So, we feel bad when we’re ignored by others––even by people who we don’t know.
Does being ignored by others result in us behaving aggressively towards others?
In 2005, Warburton and colleagues used the hot sauce paradigm, where they instructed
participants to make a burger for a stranger.
All the participants knew about this stranger was that they really disliked spicy food,
but had to eat the entire burger that the participants made them.
They were also told that the sauce was really spicy.
Some of the participants were ostracised, while others were not.
The question is... how much hot spicy sauce
did the participants add to the stranger’s burger?
Warburton and colleagues found that, participants who were ostracised added more than four times
more hot sauce to the stranger’s burger compared to those who were not ostracised.
That’s really interesting, because the stranger didn’t ignore those ostracised individuals.
The stranger is literally just a random person who happened to come into the participant’s
field of vision after they felt rejected.
Twenge and colleagues in 2001 did this study where they told participants that they will
meet other participants and engage in some small group discussions with them––talking
about themselves, their dreams, their aspirations.
Afterwards, the participants completed a personality questionnaire, and they rated how much they
liked the other participants in the group.
The experimenter then comes back and tells the participants that they were the least
liked person in the group because everyone listed them as the person they liked the least
in their questionnaire.
In addition, the experimenters said to those participants...
“After looking at your personality questionnaire, we think you’re going to live and die alone
later in life.”
Twenge and colleagues found that those who were rejected and told that they were going
to live and die alone later in life behaved more aggressively compared to those who were
not told this information.
When the rejected participants were given the opportunity to annoy someone, they not
only blasted higher levels of aversive noise at the person who had insulted them, they
also inflicted the same level of discomfort to a neutral person.
Again, the neutral person didn’t reject those participants.
And yet, they were still being lashed out on.
It might seem obvious that when you tell people negative things about them that they become
more aggressive.
But if we take a look at those who behave violently and aggressive towards others in
real-life, like school massacres, often the reasons for what they’ve done are themed
around rejections, sexual humiliation, bullying, and other negative experiences.