study 6, participants were offered a cash incentive to perform well. In both studies, the heightened motivation to self-regulate eliminated the deficits normally caused by rejection. Apparently, people who are rejected have the ability to self-regulate; they simply are unwilling to do so. Beyond a Linear Relationship between Rejection and Self-Regulation Recent investigations have sought to clarify the conditions under which rejection impairs self-regulation. Might there be people for whom social rejection has an especially long-lasting effect on self-regulation? Researchers predicted that in the wake of social rejection people high in social anxiety would demonstrate poor self-regulation for substantially longer than other people (Oaten, Williams, Jones, & Zadro, 2008). To test this, some participants were ostracized and others were included in an online game. Results indicated that overall, ostracized participants ate more (unhealthy) cookies immediately following ostracism. Forty-five minutes after being ostracized, only participants high in social anxiety evinced poor self-regulation (again, by eating several cookies). Thus, as predicted, the effects of social rejection were found to last longer among the socially anxious. A series of experiments illustrated that the way in which a self-control task is framed has important implications for the effect of rejection on self-regulation (DeWall, Baumeister, & Vohs, 2008). In one study, participants in the acceptance condition were led to believe that they could expect good close relationships in the future, whereas participants in the rejection condition were led to believe that they would be alone. Next, participants played the game Operation, which requires slow, deliberate, controlled movements. As expected, rejected participants made more errors on the task relative to accepted participants. However, this was not the case when participants were led to believe that doing well at Operation was indicative of good social skills. When Operation was framed this way, rejected participants made fewer errors than accepted participants did. Thus, the decrements in self-regulation following rejection were eliminated when the self-regulation task was framed as being diagnostic of social skills. The implication is that when self-regulation is seen as a means of attaining social connection, excluded people can self-regulate effectively. A second study assessed self-regulation by measuring how long participants could keep their arm submerged in ice water (1 C). Participants assigned to the acceptance condition were led to believe they were going to have fulfilling social relationships, whereas participants in the control condition were not given any feedback. For some participants, the ice water task was described as indicating the promise of social acceptance (as pain endurance, ostensibly, helps one endure difficult relationship episodes). Results indicated that socially accepted participants showed decrements in self-regulation relative to the control condition, but only when the ice water task was described portending good future relationships. When the task was not framed as diagnostic of social skills, social acceptance prompted a modest increase in self-regulation relative to the neutral control condition. The authors conducted five additional studies, and found a similar pattern of results using different means of bringing about social rejection and different measures of self-regulation. The additional studies also found that accepted participants only demonstrated poor self-regulation on tasks that were ostensibly linked to social skills, but they demonstrated good self-regulation when the there was no motive (or, in one study, a financial motive) for good self-regulation. DeWall and colleagues (2008) concluded that the desire to belong socially conforms to the broad pattern observed in other motivations. Namely, that thwarting a desire (as social rejection thwarts the desire for social connection) causes people to strive to attain it, whereas satiating that desire (social acceptance) decreases the motivation to attain it. Social rejection causes people to strive to attain social inclusion, by exerting high levels of effort to perform well on tasks that they Stillman, Baumeister 137 13_DeWall_Ch13.indd 137

believe are linked to the promise of future social connection. When the self-regulation tasks are not framed as linked to possible future social connection, social rejection reduces self-regulation. Family Inclusion Increases Self-Regulation If rejection decreases self-regulation, might emphasizing familial inclusion improve self-regulation? In three studies, researchers found that thinking about family relationships increased selfregulation (Stillman, Tice, Fincham, & Lambert, 2009). In Study 1, participants who were subliminally primed with the names of family members demonstrated more persistence on a language task than participants primed with neutral words. In Study 2, subjects who were asked to write about a positive relationship with a family member demonstrated more persistence on math problems than those assigned to write about control topics. Study 3 sought to determine whether thinking about family relationships replenishes self-regulation resources that have been depleted. In this study, participants were first asked to control their attention (or not, in the neutral condition). Next, participants saw a picture of close family member (or not, in the control condition). Thus the design was a 2 (attention control or not) 2 (family prime or not). Results indicated that participants in the neutral condition (not assigned to control attention) were affected by the picture of a loved one, such that having seen the picture decreased the number of unhealthy cookies eaten. However, participants whose self-regulation resources had been reduced by controlling their attention were unaffected by seeing the picture of a loved one. In sum, it seems that making belonging and social relationships salient has the opposite effect that rejection does, namely, increasing self-regulation. However, the effect does not seem to replenish lost resources, but rather to provide a temporary self-regulation boost. Summary Th e successful restraint of aggression, helping others, and acting in ambitious, nonlethargic way are signs of successful self-regulation. These faculties are impaired by rejection, suggesting that rejection may impair self-regulation. Six experiments (Baumeister et al., 2005) found direct evidence that rejection impaired self-regulation, as rejected participants drank less healthy beverage, ate more unhealthy food, gave up sooner on a persistence task, and performed poorer on an attention-control task than controls. Thus, rejection weakens self-regulation. The inverse is also true, as thinking about warm and close family relationships increased self-regulation. However, when a self-regulation task is framed as being diagnostic of social skills, socially rejected people actually demonstrate better self-regulation than socially accepted people do. Conclusions Humans have a remarkably high level of intelligence and capacity for self-regulation relative to nonhuman animals. These capacities help people address the problems common to other animals, such as providing food and protection. However, the benefits of intelligence and self-regulation are indirect and occur via culture, according to Baumeister s (2005) thesis. In other words, human intelligence and capacity for self-regulation are designed by nature to function within a social and cultural context. One extension of this argument is that self-regulation and intelligence were not designed to operate in the absence of social relationships. Consistent with this idea, rejection brings about a decrease in intelligent thought and self-regulation. References Aronson, E. (1972 ). The Social Animal. New York : Freeman Baumeister, R. F. (2005 ). The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life. New York : Oxford University Press. Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. ( 1998 ). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? 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