Rejection

Rejection Thwarts a Fundamental Need

Most psychologists agree that people are motivated to have positive and durable relationships with other people. Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary refer to this motivation as a “need to belong” and suggest that it is among the strongest and most basic of all human needs. From this perspective, people naturally try to think, feel, and act in ways that will earn them social acceptance and avoid rejection. Rejection thwarts the need to belong. As such, the consequences of rejection are consistent, strong, and mostly negative.

Rejection inside and outside of the Laboratory

Rejection is a common experience. People experience divorce, romantic breakups, or show romantic interest in another person only to have their romantic advances rebuffed. Some people seek membership in college fraternities and sororities, only to be told that they are not wanted. Children are left out of games on the playground, or they are told that they cannot sit by a person on the school bus. Rejection is a common theme in television and movies. Most reality television shows involve some sort of rejection. Some reality television shows involve contestants being voted off an island, whereas others involve contestants experiencing eviction from an apartment or house for various reasons. These examples provide at least some suggestion that rejection is a familiar experience for most people.

Psychologists use a variety of methods to study the effects of rejection. The methods psychologists use to understand rejection involve exposing people to situations that are considerably milder than the types of rejection people experience outside the laboratory (e.g., divorce, breakups), mostly because it would be unethical to expose people to those types of events for the purpose of research. Although laboratory manipulations often involve vague or impersonal experiences of rejection, the effects of these manipulations are quite strong. Listed next are the five most common methods psychologists use to study rejection. In each method, some people experience a type of rejection, and their responses are compared with those of people who do not experience rejection.

The first method (“group rejection”) involves some participants being told that no one in a group wanted to work with them, whereas others are told everyone wanted to work with them. In a second method (“lonely future”), some participants receive false feedback that they have a personality type in which they can expect to end up alone later in life, whereas others are told they can expect a future filled with social acceptance or negative events unrelated to their social relationships. A third [Page 1337]method (“personal vs. impersonal rejection”) involves participants expecting to meet with a partner. Some participants are told that their partner refused to work with them, whereas other participants are told that they will not be able to meet their partner because the partner had to leave for a forgotten appointment. The fourth method (“rejection in a virtual environment”) involves participants completing an online ball-tossing game with two or three other players (whose actions are actually programmed by the researcher) and having some participants receive almost no tosses from the other players, whereas other participants receive a high number of tosses from the other players. In the fifth method (“think of a time when you were rejected”), some participants write an essay about a time in their life when they felt rejected, whereas other participants write about a time they experienced social acceptance.

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