Jesse Bering
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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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It is a little-known fact that a life lived without enemies would be an extraordinarily dull affair. One person who understood this very clearly was the nineteenth century British essayist William Hazlitt, whose misanthropic-sounding On the Pleasure of Hating was in fact a gracefully written ode to this much maligned social emotion: “Without something to hate,” wrote Hazlitt, “we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men.” Suddenly the idea of a utopian society, where everyone is satisfied, equal and good, sounds like a rather drab and stultifying place. Heaven, according to this view, would be a special kind of Hell, a land filled with the souls of smiling, slumbering idiots intoxicated by unending love, understanding and pleasant company. (And an especially interminable ocean of boredom, since one couldn’t even escape through death.)
Or consider, where would Bill O’Reilly be without the “Liberal Left” that so angers him, Richard Dawkins without the “dyed-in-the-wool” believers who’ve become the bane of his existence, or prosecutorial talk show host Nancy Grace without the “scum” she abhors so passionately? (Writer Jean Genet, who spent the first half of his life as a cog in the French penal system, pointed out that criminals were just as important to society as were those who despised them. After all, said Genet, an entire industry of people—lawyers, judges, jailers, clerks, guards, legislators, psychiatrists, counselors and so on—were only able to pay their taxes, feed their children and furnish their homes through the tireless labors of criminals.) Without someone to hate, these pundits would be considerably poorer, no doubt, without a soapbox to stand on and void of any unique social function. With all this in mind, I suppose it was a very wise PR person who once told me that if ever I found myself universally liked, this would be a sign that I was doing something very wrong.
Yet the problem is that, although I can certainly appreciate the rationale behind this strategic advice and I’m all too happy to submit to our species’ natural taste for self-righteous animosity, I’ve unfortunately (and, I must say, embarrassingly) inherited a rather “sensitive” disposition. For most people, it’s relatively easy to hate—even, as Hazlitt reasoned, to find a hidden pleasure in such emotions. But, unless you’re a genuine sociopath, it’s a real feat to derive such pleasure from actually being the subject of others’ wrath. And that, of course, is the ugly flip side of Hazlitt’s glimmering coin of hatred.
According to Duke University psychologist Mark Leary, the feeling of being disliked, ostracized or rejected was specially designed by evolution to be particularly painful; subjectively speaking, being evaluated negatively by others can feel even worse than physical trauma. The reason that others’ negative evaluations affect us so deeply, Leary believes, has to do with our primate past.
Unlike virtually every other species, the hominids could not rely on speed, flight, strength, arboreal clambering, burrowing or ferocity to evade predators. Many theorists in psychology, anthropology and biology have noted that human beings and their hominid ancestors survived and prospered as species only because they lived in cooperative groups. Given the importance of group living, natural selection favored individuals who not only sought the company of others but also behaved in ways that led others to accept, support and help them.
In other words, for a human being, only death itself ensures a speedier genetic demise than stigma and exclusion. To ensure that our ancestors were ever wary of their tenuous dependence on others, Leary proposes that they evolved a sort of subjective, psychological gauge that served to continually monitor their fluctuating “relational value,” an affective index of where the self stood in the eyes of other ingroup members. Generally speaking, the higher one’s relational value, the greater one’s reproductive opportunities and genetic fitness. Just as it continues to do today, this hypothetical “sociometer” generated emotional states that, collectively, were translated into what’s popularly known as our “self-esteem.” Assuming our sociometer isn’t broken or impaired, negative self-esteem is a kind of warning, then, that one is at serious risk of social (and therefore genetic) exclusion.
One of the most significant contributions of the sociometer hypothesis is that, over a decade of conducting carefully designed experiments meant to test its central tenets, Leary and his colleagues have almost completely debunked the popular “doesn’t-matter-what-anyone-else-says” idea that self-esteem comes from the self. That is to say, if you’re prone to boasting that you don’t care what other people think about you, then you probably just haven’t given enough thought to the source of your self-esteem—that, or you genuinely have a diagnosable personality disorder. There are, of course, individual differences in this domain. For example, “high self-monitors” are people who are unusually preoccupied with the impressions they’re making on others. Such people—I tend to be one of these in real life—are overly agreeable chameleons who easily adopt the attitudes and beliefs of the prevailing social environment (at least on the surface). But wherever we fall along the self-monitoring scale, each of us presumably has an innate sociometer providing continual emotional feedback and encouraging us to boost our relational value.
The trouble, of course, is that each of us is also vulnerable to flubbing up the occasional social norm. If we were perfectly angelic specimens, we wouldn’t need the sociometer to begin with; rather, the sociometer is as much a preemptive device for disarming our selfish desires and preventing dips in our relational value as it is a corrective one that prompts us to repair the reputation-related damage we’ve already done. One quick-and-dirty damage control tactic is apologizing to those we’ve wronged. And you might be surprised to learn just how effective a simple apology can be. In fact, a recent series of studies showed that, to a large extent, it doesn’t even matter if the apology is patently insincere—at least for the target of the original wrongdoing. In this 2007 article by Cornell University psychologists Jane Risen and Thomas Gilovich and published in Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, unsuspecting students were confronted with a surprisingly obnoxious person (ostensibly another student, but actually someone who was in on the experiment and acting out a script to test the researchers’ hypotheses) during testing.
