Podcast #1,033: Ouch! That Stings! Why Rejection Hurts So Much (And How to Deal With It)

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love,” Charlie Brown once said. Indeed, being spurned by one’s crush, or, for that matter, by a friend or potential employer, not only ruins the taste of one’s favorite sandwich spread, but causes great psychological distress and even physical pain.

Here to walk us through one of life’s worst feelings is Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and the editor of Interpersonal Rejection. Today on the show, Mark unpacks the experience of social rejection, including why we’re so sensitive to it and the emotions and behaviors it causes, which can be positive and prosocial or maladaptive and even violent. We discuss the role that is played by the sociometer, a concept Mark originated, in monitoring our social acceptance and rejection and what influences its sensitivity to fluctuations in your relational value. And Mark offers advice on how to remove some of the sting of rejection and civilly reject others.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Mark’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #725 — The Curse of the Self
• Simpsons’ episode where Lisa breaks Ralph’s heart
• AoM Article: Honor in the American South

Connect With Mark Leary

• Mark’s faculty page

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love,” Charlie Brown once said. Indeed, being spurned by one’s crush, or for that matter, by a friend or potential employer not only ruins the taste of one’s favorite sandwich bread, but causes great psychological distress and even physical pain. Here to walk us through one of life’s worst feelings is Mark Leary, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and the editor of Interpersonal Rejection. Today on the show, Mark unpacks the experience of social rejection, including why we’re so sensitive to it and the emotions and behaviors it causes, which can be positive and pro-social or maladaptive and even violent. We discussed the role that’s played by the sociometer, a concept Mark originated, in monitoring our social acceptance and rejection and what influences its sensitivity to fluctuations in our relational value. And Mark offers advice on how to remove some of the sting of rejection and civilly reject others. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/rejection.

Alright. Mark Leary, welcome back to the show.

Mark Leary: I’m delighted to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are a professor of psychology. You have done research on the self. We had you on last time to discuss the curse of the self, though you also done research on interpersonal rejection, which is social rejection. How do you, as a psychologist, define interpersonal rejection?

Mark Leary: I think it’s easiest to think of rejection as a subjective psychological experience. It’s hard to define it in terms of how people behave toward us, because different people interpret other people’s behaviors in different ways, and I might feel rejected by something somebody does, and you wouldn’t. So rejection is really the psychological experience of feeling like other people don’t adequately value their relationship with us at this moment. It’s a signal of low relational value.

Brett McKay: Alright, we’re gonna get into this objective, subjective split with social rejection and talking about your idea of the sociometer here in a bit. But let’s talk about this, what happens to us emotionally and even physically when we experience social rejection?

Mark Leary: Well, any time we feel like people don’t adequately value their connection with us at the moment, and it could be a big thing, it could be a romantic rejection, we got fired from our job, we got kicked off the team, we were ostracized, it could be a big kind of rejection like that that makes us… It very clear other people don’t value their connection with us. It could be very minor things. We just felt ignored, or dismissed, or, Hey, we didn’t get invited to that party. Those things all kick off a series of psychological and emotional and behavioral reactions in us that involve our emotions, and we can go into detail about what those emotions are, and our views of ourselves and our behavior becomes affected.

Any time we feel rejected, we clearly have a response. It’s hard to imagine a person who’s been rejected who just shrugs and has absolutely no reaction whatsoever. We are very sensitive to the possibility of being rejected. It’s a feature of human nature. It’s an evolved part of the human brain to be sensitive to rejection, because throughout evolutionary history, we had to live in groups with other people, and they had to accept us. They couldn’t kick us out. We would never have survived out there on the plains of Africa during evolution just living by ourselves. And so we had to behave in ways that led other people to at least minimally accept us and be very sensitive to those instances in which they found us lacking in some ways and wanted to reject us. So that’s why we are so sensitive to other people’s acceptance and rejection of us.

Brett McKay: So what are some of those emotions we might experience when we feel like we’ve been rejected by somebody or excluded?

