Ostracism: The Cruel Power of Silence
Part One
Kip Williams: Ostracism and the silent treatment are very palpable metaphors for 'this is what life would be like if you did not exist, this is what it would be like if you were dead'.
Woman 1: I was married to a man that would give you the silent treatment and he'd go weeks and weeks and not talk to you other than 'pass the salt and pepper'. And I found that just as damaging, it's a form of abuse so I guess as I've got older and would like to think wiser, I just wouldn't tolerate it now. I just choose to walk away.
Woman 2: Yes but John was a power controller.
Woman 1: Yes he was, we were both married to the same man, can you believe it!?
Woman 2: He was definitely a power controller.
Woman 1: A very placid man outwardly, but that was his power.
Natasha Mitchell: How did it make you feel?
Woman 1: Frustrated, but then really angry, and then over the years then it was 'oh well, I don't care'. I got caught up in the same thing, he didn't talk, I didn't talk
Natasha Mitchell: It's a vicious cycle.
Woman 1: Yes, it is, you get into a cycle with it.
Natasha Mitchell: And hello, Natasha Mitchell joining you for All in the Mind this week, great to have your company. Today, bullying, getting the silent treatment, social rejection - it may be ubiquitous but it's not nearly discussed enough. And if the exploits of reality TV are anything to go by, it appears we've turned social ostracism into a national tele-sport.
Kip Williams: Yes, it can be done at a societal level in groups ostracising groups, it can be groups ostracising individuals, it can also be an individual ostracising another individual, and so we usually call it the silent treatment. But it's the same thing, you're ignoring and you're excluding somebody.
Natasha Mitchell: Kip Williams is Professor of Psychology at Macquarie University and he was one of the hosts of, ironically enough, a closed symposium this week on the Social Outcast, organised by Macquarie and the University of New South Wales. It brought together some of the biggest international names in social psychology. And over the next two weeks here on
All in the Mind you'll hear some of the latest thinking from what is a relatively young field of scientific research, ostracism.
Social rejection comes in so many shades and places - at school, in the workplace and of course in the home. And as you'll hear today, it can make us aggressive and even physically sick.
[Montage of news archive]
Journalist [news archive]: We begin tonight with the culture of rumbling and bullying that's emerged at an exclusive school...
Journalist [news archive]: The Japanese Justice Ministry today began an investigation into the suicide of a 13-year-old boy who was found hanging from a tree. Inside he'd left a suicide detailing months of bullying by a group of students at his school...
Letter of boy [news archive]: I should have refused to comply with their demands, then things would not have become like this. I'm sorry, I wanted to live longer.
Woman 3: I've been bullied and that was at school, and for that reason I had no friends and it was just in every class, they were bully, bully, bully, 'Miss Piggy' or 'chubby cheeks', and I used to cry a lot. And I used to go home in lunch so no one would pick on me - and then I left school.
Natasha Mitchell: At our core the need to belong, to be included, it could be argued goes back to our evolutionary roots, we are fundamentally social beings.
Roy Baumeister is Professor of Psychology at Florida State University. He's the author of a stack of popular titles including Evil - Inside Human Cruelty and Violence and Losing Control - Why and How People Fail at Self Regulation. Roy Baumeister: The criteria for success in biology and evolution are survival and reproduction, animals that survive and reproduce better are the ones that we are descended from, and the ones who didn't do that so well took themselves out of the gene pool and didn't leave a trace.
Human beings, we really survived mainly by virtue of being connected to others, and in fact I take it that it's not just being social, it's being cultural; human beings used culture as our basic biological strategy. So human beings that didn't have any need to connect with others and get involved - we're not descended from them.
Natasha Mitchell: Now if we are to follow that, if you like, paradigm of evolutionary psychology; then is the social outcast, is the deep eccentric, somehow an evolutionary anomaly?