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12 Comments
Add CommentI disagree that self esteem comes totally from what others say.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do not care if you ostracize me or even exclude me from your hallowed pages for saying so.
Well, Jesse made a good summary of the work of Risen and Gilovich. No apologies there. So far so good. But how much is he justified in designing a (presumably) measurable index called self-esteem? That may serve as a good psychobabble. But it make sense when neuroscience tells that 'self' itself is a phantom? There is no solid little man sitting there as self to be bother about 'esteem'. Risen and Gilovich work shows the resultant effect of various social forces acting and adjusting in a specific environmental situation. The resultant helps in realigning the body-organism to adjust to the emerging situation for its own survival. So it is another phantom. Where is self-esteem?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswell said, jesse. thanks for keeping it real! Your sorry animal account dove tails nicely with that irrepressible urge for people to punish other people even if it costs them or causes their own suffering. BTW, perhaps someone should tell some of your readers that self-esteem is a construct that allows researchers to operationalize subjectively experienced feelings of self-worth, both global self-worth and domain-specific self-worth (an example of domain-specfic would be "me as a scientist"). I believe the point being made is t hat when people are excluded socially, according to the sociometer hypothesis, their self-worth plummets which then motivates them to do something. that something could be to change their behavior ("i won't make grammatical errors anymore") or change their attitudes ("it would ruin my expressiveness if I used proper grammar when i post blogs"). some might even apologize for being assess (not in the sense of Kim Kardashian but in the sense of acting jerky). All of this talk makes me think: WWFD? what would (chain-smoking) Festinger do? Probably light another cigarette while waiting for some attitude adjustment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyup yup yup! precisely! i lost respect for you [not a lot, don't worry] immediately when you bowed to the [hahaha] social aggression of a [how many 'ha's can i put in here and still seem halfway serious?] clique of women, who, since they occupied the anonymous position, were basically trying to trash your reputation in a web age version of behind your back.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthis is great stuff-- the ideas you are talking about are actually playing themselves out in the very presentation and reception of the ideas. i propose you planned that al along. now neither confirm nor deny that so i can regain that little bit of lost respect.
Hm, I'm curious to know how stable the feelings of the "onlooker" are about the "harmdoer" over time especially when witness to continued amicable transactions between the "harmdoer" and 'victim.' Do the "onlooker"s negative evaluations temper with time? If so, how soon?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSupposing, there's an added energy cost to harboring negative emotions about the "harmdoer," I wonder specifically how the negative feelings diminish over time-- and that if it's possible eventually to simply hold the semantic memory of the "harmdoer" being a poor partner without the emotionality.
I also wonder how context specific these evaluations are. If you run this experiment, then put the participants and plants into a novel situation. Do the previous evaluations carry over? If so, how much? How different can we make the new context before the old evaluations don't matter (if possible)?
What about people that apologize for others' bad behavior? How does that play into evaluations?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLike, "Don't mind Jeff. He just says things like that sometimes. He don't mean any harm."
That's often because Jeff is a friend of that person and their association with them may reflect badly upon them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn apology is a prelude to redemption. One does not redeem themselves with with an apology only as was offered by this so called test. With such a vital piece of the equation missing the results are not surprising.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article does illuminate how poorly apologies are understood and why "sorry" is so abused when people are in limited contact with others when there is little time for one to redeem themselves. I.E., Step on a persons foot in a long line and say "I'm sorry". Then do the same thing but this time offer with the apology an act of redemption, "would you like a bottle of water?" There are other factors I am overlooking here as well, witch is why I hate articles such as this. "" 'U' ""
The purpose of an apology is to let others who expected your cooperation know that you realize you violated the rules through which mutual trust operated in that group, and that you wanted a chance to show in the future that you could indeed be relied upon to obey those rules. Someone referred to self-esteem and that is certainly involved, as you tend to realize that if you cause others not to trust you, you can't really trust yourself to act effectively within that group in the future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article doesn't really make t clear that an apology that also doubles as an admission is not strictly speaking an apology. If the prospect of punishment were involved, it would or at least could be more of a plea for mercy, and not for renewal of trust.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem with some of these experiments is that if the hypothesis is wrong, the testers will often conclude it was wrong for the wrong reasons. The ones involved here owe someone an apology.
please remove most objectionable visually and psychologically photo.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisat least replace as corrupt.
The study seems only a baby step in the direction of understanding an apologies influence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIgnoring the current social status of the offender; seems to be a roadblock to conclusion.
I would guess there is a different interpretation when the group leader (Alpha-Male) is the offender than when it's a lower status offender.
When a group of people reach a certain size the group dynamics change drastically, at 12-13 people the group starts to fracture.