Mark Leary: The key emotion that is probably common to most instances of rejection is the thing that we in every day life call hurt feelings. Why are your feelings hurt? Your feelings are hurt when you feel that someone doesn’t adequately value you at the moment. And this could even be someone that you know loves you and cares about you, but at that moment, they don’t seem to really value their connection with you. I can imagine on my anniversary suggesting to my wife, “Hey, let’s go out to dinner.” She goes, “Oh, I’d love to, but I really wanna watch “Wheel of Fortune” tonight,” or something.” [chuckle] Oh, that would sting. So hurt feelings is the fundamental rejection emotion. But we experience other things as well, depending on the consequences of the rejection. So if rejection involves losing a valued relationship, somebody rejects us, tells us they never wanna see us again, we often feel very sad. And sadness is caused by the loss of something valued. If we feel like it was unfair that they rejected us, that often creates anger, hostility. People get enraged at times. If the rejection leads to negative consequences of various kinds, we can experience anxiety.

What’s gonna happen now? I’m getting kicked out of my house. If we think it’s gonna last for a long time and we’re not gonna find anybody else for a friend or a romantic partner or group memberships, oh, then we’ll feel lonely. It’s really interesting. There are so many negative emotions attached to rejection that it sort of suggests to me that evolution really wanted us to make sure that we didn’t miss any instances in which we were rejected. That’s how important it is. It triggers all kinds of negative things, depending on the context, and it motivates us to respond in one way or another.

Brett McKay: You mentioned whenever we experience these emotions, we also have… There’s changes in our behavior. What are some behavior responses to rejection?

Mark Leary: There’s three major categories. One is sort of a helpless resignation, Okay, she kicked me out of the house, and I gotta go on with my life, and it’s just a helpless resignation, passive, moving on. A second one is a very pro-social reaction, where it’s clear that I might be able to repair this rejection, get back on the team, to get the friend to come back, to win the romantic partner back if I just treat them nice enough. So in some instances, people begin to behave more positively, more pro-socially, or they, as we just discussed, people become aggressive and angry about it. They become vengeful and they wanna get back at the person. And which way people respond depends a lot on what they think the prospect is for getting the person back. If I am sure that you’re gone and you’re not coming back at all, and particularly if I think it was my fault, then I’m just gonna be resigned and I’m gonna walk away with my head hung down and my feelings hurt. If I think there’s some chance of repairing whatever it was that led to the rejection, then I’m going to behave positively, to try to get back on the team, to try to get the job, to try to get the romantic partner back.

If I feel like there’s no chance at all I’m gonna get you back and this is all your fault and I blame you, then you’re gonna get the anger and potential aggression in response. So we can either sort of sulk away, we can respond more positively, or we become angry.

Brett McKay: And in addition to the psychological responses, emotional responses, behavior responses, rejection can also affect us physiologically. It actually can cause changes in our body where we kind of feel physical pain almost.

Mark Leary: Absolutely. We suggested, just speculatively, years ago that the systems that make our experience hurt feelings in the brain may be somehow related to the same systems that make us feel physical pain. And at the time, we were just guessing, or speculative, but neurosciences have shown that that’s the case, that some of the same brain systems that light up when you’re physically in pain also light up when you’re in social pain because other people haven’t valued you enough. Not only that, but you kick into high gear, your sympathetic nervous system kicks on with the classic fight or flight or freeze reaction that we have any time we have a strong emotional reaction. So yeah, we hurt, we’re experiencing some psychological pain, and our whole system gets really revved up.

Brett McKay: Have you seen… There’s a Simpsons episode where Lisa Simpson goes on what Ralph Wiggum thinks is a date, but Lisa doesn’t think it’s a date, but Ralph does, and then in the moment, Lisa rejects him very publicly, saying, “This is not a date. I’m just going with you… Went out.” And you can see Ralph just physically, his heartbreak. It got recorded on TV, and Bart replays it over and over again. He’s like, “Hey, Lisa, you can actually pinpoint the second when you break Ralph’s heart.” [laughter]

And he just plays it over and over again.

Mark Leary: There it is.

Brett McKay: I think we’ve all experienced that Ralph Wiggum…

Mark Leary: We have.

Brett McKay: Where you’re just like, “Oh.” You’re just like, “Oh man, that feels so bad to be rejected,”

Mark Leary: Yes. Everything seemed to be okay, and it takes a split second, and suddenly, you’ve got that broken heart and the pain and the resignation all at once. Yeah, comes on quickly.

