Who is more willing to engage in social rejection? The roles of self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, and negative affect in social rejection decisions

ABSTRACT

How do self-schemas and their consequences guide would-be-rejectors? When making decisions about whether to reject, individuals consider the difficulty and emotional consequences of rejecting, and both considerations are likely to involve self-schemas. In three preregistered studies, we examine the roles of self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, and symptoms of depression and anxiety in rejection decisions. In an initial set of studies (N_1a = 214, N_1b = 264), participants forecast their willingness to reject and their emotional responses in friendship (Study 1a) and romantic (Study 1a-1b) vignettes. In Study 2 (N₂ = 259), participants who recently rejected rated that experience on the same measures. Correlates of negative self-schema were associated with negative emotions. Self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, and general distress were associated with forecasted difficulty rejecting, but only anxiety and general distress were associated with retrospectively reported increased difficulty. Taken together, psychological distress may decrease willingness to reject in a way that participants cannot predict.

KEYWORDS:

• Social rejection
• self-esteem
• rejection sensitivity
• depression
• anxiety

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/fmvn5; https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6B9QH.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/fmvn5; https://osf.io/ukwbq and https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6B9QH

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2131502

Notes

1. We use the term “social rejection” throughout the manuscript to refer to the idea of being denied belonging. Although this term has previously been defined to indicate an “explicit declaration” (Williams, 2007, p. 427), we have chosen this language to match the language that participants saw in the reported studies.

2. The labeling on the concern scale was inadvertently reversed in the survey: 1 corresponded to “very concerned” and 6 corresponded to “very unconcerned.” Therefore, the concern items were reverse-scored before calculating the composite.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Gili Freedman

Gili Freedman is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at St. Mary's College of Maryland. She studies the two-sided nature of social exclusion as well as gender biases and how we can use narratives and games to create interventions.

Justin Dainer-Best

Justin Dainer-Best is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Bard College in New York. He studies the intersection of negative and healthy mood states, self-evaluation, and how positive and negative emotions change the way people think about themselves and the world around them.