Roy Baumeister: It depends what you mean, people can be outcast because others don't accept them, and I think you'll find almost invariably that people who are rejected by others have fewer offspring and are less likely to have passed their genes along. So yes, today we are not descended very much from social outcasts, we're descended from the people who were very socially successful.
The other part of your question is maybe what about people who don't want to be accepted or be included, and actually there are precious few of those. People seek acceptance in different groups...
Natasha Mitchell: Or in different ways.
Roy Baumeister: In different ways, some people may want a lot of friends, some may want a few friends but my friend Warren Jones remarked once that in 20 years of studying loneliness he had met many students and many others, many people who said they had no friends; but he never found anybody who said they didn't want to have any friends.
Kip Williams: Over thousands of years we have developed a very fine-tuned system for detecting even the slightest hint of being excluded. The alarm goes off and we start to do whatever it is we think we should do to get back in the good graces or to somehow cope with that exclusion. So it's adaptive to be able to detect when you're going to be rejected, excluded or ostracised.
It's a painful experience for those who are getting ostracised, but it is also painful for people who do it as well. It's hard to do, it's hard to on a daily basis not look at somebody, not talk to somebody and not answer their questions. We have rules of social engagement that we've used for years and years and years, and to have to not do it means you have to be mindful, you have to be thinking what you're doing. And then some people feel like once they've started ostracising, especially a loved one of a family member and they've done it for weeks and weeks and weeks, and months and months and years and years that they can't stop. It sort of takes control of them and they feel like they can't go back and make up because that would be to admit that they'd been wrong all this time. So they just keep it going and sometimes we've interviewed people who have ostracised for years; 10, 20 years, and they can't remember why they started.
Natasha Mitchell: You've looked at ostracism in a whole range of ways but you've also quite specifically looked at a number of extraordinary cases of people that have been ostracised by people in their immediate lives. Can you give me some situations?
Kip Williams: Yes, we've done interviews with a large number of people now who have been given the silent treatment or been ostracised for many, many years and also some, a smaller group, who have done it to others.
And yes there is one woman whose husband did not look at her, or talk to her, or even sit at the same table for dinner or breakfast for the last 40 years of their marriage. And we interviewed her - she was just depressed, she felt like she had no alternatives. You know the obvious question you'd have of anybody in that situation is, why would you stay in that relationship? And she said I just didn't think I had any other options, or at least I had a roof over my head.
There have been a lot of people like that whose fathers, or mothers, or sisters or brothers or sons or daughters have given them the silent treatment and ostracised them. Sometimes it's the family against one person as well, not just one against one, but several against one, and these are really heart-wrenching stories. They don't feel like anybody wants them, they feel alienated from their families. A lot of the people we interviewed had attempted suicide, some of them had eating disorders, a couple become very promiscuous. It had different debilitating affects on different people.
Other people try to provoke a response, so some people have resorted to insulting and saying really hurtful things and even worse, throwing marble ashtrays, punching and hitting and things like that, in order to just simply get a response.
A lot of our interviewees have actually said, and this is without us asking, they said 'I'd rather be hit than be given the silent treatment'. To be hit, they say, at least recognises you know that the person knows you're there. One lady also said you can take your bruises to the police but you can't take silence.
Natasha Mitchell: You mentioned that some of them had actually been ostracisers, how did they reflect on the situation?
Kip Williams: The ones that were ostracisers fell into two groups, there were the proud and the penitent. There were some that just thought it was the best thing since sliced bread that they weren't able to really get a hand up on anybody until they learnt how to give them the silent treatment. And then they realised that that levelled the playing field, and like if you're with somebody that's very articulate and a good arguer they'd always win, but if you give them the silent treatment then you've just taken or stripped away their weapon. Then there were the people who were penitent, they realised that they had lost very important people in their lives and they just felt like they'd gotten into this habit where they couldn't stop, and so they habitually respond as soon as they're angry, they respond with silence.