Brett McKay: In elementary school, kids are often taught, You have to include everyone, be friends with everyone, but something you argue is that social rejection or interpersonal rejection is actually a necessary part of social life. Why is that?

Mark Leary: Yeah, I would hate to quite word it that way, and I may have worded it that way sometime in the past. [laughter] It’s not so much we have to reject other people, but we have to recognize we can’t value everybody we meet equally, and they can’t value us equally. We only have so much time and energy for our social connections. So how many good friends can you really have? Research suggests that, to maximum, five to seven good friends, and most people don’t even have that many. You just can’t. You can’t have 40 really good friends. You can’t maintain those kinds of friendships. So it is true that we have to be aware of the fact that we can’t have close, supportive social connections with a very, very large number of people. And we need to think about that from both sides. One is from the side we know we can’t value everybody equally. Sure, we can treat everybody in a friendly way, but that doesn’t mean we have a strong support of emotional connection to that person. We only have so much time and energy. But we also have to realize that’s true of everybody else. So sometimes when we feel rejected, it’s not that the other person is rejecting us, it’s the fact that their niches, their little slots to have friends and romantic partners and people in their lives are kind of filled up and there’s just not room for us. And yes, they don’t value us as one of their top five people, but that doesn’t mean they devalue us. We’re just on a different tier.

And I think it’s important for people to remember when dealing with their own feelings of rejection with friends or in the work settings or on teams, other people… Any other person can’t have close connections with everybody, and maybe you’re sort of secondary status, but that doesn’t mean they’re really rejecting or devaluing you.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, you can only have one spouse, unless you’re polygamous, I guess.

Mark Leary: Yes. Yep. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: But, yeah, an employer can only hire so many people. They can’t hire everyone that wants a job, so they have to reject. And again, like you said, it doesn’t mean they devalue you or think you’re not worthy of being valued or having that relationship, they just… They don’t have enough room in their finite social brain.

Mark Leary: That’s well said.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So typically, when I think people think of social rejection, they think of romantic rejection; we’ll talk a little bit about that, or being rejected by friends. But we experience social rejection when you apply for a job and you don’t get it. That’s a form of social rejection.

Mark Leary: Yes.

Brett McKay: You’re being excluded from a group. Or I remember when I was in college and I applied for particular scholarships, like the Presidential Leadership Scholarship, I didn’t get it, and I felt rejected. That’s another form of interpersonal rejection. And going back to what you said earlier, this idea that social rejection or interpersonal rejection is a subjective feeling. I wanna dig deeper into this, because as you said, objectively, someone can look like they’re being accepted socially from a third party; they belong to the group, etcetera, but subjectively, that person who looks like, from a third party, they’re being accepted, they feel like they’re being socially excluded.

Mark Leary: Yes.

Brett McKay: Walk us through more of this objective, subjective split of interpersonal rejection.

Mark Leary: No, that’s a very important point. Our reactions to rejection situations, situations that appear to be rejecting, are based entirely on our perceptions of what’s going on in our interpretations, and those aren’t always right. People may not realize that they’re being rejected. In many cases, everybody can see that she doesn’t wanna have anything to do with you, and you don’t seem to get it. Or they can feel rejected when they’re not, which is actually, I think, probably more common. So I think when we feel rejected, one of the things that’s really useful to do is to try to be as honest and accurate as possible and deconstructing, What is really going on here? Knowing that our perception of the events, our interpretation of the events may in fact not be accurate. And we’ve done several studies over the years that show that people’s judgments of how much other people are being accepting actual other people in that situation, we have the ratings of those other people, how much they like and accept you, and we get your ratings of how much you think they like and accept you, and you’re way off, but you think that you’re right.

And as human beings, we do tend to err in the direction of over-estimating rejection. That’s true of most threat systems in the body. We’re more likely to react to things as if they’re dangerous when they’re not, than to think that dangerous things are safe. We always lean in the direction of over-interpreting threats. All animals do that. You think of the deer. How many times does a deer in the woods get kind of skittish and startled and run away when it’s really nothing going on? That’s to make sure it doesn’t miss a real threat. And so our brains are programmed to over-react to potential rejection when it’s not really there, just to make sure we don’t miss a real rejection. It’s like making sure the fire alarm really does pick up a fire so it’s gonna go off when I just burn food on the stove in the kitchen. I think people need to realize that too. We overestimate rejection, we underestimate the degree to which people wanna have connections with us, and so we feel worse about our social lives sometimes than we really should…

Brett McKay: How does your idea of the sociometer play into this objective, subjective split of rejection?

