The Hidden Correlates of Social Exclusion

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

Social exclusion is universally practiced and universally painful. Ostracism or rejection by important relationship partners is almost always psychologically damaging. Research in psychology has shown that social exclusion changes the ways that people think about their social worlds, sensitizing them to relevant types of social information. Although social exclusion (unsurprisingly) makes people feel sad or hurt, a surprising finding from a number of studies is that social exclusion often leads to increased anger and aggression and that such aggression can even be directed towards individuals who did not do the excluding. The present research project builds on these findings and generates novel hypotheses by integrating a social psychological perspective on social exclusion with theories of sociality coming from evolutionary psychology. Specifically, this research applies the evolutionary psychological idea of hidden correlations. Hidden correlations are relationships that cannot necessarily be detected during one's own lifetime, but that can be detected by natural selection over deep time. These hidden correlations can drive the evolution of psychological processes, creating minds that expect certain correlations to exist, even if an individual would be otherwise unable to learn of them through experience. The proposed research therefore focuses on the hidden correlates of social exclusion. Based on this, the present research, conducted by researchers Leda Cosmides and John Tooby at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, examines four related sets of hypotheses. The first study set examines the hidden correlates of different reasons for exclusion: Do different causes of exclusion lead to distinct responses? The second study set examines the hidden correlations between social exclusion and social devaluation (the extent to which others take - or fail to take - one's interests and welfare into account). This study set investigates how hidden correlates of social exclusion lead to antisocial reactions, such as aggression, as a means of 'bargaining' for better treatment. The third study set examines a surprising set of predictions made by thinking in terms of hidden correlations: Social exclusion will sensitize the mind to threats of predation, starvation, and illness and injury - all threats faced by excluded individuals in ancestral, but not necessarily modern, environments. Finally, across all study sets, the proposed research examines the biological mediators of the effects of social exclusion by measuring hormonal indicators of stress.