Natasha Mitchell: Professor Kip Williams, whose team is doing some extraordinary work at Macquarie University, and we'll hear more from him later. The silence of ostracism can make for a very lonely and unhealthy existence. It's an experience that John Cacciopo, Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, knows a thing or two about. And if the figures from the USA are anything to go by, so do an increasing proportion of the community.
John Cacciopo: So if you look at the number of single person households between 1980 and 2010, the predictions are there will be an increase of 40%, which is an enormous increase in isolation. And there are also other statistics, for instance the number of people in a household in 1950 was about 2.7. Now it's down to about 2.4, which is really a dramatic reduction. The typical family in the United States is now a woman with two children.
The experience of loneliness isn't the same as being isolated. People can feel lonely when they're in a group. We do know that isolation is one of the strong predictors of feelings of loneliness, so as people move to more isolated conditions you can expect loneliness to increase. We've also looked and asked that question, why does it matter? And there's strong epidemiological evidence from prospective studies, showing that being isolated or feeling lonely predicts broad-based morbidity and mortality.
If you look at what's producing the health care costs, it's no longer infectious diseases or acute diseases. The primary causes are from chronic diseases, and isolation and loneliness are strong contributors to those disease states. How does that happen? There are two broad categories of reaction - there's catabolic and anabolic. Catabolic group are simply stress reactions, and so we find all kinds of differences in the regulation of the cardiovascular system, we find greater total peripheral resistance, that is the resistance to blood going through the cardiovascular system in lonely compared to non-lonely individuals as they age.
Natasha Mitchell: So that increases cardiovascular risk, risk of cardiovascular disease?
John Cacciopo: Yes, exactly, and then there's the age. There is something called arterial stiffening, that aging process is promoted by social disconnectedness by loneliness, so those age more quickly, your blood pressure goes up if you're lonely compared to non-lonely.
Natasha Mitchell: Are those results robust, in your mind?
John Cacciopo: Yes, they are. We've found them in a couple of different studies now. We have a large population-based study...
Natasha Mitchell: Longitudinally, over time?
John Cacciopo: We are looking at it longitudinally at this point, all the data to date are cross sectional, it's been replicated by other people.
We've also looked at inflammation, inflammation is a very primitive response to assaults of the body, there's interlukin 1, which is a cytokine, the most primitive of all molecules in biological organisms...
Natasha Mitchell: Very much core to our immune responses.
John Cacciopo: Right, we've looked in inflammatory response, cytokines, and indeed they also are higher in the lonely than non-lonely.
And so we've looked at a number of different processes, but the best is probably sleep. How well do you sleep? And we put these individuals to bed and we awakened in the morning, we measured their sleep throughout the night, we've measured it in the hospital, we've measured it in their home, we've measured it in young people, we've measured it in old people and in all of those studies we find that these lonely individuals, even when the sleep behaviour is the same, they are in bed just as much, they sleep just as long, their sleep is less efficient, they complain of day time dysfunction, being tired more.
Natasha Mitchell: As part of that work you've also been identifying the sorts of individuals, the personality traits that predispose people to loneliness. So who are the lonely people?
John Cacciopo: I wanted to first determine whether loneliness was what people typically think. Is it the funny-looking kid, is it the short fat kid, is it people like me - is it people who are not going to be very attractive to other people? And it turns out that's not the case.
Natasha Mitchell: Don't be cruel...to yourself!
John Cacciopo: Oh I wanted to make sure that wasn't the case and in fact that's not the case. Intelligence didn't predict it; height, weight, body mass, physical attractiveness - none of that predicted loneliness.
Natasha Mitchell: Beautiful people are lonely too.