Mark Leary: Well, the sociometer is a label that I made up for the psychological and brain systems that monitor our social acceptance and rejection, that monitor our relational value in other people’s eyes. It’s almost like we have a antenna up almost all the time that’s monitoring the social environment for information about how other people feel about us. We’re not consciously thinking about it all the time. We don’t walk through life just thinking, Hey, what’s he think? Oh, does she like me? Oh, was he being rejecting? But we have these antenna up, and they’re monitoring the social situation, but now and then, just non-consciously, they pick up some little cue, that little frown from that person, that look of disinterest, it dawns on you that it took her two days to reply to your email, and then a little warning system goes off that says, Hey, you probably ought to take a look at this. There may be a problem here. It’s like a smoke detector going off.

So the sociometer is just this gauge that monitors our relational value, and when it goes off, then we start looking around and trying to figure it out, and we start looking at the situation and, What did I do? And what did she really mean by that? And then the emotions begin to come out we’ve described. Our views of ourselves start to come out and change. If we start feeling like we’re being devalued, we start wondering what’s wrong with us, and our self-esteem can go down. So it’s just a monitoring system. Operates non-consciously most of the time, but then when it picks up some kind of information regarding rejection, then we kick into a conscious analysis of it and have a reaction.

Brett McKay: And from what I’ve read, it sounds like the sociometer is… It can be context-specific. Like, it’s gonna be more sensitive in certain situations than others, so for example, my sociometer in relation to my family, I’m gonna be more sensitive to maybe slights from them than say to strangers on the Internet. I don’t really care if I get excluded by some rando on the Internet. But if my wife gives me the cold shoulder, I’m gonna be more sensitive to that.

Mark Leary: No, that’s absolutely true. And that makes sense, obviously, because we worry more about our relational value to the people who are close to us, that we have relationships with, us, but if we’re just passing in the street, it really shouldn’t matter. [chuckle] The interesting thing is, it does sometimes. Sometimes, we do have a reaction, our sociometer sends off a warning signal about somebody’s reaction that really shouldn’t matter to us, in the least. I remember I was in Switzerland a few years ago checking out of a grocery store, and I just made some… What I thought was a funny comment to the woman who was checking me out. And I don’t know if it was a language difference [chuckle] or a cultural difference, but she looked at me with disgust on her face, like, What kind of a maggot are you anyway? And I realized, I just sort of stumbled out of the store, and I got out in front of the store, and I just thought, Oh my God, and my feelings were hurt, and I felt like, Gee, she thought I was an idiot. But then it dawned on me, Why do I care? [laughter] I’m never gonna see this person again. She just didn’t think I was funny.

What that told me is our socio-meters, even though they do distinguish between important relationships and non-important relationships, they still are prone to over-trigger in situations that really don’t matter very much. So how that guy bumps into me in the bar, which seems to me like he’s dismissing me somehow, it affects me even though it doesn’t matter. And I think it’s important to know that, that just because your sociometer kicks off and you’re getting charged up about this rejection, this might not matter in your life at all. Move on. It does not matter.

Brett McKay: How does our sociometer develop? Is it something that we’re born with, or do we develop it through experience?

Mark Leary: Well, certainly, its operation develops as kids grow. When you’re born and you’re an infant, you’re not judging to the degree to which you’re accepted or rejected by other people. As you get older, it begins to become active. And by the time kids are two and a half, three years old, they are beginning to realize, Some people treat me better. Some people seem to like me, and some people don’t. And as it develops, it becomes calibrated in terms of the experiences we’ve had. The ideal situation, think of it as a gas gauge in a car, but this is a gauge in your brain that’s judging how much other people value their relationships with you. The ideal situation, just like with a gas gauge in a car, is that it’s perfectly accurate in telling you how much value you have to other people, telling you exactly how accepted or rejected you are. But it can become mis-calibrated. I had an old car once that would tell me I had three-quarters of a tank when it was really running on empty. Well, that’s not good. You need to know how much gas is really in the car. And if you grow up in an environment where you are rejected a lot, or you’re neglected by your parents and you aren’t taken seriously and you’re dismissed, your sociometer begins to calibrate too low. It begins to assume that most of the feedback that’s coming in is negative feedback, and so it’s more sensitive to those things and you walk through life not feeling acceptable.

