You’re dead to me! The evolutionary psychology of social estrangements and social transgressions (original) (raw)
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If You Can't Join Them, Beat Them: Effects of Social Exclusion on Aggressive Behavior
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001
Social exclusion was manipulated by telling people that they would end up alone later in life or that other participants had rejected them. These manipulations caused participants to behave more aggressively. Excluded people issued a more negative job evaluation against someone who insulted them (Experiments 1 and 2). Excluded people also blasted a target with higher levels of aversive noise both when the target had insulted them (Experiment 4) and when the target was a neutral person and no interaction had occurred (Experiment 5). However, excluded people were not more aggressive toward someone who issued praise (Experiment 3). These responses were specific to social exclusion (as opposed to other misfortunes) and were not mediated by emotion.
Resisting Connection Following Social Exclusion
Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2015
Social psychologists theorize that individuals seek connection following rejection. However, accepting connection from a low status other may imply that one is of similarly low status, which may call into question one’s prospects for future acceptance. Thus, we hypothesized that rejection would lead individuals to distance themselves from a low status other even when the low status other is accepting. In two studies, single, heterosexual, female participants received simultaneous acceptance/rejection feedback from one physically attractive man and one less attractive man. As predicted, rejected individuals derogated their rejecters as indicated by a decreased desire for affiliation and more negative evaluations. Moreover, participants rejected by the attractive man also derogated the unattractive man even when the unattractive man offered acceptance. These data may shed light on specific circumstances under which rejection leads to antisocial behavior.
Relationships and the social brain: Integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives
Psychological studies of relationships tend to focus on specific types of close personal relationships (romantic, parent-offspring, friendship) and examine characteristics of both the individuals and the dyad. This paper looks more broadly at the wider range of relationships that constitute an individual's personal social world. Recent work on the composition of personal social networks suggests that they consist of a series of layers that differ in the quality and quantity of relationships involved. Each layer increases relationship numbers by an approximate multiple of 3 (5-15-50-150) but decreasing levels of intimacy (strong, medium, and weak ties) and frequency of interaction. To account for these regularities, we draw on both social and evolutionary psychology to argue that relationships at different layers serve different functions and have different cost-benefit profiles. At each layer, the benefits are asymptotic but the costs of maintaining a relationship at that level (most obviously, the time that has to be invested in servicing it) are roughly linear with the number of relationships. The trade-off between costs and benefits at a given level, and across the different types of demands and resources typical of different levels, gives rise to a distribution of social effort that generates and maintains a hierarchy of layered sets of relationships within social networks. We suggest that, psychologically, these trade-offs are related to the level of trust in a relationship, and that this is itself a function of the time invested in the relationship.
Evolutionary Perspectives on Interpersonal Relationships
Interpersonal communication scholars often integrate and synthesize the work of other disciplines, and their work is affected by developments in those disciplines. One such development is the (re)emergence of evolutionary approaches for studying human behavior. Although evolutionary theory is considered among humanity's crowning scientific-theoretical achievements ever since Darwin (1859), its early (mis)application to human behaviors had regrettable consequences such as justifications of colonialism, slavery, eugenics, and genocide. Partially due to these abuses, evolutionary explanations of human behavior have been discredited for most of the latter part of the 20th century. Recently, however, evolutionary explanations of human behavior have become more sophisticated in their descriptive and predictive ability and in their ethical awareness, and have regained currency in many of the social sciences. In fact, evolutionary theory is poised to become the standard explanatory framework for any scientific explanation of human behavior.
Heritable victimization and the benefits of agonistic relationships
Here, we present estimates of heritability and selection on network traits in a single population, allowing us to address the evolutionary potential of social behavior and the poorly understood link between sociality and fitness. To evolve, sociality must have some heritable basis, yet the heritability of social relationships is largely unknown. Recent advances in both social network analyses and quantitative genetics allow us to quantify attributes of social relationships and estimate their heritability in free-living populations. Our analyses addressed a variety of measures (in-degree, out-degree, attractiveness, expansiveness, embeddedness, and betweenness), and we hypothesized that traits reflecting relationships controlled by an individual (i.e., those that the individual initiated or were directly involved in) would be more heritable than those based largely on the behavior of conspecifics. Identifying patterns of heritability and selection among related traits may provide insight into which types of relationships are important in animal societies. As expected, we found that variation in indirect measures was largely explained by nongenetic variation. Yet, surprisingly, traits capturing initiated interactions do not possess significant additive genetic variation, whereas measures of received interactions are heritable. Measures describing initiated aggression and position in an agonistic network are under selection (0.3 < |S| < 0.4), although advantageous trait values are not inherited by offspring. It appears that agonistic relationships positively influence fitness and seemingly costly or harmful ties may, in fact, be beneficial. Our study highlights the importance of studying agonistic as well as affiliative relationships to understand fully the connections between sociality and fitness.
Dealing with Threats to Morality and the Social Bond
Our choice to withhold or disclose displeasing information to another can motivate concern about damage to our social bonds. In two experiments, using two different samples of university students in Norway, (N = 174 and N = 217), we found that withholding unpleasant information led to greater concern for selfimage and social-image than did disclosure. We also found that withholding elicited more shame, inferiority and rejection than disclosure, and in Experiment 2, withholding elicited more defensive motivation than disclosure. Consistent with our model, defensive motivation was mostly explained by concern for social-image, whereas relationship repair motivation was mostly explained by concern for self-image and felt shame.We discuss implications for the literature on shame and social bonds.
Benefits of negative social exchanges for emotional closeness
2009
Negative exchanges in social relationships have traditionally been studied as having negative consequences. This study explored whether they might have positive effects for relationship closeness. The sample included 351 adults, aged between 18 and 91 years, residing in Hong Kong, China. Closeness of social partners to the participants was measured by the Social Convoy Questionnaire, and the levels of negative exchanges and social support from each social partner were assessed. Multilevel analyses revealed that more negative exchanges were associated with a more positive change in closeness over a 2-year period, even after statistically controlling for social support and sociostructural characteristics of the participant and the social partner. Findings extended our knowledge on the positive effects of negative exchanges and their moderating conditions.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2015
Social psychologists theorize that individuals seek connection following rejection. However, accepting connection from a low status other may imply that one is of similarly low status, which may call into question one's prospects for future acceptance. Thus, we hypothesized that rejection would lead individuals to distance themselves from a low status other even when the low status other is accepting. In two studies, single, heterosexual, female participants received simultaneous acceptance/rejection feedback from one physically attractive man and one less attractive man. As predicted, rejected individuals derogated their rejecters as indicated by a decreased desire for affiliation and more negative evaluations. Moreover, participants rejected by the attractive man also derogated the unattractive man even when the unattractive man offered acceptance. These data may shed light on specific circumstances under which rejection leads to antisocial behavior.