John Cacciopo: Beautiful people, Princess Di was as lonely as, you know, Marilyn Monroe - these celebrities can be very lonely as well. It doesn't have to do with whether they're accepted in a sense by the collective, or valued by the collective. It has to do with three aspects. There're three dimensions of sociality or loneliness. And one is this feeling of intimate connectedness. We found in our research the best predictor of that is marital status, that's kind of an illustration of this
intimate connectedness. The second component is
relational connectedness. Think of it as having a best friend. Best predictor? - frequency of contact with friends and family over the last several months. And a third is
collective connectedness and that's identification with a group that's important to you. The best predictor of that in our studies were voluntary associations to which they belong.
Natasha Mitchell: They're the sort of connections we make, but what about inherent to people themselves? Clearly beauty, age, weight, intelligence, education - those things aren't so important, but are there things that are important? What about self-esteem?
John Cacciopo: Yes, things like self-esteem, shyness, social skills, anxiety, pessimism, depression, hostility, all of those characterise a lonely person instead of a non-lonely person.
But here's the interesting feature. If I manipulate loneliness, which we have done in studies, the people who now feel embedded show a personality change. All of a sudden they're not shy, they have social skills, they're not anxious, they're optimistic, they're not hostile, they change. So this sociality is such a central trait that the individual's personality changes with that feeling. Now if you think about an occasion in your own life you felt lonely, isolated as if you weren't with a group that mattered, in fact you were being rejected by your group. You feel shy, you feel like you're clumsy, you feel anxious, you feel hostile, all of those features change, so in our own existence we can actually think about cases where we felt really loved and embedded and cases where we were lonely. And you might recognise, yourself, that your personality 'changes' with that - it's that central a trait in terms of who we are.
Natasha Mitchell: John Cacciopo from the University of Chicago. And here on ABC Radio National this is
All in the Mind, with me, Natasha Mitchell, coming to you also on Radio Australia and the web. Today, the power of rejection. How do most of us respond to being socially ostracised; do we clam up or act up? At the extreme end it's a very ugly picture indeed, you might have read the case this week of a US teenager who was found with 20 bombs outside his school - a reminder of Columbine in 1999.
AM Archives Excerpt: This is AM. I'm Peter Cave, good morning. We being with terror in an American High School.
Speaker 1: I saw two gunmen, I saw them have weapons, black masks, black trench coats and needless to say I was very frightened, I saw some students running and I thank the Lord I got to hide where I did and they did not see me and blow me away subsequently.
Speaker 2: This girl came up screaming and she was like 'someone's got a gun', so everyone got under the table and then these two guys came in...
Jean Twenge: I think for me, the school shootings that happened in the United States are one of the main things that motivated me to work on this. Seeing that there's so much violence that came from rejection just throughout all those cases, that they were all linked back to kids being rejected by their peers.
Natasha Mitchell: Jean Twenge is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at San Diego State University in California.
Jean Twenge: It was just this horrific situation. They talked about how they had been rejected and they were going to get back at people and this type of language. They also showed a high level of narcissism in the things that they said. They talked about how they could get people to believe anything they wanted to, about how they wanted to be famous, they argued over which director was going to film their story, they had this grandiosity as well, which goes against what some people think. Some people think, well, it's low esteem people, people who feel bad about themselves who will go out and be violent and that's not correct. It's people who are high in themselves and then get rejected and think 'who are you to reject me, I'm going to get back at you'. So that's another part of it as well.
Natasha Mitchell: Many people argue that the need to belong, to be part of a group, is innate in all of us, it's part of our evolutionary makeup. And so the suggestion is that we're always trying to belong, so if we somehow are rejected, then the natural inclination is to do something about that. And yet your work is actually looking at the fact that actually what people do isn't necessarily try harder to belong better.
Jean Twenge: That's right, that doesn't happen. You get the more self-destructive, self-defeating responses and you get aggression toward other people.
Natasha Mitchell: Well, you've been exploring the relationship between rejection and aggression in the lab, now first of all you actually have to somehow reject people in an experimental setting. How have you done that?