If you grow up in an environment where you get a lot of praise and people do seem to like you and your parents are supportive, your sociometer will either be accurate or potentially calibrated a little too high. If you think of a narcissist, a narcissist’s sociometer is calibrated too high. They think that they’re wonderful and other people ought to accept them all the time. And only rarely do they become aware of the fact, well, no, these people think I’m an idiot. So again, another point I think for a listener in terms of thinking about this is how accurate is your sociometer? If we tested it against the actual amount of acceptance and rejection you’re experiencing, and as it moves up and down, as you move through life, how accurate is it? And there’s no way to know for sure, but I think it’s useful to think about the fact that your particular sociometer is not always spot on accurate.

Brett McKay: Okay. So people can have a more sensitive or less sensitive sociometer. It sounds like it’s a lot of just based on your experience growing up. This reminds me of a book I read a while back ago, culture of honor by Richard Nisbett. Nisbett. He’s a sociologist. He was trying to explore.

Mark Leary: He’s a social psychologists.

Brett McKay: Yeah, a social psychologists. He was exploring like, why is there more violence in the American South than there is in North New England area? And his thesis was that, well, in the American South, there is this culture of honor where from childhood, you are basically inculcated to be very sensitive to your status amongst other people. And if you ever see a slight to your status, And like the way you respond is through violence. Like, Hey, you talking to me? You can either duel or you punch, you’re gonna fight. But in the Northern States, that culture didn’t exist. And so they’d done studies where they go to universities and insult a college student in the American South or a student from the North. And the young men from the South are more inclined to feel aggressive and wanna fight.

Mark Leary: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a well-known set of studies in social psychology. It’s very interesting and it has a lot to do… He traces it historically to the fact that in the South you had people living by themselves. I mean, like in rural areas where you didn’t have law enforcement, that if in fact someone was presenting a threat and seeming to disrespect you, you’re gonna have to handle it yourself and shut it down on the spot. If you were living in Philadelphia and somebody was disrespecting you, you didn’t have to worry too much ’cause there was probably a constable up on the… Policeman up on the corner somewhere who would take care of things. So it was protective at one time. It made a certain amount of sense not to tolerate any disrespect because that might inflame into somebody attacking me. It makes a lot less sense now.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another theory is that the South was settled by a lot of Scotch Irish and they’re the genetic and cultural descendants of the warrior pastoral Celts. And that’s still influencing men today. So I mean, I think that’s an interesting theory. What about differences between men and women? Are there differences in the sociometers between the sexes?

Mark Leary: Generally, no. There’s differences in what they respond to as indications of low relational value. Men and women are concerned about different things in terms of how they wanna be perceived by other people. But men and women are… Sociometers are equally responsive to certain kinds of social threats and they kind of fire off in pretty much the same way. Their behavioral reactions differ somewhat because we’re socialized to behave differently as men and women and the brain systems are even different. And male testosterone increases the chances you’re gonna get an aggressive response. But the sociometers themselves seem to work pretty comparably.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So you mentioned earlier some of the responses we can have to interpersonal rejection or that feeling that our relationship with someone’s not being valued as much as we want it to be valued. We can kind of sulk and just feel bad and just sort of retreat socially. Or someone could try to get back into the good graces of someone. What are some strategies that we typically try to use with that approach?

Mark Leary: They can be anything you would normally do to get someone else to like you. You could be doing favors for them, complimenting them, just kind of being nice in a passing fashion until they warm up to you again. It’s exactly the same things you would do with a stranger if you were trying to get them to like you, you just crank that up a notch and that shows up in real relationships. And it shows up in laboratory experiments where people feel rejected by people they don’t even know in a laboratory setting. And then you look and see how they interact with that person when they have to talk to them again. And if they’re trying to get back in their good graces, they’re just more positive and they’re agreeing more and they’re nodding their head more and they’re showing more eye contact and they’re smiling., all the things you do to try to get other people to like you.

