| Social exclusion refers to the phenomenon that people’s need of belongingness and social relationships is thwarted because they were excluded by a group or other people.Most people are deeply affected by social rejection and exclusion(Smart Richman&Leary,2009). Suffering from social exclusion, people can experience intense frustration or anger and can engage in aggressive acts. One of the most perplexing aspects of social exclusion is that for some individuals or under some contexts, being socially rejected triggers judgments and behaviors that will further reinforce the social exclusion (Leary, Twenge,&Quinlivan,2006).In addition to deeply unpleasant negative emotions and feelings of pain, social exclusion can result in various negative personal and interpersonal outcomes. For example, telling people that they are likely to end up alone later in life can lead participants to take irrational, self-defeating risks, choose unhealthy, rather than healthy, behaviors, and procrastinate longer with pleasurable activities rather than practicing for an upcoming exam(Twenge, Catanese,&Baumeister,2002). In this vein, social exclusion has been shown to impair self-regulation such as being less able to exert effort on demanding tasks or performing more poorly on tests of cognitive functioning (Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco,&Twenge,2005).Research has also shown that social exclusion can lead to reductions in empathy and prosocial behavior(Twenge,Baumeister,DeWall,Ciarocco,&Bartels,2007) and an increase in aggression (Twenge, Baumeister, Tice,&Stucke,2001). Even just leading people to believe that others do not value them as a social partner in the lab or that they do not want to get to know them produces increases in aggression such as greater willingness to blast an opponent with white noise (Twenge et al.,2001), greater willingness to let another person listen to aversive audiotapes (Buckley et al.,2004), decreased compunction in requiring that a person who does not like spicy food eat hot sauce(Warburton, Williams,&Cairns,2006), or increases in derogation of a rejector (Ford&Collins, 2010). Given the various destructive responses that can result from social exclusion and being rejected by others, it is important to consider what other factors may help to moderate such effects. In the present research we focus on self-esteem, in particular implicit self-esteem(ISE).However, at present much remains to be determined about the factors that help moderate the negative and harmful effects social exclusion can have. In the present research we report three studies focusing on one such moderator—self-esteem. Self-esteem is potentially important because it is thought to be a barometer of how well people are fulfilling their social connection needs(Leary, Tambor, Terdal,&Downs,1995), specifically with feelings and judgments of low self-esteem signaling to people that they are in danger of losing their social connectedness to others. In addition, the state of research in the area on social exclusion and self-esteem has produced conflicting findings. Here we bring some clarity to this area by focusing on implicit self-esteem—both measuring and manipulating it in the lab—to more directly gauge its potential to moderate aggressive behaviors in response to social exclusion.Self-esteem is a global evaluation of self, which is strongly associated with a belief in one’s general social acceptability. In fact, one of the best predictors of self-esteem is the degree to which people believe they are approved of and accepted by others(Leary,2003). Ford and Collins (2010) found that compared with those with high self-esteem, individuals with low self-esteem responded to social exclusion by derogating a rejector. From such research it thus seems that negative self views and low self-esteem may facilitate the expression of anger following social exclusion, whereas more positive self-views and high self-esteem can moderate such reactions.However, Twenge and Campbell (2003) showed that self-esteem played little role in predicting aggression in response to social exclusion, but individuals with inflated views of self (those high in narcissism, which related but distinct from self-esteem,see Raskin&Terry,1988) has shown that when socially rejected such individuals respond with increased aggression.What’s more, Sommer (2001) suggested that high self-esteem may be associated with two distinct and sometimes competing reactions. On the one hand, because people with high self-esteem generally feel more acceptable than those who are low in self-esteem, they may find social exclusion more surprising and more unjustified, thereby leading to consternation and anger. On the other hand, because they feel more globally acceptable, those high in self-esteem could perceive their social opportunities and alternatives to be greater, which could lessen the impact of any particular exclusion.Based on prior researches, we hypothesized that implicit self-esteem (ISE) moderates the relation between social exclusion and aggression. And people with higher ISE aggress less than people with lower ISE in response to social exclusion. Three experiments tested the role of implicit self-esteem in aggression to social exclusion, which was manipulated by telling people that their partner refuse to chat with them. Excluded people issued a more negative job evaluation against someone who rejected them (Study1), and social exclusion induced more aggressive response primarily among people with lower iplicit self-esteem than those with higher implicit self-esteem (study2).Then a manipulation to boost implicit self-esteem reduced the effect of social exclusion on aggression (study3).These findings provide a implication that high implicit self-esteem is more likely to buffer the threat of social exclusion. What’s more, the effect of social exclusion on aggression can be reduced by subliminal evaluative conditioning which enhanced implicit self-esteem. |
