Alone and without purpose: Life loses meaning following social exclusion
Section snippets
Meaning
Literally, meaning refers to a nonphysical reality inherent in the relationship between a symbol or representation and that to which it refers. By meaning of life, however, people typically intend not a dictionary definition of life but rather a way to make sense of their existence. This subjective evaluation of the meaningfulness of one’s life is how meaning is traditionally assessed (e.g., Crumbaugh and Maholick, 1964, Mascaro and Rosen, 2006). For instance, the Meaning in Life Questionnaire
Social exclusion
The formation and maintenance of positive close relationships can aptly be characterized as one of the primary motivations for human beings (Buss, 1990, Maslow, 1968). This pervasive drive has been described as the need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). We define social exclusion as a perceived deficit in belongingness.
Past research has used two main approaches to studying social exclusion, and the present investigation used both. One research approach has centered on experimentally
Social exclusion and meaning
Why should social exclusion reduce the sense of life as meaningful? The pervasive reliance on social connection as humankind’s biological strategy entails that people are deeply motivated to connect with other people as a fundamental aspect of nearly all human striving. Meaning itself is acquired socially. Hence to be cut off from others is potentially to raise the threat of losing access to all socially mediated meanings, purposes, and values.
Prior work suggests that social exclusion reduces
Present research
We conducted four methodologically diverse studies to test the hypothesis that social exclusion decreases global perceptions of meaning in life. Studies 1 and 2 were experimental. Both studies included exclusion, neutral, and acceptance conditions, which allowed us to distinguish the potential effects of rejection from those of acceptance. In Study 1, we operationalized social exclusion by providing participants with feedback from a social interaction that was rejecting, neutral, or accepting.
Study 1
Study 1 provided an initial test of the hypothesis that social exclusion causes a global reduction in the perception that life is meaningful. Social exclusion was brought about by giving participants bogus feedback that was rejecting, neutral, or accepting. This procedure was based on a previously used social rejection manipulation (Bushman et al., 2003, Maner et al., 2007, Vorauer et al., 2003) with the exception that in the current version, we included an acceptance condition. This allowed us
Participants
For partial course credit, 108 undergraduates (73 women) participated. Nineteen additional participants were excluded for expressing a suspicion regarding their supposed partner.
Materials and procedure
Participants arrived at the laboratory with the understanding that they would be taking part in a study on first impressions. Participants were told they would be exchanging messages with a partner of the same gender prior to meeting their partner face-to-face. After giving informed consent, the experimenter showed the
Meaningfulness
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that rejected participants rated their life as having less meaning, as measured by the presence subscale of the DMS. Scores on that subscale varied significantly as a function of condition, F(2, 105) = 3.33, p = .04. Planned comparisons showed that rejected participants rated life as less meaningful (M = 6.26; SD = .71) than did accepted participants (M = 6.54; SD = .57), F(1, 105) = 4.32, p = .04; d = .43. Likewise, meaning scores were lower for rejected participants than
Discussion
The experience of social rejection reduced global meaning. It did not appear to stimulate any corresponding search for new meaning. These results were not driven uniquely by residual emotion from the exclusion, although there was some variance shared between mood valence, social exclusion, and ratings of life as meaningful.
The mean score on the presence dimension of the DMS was high in all conditions (M = 6.47 on a 7-point scale) indicating that despite some reduction in meaningfulness,
Study 2 (Conceptual replication)
For converging evidence, we replicated Study 1 using a different manipulation of social exclusion and a different measure of meaningfulness.
Method
Participants were 121 (81 women) undergraduates who participated in exchange for partial course credit. After giving informed consent, they were invited to play Cyberball, which appears to be an amusing, interactive ball-tossing computer game but is actually a program designed for research on social exclusion (Williams & Jarvis, 2006). Participants were ostensibly connected via the internet to three fellow students involved in the same exercise. In fact, there were no other students; the
Results and discussion
The results were consistent with Study 1. ANOVA using condition and gender as independent variables revealed a significant main effect of condition, F(2, 115) = 4.06, p = .02. The main effect for gender was not significant, F(1, 115) = 1.51, p = .22, but the interaction between gender and condition was significant, F(2, 115) = 3.49, p = .03, such that men were more strongly affected by the manipulation than women (see Table 2). Planned comparisons confirmed that life was rated as more meaningless by
Study 3
Having established that laboratory-manipulated social exclusion can cause a decrease in the perception of life as meaningful, Study 3 moved on to study the effects of social exclusion as experienced outside of the laboratory. Insofar as loneliness reflects a chronic sense of social exclusion, we predicted that lonely people would rate life as chronically less meaningful than other people would.
Study 3 also sought to distinguish the effects of loneliness on meaning from those of other documented
Participants and procedure
Participants were 202 undergraduates (77% female) participating in the study in exchange for partial course credit. After giving informed consent, participants completed a series of questionnaires online at a time of their choosing.
Meaningfulness
The Meaning in Life Questionnaire was used to assess the extent to which participants viewed their lives as having meaning (MLQ; Steger et al., 2006). The MLQ is nearly identical to the Daily Meaning Scale (DMS; Steger et al., 2007) used in Study 1, the main
Meaningfulness
Loneliness predicted the presence of meaning, r = −.35; p < .001, such that more loneliness was associated with less meaning. Consistent with Study 1, there was no correlation between loneliness and search for meaning, r = .06, ns. Thus, again, it appears that being socially excluded is related to a reduced sense of life as meaningful, but social exclusion neither evokes nor stifles any tendency to seek for meaning in life.
Several other independent variables were related to meaningfulness. These
Study 4
The purpose of Study 4 was to address the means by which exclusion reduces meaning. According to Baumeister’s (1991) analysis, the evaluation of life as meaningful depends on a sense of purpose (seeing current activities as contributing to future outcomes), efficacy (experiencing control over one’s outcomes), value (having moral justification or socially approved motives), and self-worth (being a worthy individual with desirable traits). Thus, our expectation was that the mechanism by which
Participants and procedure
For partial course credit, 212 undergraduates (87% female) participated in the study. After giving informed consent, participants completed the questionnaire online at a time of their choosing.
Meaningfulness
The Meaning in Life Questionnaire (presence subscale) was again used to assess the extent to which participants viewed their lives as meaningful (α = .93).
Social exclusion
Ongoing social exclusion was again assessed with the UCLA Loneliness Scale short form (α = .86).
Purpose
We created a measure of purpose in life by combining the
Results
To test whether the four needs for meaning functioned as mediators between loneliness and meaning, we conducted multiple mediation, which permits the assessing of multiple indirect effects simultaneously. Our analytic approach was informed by Preacher and Hayes (2008) who recommend bias-corrected bootstrapping to measure multiple indirect effects. Bootstrapping involves the repeated extraction of samples from the data set (in this case, 5000 samples were taken), and the estimation of the
General discussion
Social exclusion causes a global reduction in the perception of life as meaningful. The relationship between social exclusion and low meaning was assessed using both laboratory-administered experiences of rejection (Studies 1–2) and naturally occurring feelings of loneliness (Studies 3–4). It was evident across two different manipulations of social rejection and three different measures of meaningfulness. Both loneliness and rejection were associated with relatively low meaning, suggesting that
Acknowledgements
The present research was supported by Grant MH65559 from the National Institutes of Health.
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