Brett McKay: And is it the same thing if we’re trying to avoid social rejection? Let’s say we have a relationship with somebody and we wanna maintain it. Are there things we do to do that?

Mark Leary: If it’s somebody that we know well and we’re trying to maintain it, obviously we do things to make sure that we keep the relationship strong by being positive and supportive and happy and pleasant and complimenting and not making them mad very often. And we kind of do that automatically with our friends and romantic partners and family members. If you’re dealing with strangers, you get two different reactions depending on the person’s confidence. If I’m a confident person, feel like I have good social skills and I’ve just met you and I really want you to like me, well, yes, then I’m gonna agree with you. And I’ll bring up interesting conversations and follow up on what you said, everything I can do to make you like me. If you’re not a confident person, those people sometimes shut down. I’m more worried about you disliking me. So I’m overly careful and cautious in what I say and it works against me. I’m not doing really positive things because I’m trying to be real careful not to do negative things that’ll lead you to devalue me. But it also doesn’t allow me to come across in my best way. So it’s sort of moderated by how much social confidence you have.

Brett McKay: So you’re playing not to lose socially in that situation?

Mark Leary: Yes. Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Defensive rather than offensive.

Mark Leary: Yep.

Brett McKay: Never good. That’s not a good strategy.

Mark Leary: Generally not.

Brett McKay: Then there’s maladaptive ways. You respond with anger, aggression, violence. I wanna dig more into this because something I’ve noticed, I’m sure other people have noticed too, is with the mass shootings that we’ve had here in the United States, you always look at who was the culprit and it ends up being typically a young man and their history is one of they were bullied, ostracized, just, they were socially rejected. Has there been any research done about the connection between social rejection and violence and like mass shootings?

Mark Leary: Yes. Yes. In fact, I’ve been involved in two large projects where we actually did case studies of all of the school shootings that we could get our hands on to try to understand what were the common characteristics in the shooters. There’ve also been examples of experimental research in laboratories where they bring participants in, often college students, but not always. And they either get accepting feedback or rejecting feedback. And then they have laboratory measures of aggression. The next thing you’re supposed to do is blast this other person with loud noise ’cause this other person’s doing a task. And part of the study is you’re supposed to give them loud noise to see how much it interferes with them doing the task. But you get to choose how much noise and how loud a noise you’re giving them. And people who were rejected by this person blast them with a whole lot more noise. Now, that’s a lot different than shooting somebody, but it shows that even in a laboratory situation, the motive to aggress against people who reject us goes up when we feel rejected.

Other studies have had you feeding other participants in a study crackers with hot sauce on them. And you either believe the other person likes hot sauce or doesn’t like hot sauce. And you feel like the other person was either rejecting or accepting of you. You find that you start giving more of the rejecting people who don’t like hot sauce more hot sauce. And again, that’s different than shooting people. But it shows the same basic psychological process. I’m going to aggress against people that I feel like have devalued and rejected me. Of course, nobody gets through the school system without some rejections, romantic rejections, or you don’t make the team or you’re teased or you’re bullied, I mean, everybody experiences that, but only a small fraction go out and shoot somebody. And you’re right. It’s almost always males. Less than 5% of school shootings were perpetrated by girls. More than 95 were guys. So what makes the difference? And in our case studies of hundreds of shootings, rejection shows up a lot, not in every case, but it does show up a lot.

Brett McKay: I feel ostracized. I’m on the outside. People make fun of me. I’ve been bullied. But it almost always involves one or more of three to four other things. You find that the school shooters not only have been rejected, but they have already shown certain psychological problems, evidence of sadism in the past, like smashing worms or trying to kill little birds when they were kids or destructive aggression or vandalism or depression or being suicidal. So if you take rejection and then combine it with already existing psychological problems, the likelihood of aggression goes up. The shooters generally have a familiarity with and fascination with guns. Makes sense. If you’ve never seen a gun in your life or ever had a gun, you’re probably less likely to shoot somebody than if you’re comfortable with guns. We find out a lot of the shooters have a fascination with violence and death. They’re interested in the Holocaust, or they read about other school shootings, or they like to read stories about violent people.

