The Psychological Effects of Feeling Excluded

Let's talk about how bad it is to be

excluded

. Psychologists are interested in the idea of ​​social rejection. They sometimes use the term ostracism to mean the same thing. Basically what we're talking about here is every time you feel left out when someone could have called you out. and invited you to a party when someone could have invited you to be part of a game but instead you feel like you were overlooked, like you were being left out of the fun. What psychologists are interested in knowing is one, what does that feel like? and two, what?

What does it mean how you react first to the point of how it feels? It's worth paying attention to the fact that when we describe what it feels like to feel left out, we use many of the same words we would otherwise use to describe who we are.

feeling

physical pain is like, for example, we could say that people hurt our

feeling

s, that a person broke our heart in a relationship, these are pretty vivid pieces of language, but it could go beyond a simple metaphor between feeling physical pain and feeling social pain, research that uses the brain.

The images can observe what people's brains do when they experience rejection. What they will do is put people in an fMRI scanner and make them feel like they are playing with other people. and as the game progresses, the other people start to ignore them. Now this is just a big ruse and in fact no other people except the people in the scanner feel it quite intensely and so what does that feeling of being left out look like? Well, the interesting thing is that the same part of the brain that is often involved in feeling physical pain is also involved in this emotional experience, just as the dorsal anterior cingulate is the same part of the brain that is actually involved when you feel physical pain. and comes. online when you feel rejected, another way to test this relationship between physical pain and social rejection is to give people Tylenol.

This sounds crazy, of course, but it actually works if you give people Tylenol over a three-week period. What some researchers found is that compared to groups that had been taking treatment for three weeks, people who had been taking Tylenol ended up feeling less social pain as the days went by; In other words, taking a pill that we know helps reduce physical pain also does all of this to say that, as far as your brain is concerned, feeling

excluded

from a group is not that different from any number of experiences captured by a group. camera and used for our amusement, an object does not have to be very large or very tall to cause serious problems on the steps, so feeling left out not only hurts physically;

In fact, probably the most important thing is that being excluded hurts

psychological

ly, although you probably already know that. However, the question is why what hurts so much about being excluded? The problem is that the sense of belonging is like a fundamental human need. In fact, a group of psychologists have proposed the need to belong as a fundamental human motive and that is why Every time we feel that we do not belong or that we are not included, it hurts us quite deeply, it hurts this fundamental need that we have as social human beings. It would be bad enough if feeling left out simply damaged our sense of belonging, but there are many other

psychological

harms as well, for example, when we feel left out we often have reduced self-esteem, lack a sense of control over our world, and have a feeling diminished from having a meaningful existence.

What's crazy about all this? It's just that it doesn't even seem to matter who excludes you, I mean obviously if your family member excluded you that would feel pretty bad or if your close friend forgot to call you and invite you to their birthday party that would feel pretty bad. or if your partner forgot your name, date of birth and everything about you that would make you feel bad, but the crazy thing about all this research is that those things feel bad and it also feels bad coming from a stranger, a study showed That if the exclusion came from someone in your own group or someone you don't even know very well, it doesn't feel good to be excluded.

In fact, another study showed that when a computer is the thing that excludes you, it's pretty bad even more so, according to another study showed. that even when the person excluding you is someone you would despise on moral grounds, i.e. a member of the KKK, people still reported that they didn't feel very good about being excluded even by a person from that group, so here we are the question remains. That if social exclusion feels so bad, what do people do in response to it? Well, several studies have shown that when people are put in a situation where they feel excluded afterwards, they show much more interest in making friends and reestablishing social ties.

Studies show all kinds of things, like that people who have been excluded become more conforming to a group that cooperates with a group, they actually take on the actions and gestures of other people, all of which is an attempt to restore some sense of belonging. being part of a social group well there we go, I think we can safely conclude that feeling left out is pretty horrible and we never want to feel it, it all comes down to the idea that we as human beings are social. As people, we have a need to belong socially and every time something gets in our way and that need hurts almost as much as having a brick fall on your foot, but we adapt and use this as an opportunity to move forward and try to making those social connections and forging even stronger ones, that's all for this week, so subscribe to my YouTube channel and like this video because I need social belonging and it will hurt if you don't.

For more social psychology, subscribe to this YouTube channel. or become a people expert, relax and find new articles every week on psychological science when it comes to our brain, feeling left out is no different than getting your head kicked with a machete.