Jean Twenge: We use two different ways. The first is people come to the lab in groups of four to six people, we talk for a while and then they are told, name the two people you want to work with next. We don't actually use what they say; instead we randomly assign them to hear 'oh everybody put you down, everybody picked you'. Or they hear, 'well we looked at those nominating forms and no one chose you'. So that's the rejection condition.
And then we have another one where they take a personality test and we tell them 'well, based on your personality, here's the prediction for your future'. And one of them is 'you're going to be alone the rest of your life, your friendships are going to drift apart, you might get married but you'll probably get divorced a few times, and as time goes on you're going to be alone more and more'.
Natasha Mitchell: Oh, you're so cruel.
Jean Twenge: Yes, people often ask me, do you do this just to torture people? No, we really want to find out what the experience is like, so we can help figure out how to prevent it.
Natasha Mitchell: Now what did you measure for the people that you rejected, what were you wanting to find out?
Jean Twenge: We measured a lot of different variables. I've become recently most interested in the aggression variable. So with that they play a game with someone else where they are told, you're going to have a reaction time and whoever wins the trial gets to set the noise that another person hears and it's an aversive noise. You set it on 10 and it's loud enough to make you jump. It's not a pleasant experience, so you're basically able to cause someone else pain and discomfort, so that's this aggression game. And the people who just heard that no one chose them are much more aggressive - they blast more noise against this new person.
Natasha Mitchell: What if they have, and you've looked at this, what if they have a particularly high evaluation of themselves so they've got a narcissistic sort of personality?
Jean Twenge: Well, people who are high in narcissism, who think very highly of themselves and tend to be manipulative of other people, tend not to care about other people's feelings very much, it's 'all about me' type thing, those people are even more aggressive after rejection. If you do the random assignment and you look at the narcissism score, the people who are rejected and who are high in narcissism show the very highest level of aggression.
Natasha Mitchell: Now, you're interested in actually doing something about this and certainly for teachers in schools, for parents who are dealing with kids that have been rejected, they're being bullied or teased and the kids are becoming aggressive as a result of it for all sorts of reasons, what can we do about it? So how are you probing that, how are you attempting to try and work out how to suppress aggression after we've been rejected?
Jean Twenge: We've been trying a lot of different things, to try and do different tasks. So you get the rejection, but then you get to do another task before we measure your aggression, to try to see what can eliminate it. We found that writing about your favourite family member will get rid of the effect, having someone come in and saying 'thank you so much for being here and here's a bag of candy' - that also eliminates it.
Natasha Mitchell: So being treated nicely, or having a warm feeling about someone that you love.
Jean Twenge: Exactly. So having that kind of, we've called it
'replenishing belongingness'. So having those feelings of belonging come back, and even in a very small way and all the ways we manipulated it was very small, it was writing about a family member for two minutes or just getting that one thank you from someone and a little bit of candy, it was a pretty small thing - yet that still eliminated it. Which I think is very encouraging.
Natasha Mitchell: Jean Twenge, from San Diego State University. And besides making us aggressive, Roy Baumeister's research suggests that being rejected reduces our IQ too, at least in the short term. And he's investigated other ways in which we lose control after we've been excluded.
Roy Baumeister: They perform very poorly in this, and people who otherwise would do very well, suddenly they can't control their thoughts as well, they don't seem to be able to concentrate, they don't seem to be able to focus their attention on one thing and screen out something else. We had one study where we let them eat as many cookies as they wanted, because cookies - most of them think they are bad for you and fattening and so on. And the rejected people ate twice as many cookies, even though some of them said they even didn't like them, they just couldn't stop eating them and shovelling the food in.
Natasha Mitchell: Is that seeking comfort, is it seeking distraction maybe from what they are feeling?
Roy Baumeister: Well, I don't know, I don't know that they would put it in quite those terms, rather than a positive quest for something, it's a failure to regulate. You know you shouldn't eat all these things that are bad for you, but when you've been rejected you figure 'why should I be controlling myself, why should I make these sacrifices, why shouldn't I just do just what I feel like?'