Mark Leary: So it’s not just the rejection that does it, it’s combining it with a motive. The rejection gives me a motive to shoot people at my school ’cause they don’t accept me. The availability of guns or explosives gives me a means to do it. And my psychological problems often mean I don’t have the same control over myself. We’ve got other adjustment problems that make it less likely. A lot of us have had urges or thought through my mind, man, I’d like to kill that guy. But of course, we’re not gonna do it ’cause we have self-control. So it helps to explain a little bit. I mean, not all shooters are the same, but rejection often plays a part along with these other things.

Brett McKay: Going back to the sociometer, have you found any evidence that the sociometers of these mass shooters or anyone else who takes part in violence in response to social rejection, like it’s out of whack, it’s maybe more sensitive than it needs to be?

Mark Leary: Yeah, that would be a very hard kind of research to do. We don’t have any data on that, but that would make a certain degree of sense, because again, there’s plenty of the rest of us who have been rejected, who have our own psychological problems, who might own firearms, who still don’t go shoot people. So it does suggest the sociometer may be out of whack, but I don’t know of any evidence of that.

Brett McKay: Let’s dig into romantic rejection. I think men experience a lot of romantic rejection, but women can experience it too. But men typically experience it because they’re the ones doing the pursuing in a relationship usually. They’ve got to ask a woman out on a date, which means that they set themselves up to be told no. So I mean, just based on your research on the best way to respond to social rejection, any advice for men out there who are in the dating scene on how to alleviate the blow of social rejection?

Mark Leary: I think the best way to cope with it is to go back to this idea that we can’t be valued by everybody. There’s a lot of people in the world and only a few of them can really value in us… Us enough to date us, to get involved with… Romantically involved with us, to form a permanent relationship. So I think we just have to go into it knowing that this is just a low probability event that I’m going to be able to match up with this person who wants to go out with me as much as I want to go out with her. And that doesn’t mean it says anything about me. And it doesn’t mean it says anything about her feelings about me, except for the fact that I’m just not making the very top few people in the whole world that she might be interested in going out with. I think sort of to talk to yourself about this, this is often not an acceptance rejection reaction. It’s a compatibility reaction ’cause I have sort of turned people down in my own life who I liked a lot.

Yeah, I wanna hang around with you, you’re… You’d make a good friend, but as a romantic partner, no, I don’t think we’re compatible. I don’t think that’s gonna work for either one of us. And so I’m gonna turn you down. So one way to soften it I think is to realize this woman has a lot of choices and just ’cause you’re not among the very top ones doesn’t really say she’s rejecting or devaluing you. And it has a lot more to do with compatibility than the fact that she thinks that you’d possess undesirable characteristics.

Brett McKay: Your colleague, Roy Baumeister, we’ve had him on the podcast before, he did research on what it’s like to be the rejecter of romantic overtures. Do you know what his research found with that?

Mark Leary: Yes. That was a fascinating set of studies on unrequited love where one person is attracted to another one and has reached out and sort of thinks that we ought to get together. And the other one is not interested. And now when you see movies about unrequited love, where there’s a pursuer and they keep getting turned down, you sort of get the sense that the person getting turned down is suffering a lot and the person being pursued is not being affected by this very much. But what Roy’s research showed as I remember is that the person who’s being pursued has as many negative reactions as the person who’s pursuing and who’s being rejected. So yes, the person being rejected is heartbroken. They protest, they persist, please, let’s go out. I wanna get to know you. They can feel sad and in despair. They can get angry and defensive. The rejectee, the person who’s experiencing the unrequited love experiences all of the stuff we’ve been talking about today.