Natasha Mitchell: You think that's what's going on, people sort of give up, in a sense, they stop putting the effort in to control their behaviour?
Roy Baumeister: Oh yes, I think a capacity to regulate and adjust our behaviour, and this capacity we have - and it's crucial because it enables us to live in a culture and in a social group with rules. There's like this reward, we'll make these sacrifices, I'll follow the rules, I won't do what I want, I'll wait my turn, I'll pay taxes, but in exchange for the rewards that come - belonging to the group. And as I said, we get almost everything we need from our culture until when you hear that you're not going to be accepted, that other people have rejected you, that they don't like you, they don't want you, you start to think, 'why should I bother making sacrifices, why shouldn't I do what I want?'
Natasha Mitchell: Professor Roy Baumeister from Florida University. Kip Williams at Macquarie University has measured four fundamental social needs which he argues are threatened when we're ostracised.
Our need for belonging, a need for control, for self-esteem and a meaningful existence. He's turned a simple exercise in ostracism, a ball-tossing game between three people into a cyber experiment in the lab. It's called Cyberball and people think they're playing a virtual ball game with two others only to find themselves progressively left out. On all measures they feel rotten, no matter what.
Kip Williams: We've done even more crazy things like we've told people that it's not other people that are ostracising them, it's simply the computer. That hurts their feelings too, in fact those people are angrier because they said, well, you learn that people let you down but computers aren't supposed to let you down.
One time one of my students said, well, surely there are groups of people who we would want to be ostracised by, we wouldn't want to be included by a group that we despised or we didn't respect or we hated? And so we did an experiment where we convinced people that they were playing with members of the KKK. They felt just as bad being ostracised for four minutes by the KKK as they did by members of their own political party, or of a rival but respected political party. So I think that we would definitely ostracise the KKK but we don't like it when they ostracise us! It hurts, at least initially. What we could find over and over and over again is that no matter how minimal or how ridiculous we make the experience, as long as the person's been excluded and have been ignored, it's painful.
Natasha Mitchell: Kip Williams, Professor of Psychology at Macquarie University in Sydney. And despite the incredible power of being ostracised, John Cacciopo argues that we too can be our own worst enemy.
John Cacciopo: Lonely people want to make connections with other people, that's why they feel dysphoric, and again, there's this evolutionary basis for that dysphoria. But they also anticipate being rejected by other people, so they act in a self protective fashion. If you know you're going to be punished, or you know you're going to be rejected you tend to kind of buffer yourself, protect yourself from that anticipated punishment. Well these other people may not know you, and if you act in that self-protective fashion, you're paradoxically engaging in self-defeating behaviour, so that turns out to be this positive feedback loop. You expect to be rejected - you end up being more rejected.
Natasha Mitchell: The message is that loneliness makes us sick. What's the way out?
John Cacciopo: Well, one of the things is that once you've recognised it - is we're not talking about short-term effects, when I say it makes you sick and these cardiovascular effects - think about a time-scale of decades rather than years. So one of the things we have to recognise is it's a lifestyle change, it's not, you know, the two-week diet, I don't have that kind of quick answer here.
Natasha Mitchell: Bugger...
John Cacciopo: Yes...Now one of the things that people don't realise is the best way to feel connected is to have value to other people and if you're out there doing voluntary service you'd be surprised how quickly you feel like you yourself are valued by other people and connected to the other people.
Natasha Mitchell: For some people, though, that's about overcoming a barrier of self-esteem and confidence to even do that.
John Cacciopo: Yes, it is, but you have to be able to start somewhere. If you're doing something and you're feeling like others value you, your self-esteem will rise pretty quickly. If you're feeling dysphoric it seems odd because we want other people to take care of us but the best way to get over that, or one quick way to get over that, is to go out and try to help other people.
End of Part One
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