But the rejecter also experiences negative emotions. They feel trapped and put upon and frustrated. They’re like in a no-win situation ’cause this is often somebody they know, the person who’s pursuing them, somebody they like. And if they say no and turn them down, it kind of damages a friendship in some cases. But if they say yes, they’re getting into a relationship they really don’t wanna be in. So it’s a no-win about it. And they certainly feel badly about hurting the other person’s feelings. It’s not easy to just be cavalier about rejecting somebody. If you fire somebody from a job or don’t hire them, it’s… I’ve been on the other side of it. And no, it hurts to turn other people down, to kick somebody off the team, to break up with somebody. So it was interesting that it’s not just the people being rejected who experienced negative emotions going through the process of being a rejecter. Rejecting other people is negative too.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That was interesting. Baumeister said that the pursuee, the person who’s in the pursuing part of the romantic relationship, they experience negative emotions when they get rejected, but he also says, they actually, they experienced a lot of positive emotions in the process. Like they feel good. Like I’m in love and I’m gonna… I want to do these things to get this person’s attention that it feels good to be in love, but then it feels bad when you get rejected. And then he said the person who is the pursuee, the one who has to do the rejecting, it’s more of a problem to be solved. Like they don’t… They might not actually feel any of those good feelings. And they just got to figure out, well, how do I let this person down without hurting their feelings? So it just kind of becomes an annoyance.

Mark Leary: Yep.

Brett McKay: Yep. And yeah, I mean, I think I think there’s some guys out there that have this idea that women just love to turn guys down. Reading the research suggests like, no, most women they feel really bad when they have to turn a guy down.

Mark Leary: Yes. I think that’s true.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So as we discussed, you can’t be friends with everybody. You can’t be romantic partners with everybody. You can’t invite everyone to work for you or be a part of your team. So you’re gonna have to socially reject people. It’s just a part of life. The question is how do you do it in a way with some class, like in a way that respects the other person’s dignity?

Mark Leary: Wow. That is a great question. And so everything I’m gonna say is just totally speculative based a little bit on research, baby, but mostly I’m just making this up. Your listeners need to know this is not research-based. That is very difficult to do as we were just discussing to have to reject somebody. And I guess I would say that you have to be basically honest with the person, but also kind in how you do it. And what that means is framing the rejection in a way that doesn’t damage their self-esteem. And often, that… It’s true that you can say, no, I really do like you. I mean, I think you’re a great person, but to be honest, here’s the reason why. Again, the compatibility might be a good explanation. So I really like you. I mean, we have a lot of fun as friends, but you know, I’m just not sure we’re really compatible as partners.

I think there’s things about me you wouldn’t like. And there may be things about you that I wouldn’t like, and you’re a great person, but it’s just not the best fit for me. I would even pepper the rejection with certain compliments, ’cause what you’re trying to do is show that I do value you. I value my connection with you, if that’s true. And in many cases where you have to reject somebody, you really do sort of value your connection with them, but not enough to go to the next step and really accept them fully and be in a romantic relationship with them, for example. I think even turning people down for a job, you interview them for a job. Yeah. You got to tell them, no, I’m sorry, you didn’t get the job. But you got to sort of be honest about why to some extent. Say, Hey, you’ve got great credentials. I think under other circumstances, I could have seen we could have hired you, but we had this other candidate who had this thing you didn’t have. And I think most people, when they hear it really laid out and they understand what’s going on, I think they accept it better. As I said, we have this tendency as human beings to over-interpret reactions as more negative than they are, other people’s reactions.

So to the extent you can be upfront and show, nah, this isn’t blanket rejection. This isn’t blanket negativity toward you. I’ve got some very positive thoughts about you, but here’s the reason why we can’t go along with this, that I don’t value you enough to give you the job or to go to the prom with you or whatever it might be. I value our connection, but not as much as you would like, is sort of what the message would be.

Brett McKay: Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Anywhere people can go to learn more about your work.

Mark Leary: I think the best thing, if anybody’s interested in most of these topics, is just Google Mark Leary rejection. I just tried it this morning just to see what came up and you get a whole lot of stuff that either I’ve written or things about what I’ve written that’s accessible online and you can take your pick about how people try to be accepted. We’ve done a lot of research on how is it that we try to make sure we’re not rejected? How is it when we are rejected? How do we behave? And so, yeah, there’s a lot out there. Just Google Mark Leary rejection and you’ll find things.

Brett McKay: Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Mark Leary: I’ve enjoyed it a lot. Thank you so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Mark Leary. He’s the editor of the book, Interpersonal Rejection. It’s available on amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is/rejection, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find out podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. You get a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to [0:39:26.2] ____ podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think there’s something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to my podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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