Defend Your Research: Hurt Feelings? You Could
Take a Pain Reliever...
The
finding: Daily doses of acetaminophen alleviate hurt feelings
and reduce neural activity related to the pain of social rejection.
The
research: The University of Kentucky’s C. Nathan DeWall asked
62 undergraduates to take 1,000 milligrams of acetaminophen or a placebo for
three weeks. Each evening they recorded how much social pain they’d felt that
day. The hurt feelings of those who took acetaminophen decreased significantly
over time; people who took the placebo showed no change. In a related study,
functional MRIs showed that people who had taken acetaminophen also had less
activity in the brain regions that respond to emotional pain.
The
challenge: Aren’t mental and physical pain entirely different?
Can over-the-counter analgesics improve your emotional state if, say, you get
fired? Professor
DeWall, defend your research.
DeWall: My research is
really just a continuation of extensive studies over the past three decades
showing a significant overlap between social and physical pain processes in
animals. Rat pups that are freaking out during separation from a parent become
less upset when they’re injected with opiates—and not because of any sedative
effect. The analgesic actually reduces their distress. No one had looked at
whether the same thing might be true of humans. Our experiments used
acetaminophen for the obvious reason that it’s safer and simpler for people to
take on a daily basis than an opiate.
HBR: How
can you tell if the pain reliever reduces distress or just masks it?
Our
subjects knew they’d been rejected; it simply didn’t bother them as much. In
another part of our research, we had 25 undergraduates undergo functional
magnetic resonance imaging while playing a computer-based game in which they
were socially included or excluded. During rejection, people who’d taken
acetaminophen for three weeks actually showed less activity in the areas of the
brain associated with social pain.
Still,
distress from rejection isn’t really pain—that’s just a metaphor, right?
No. We
experience social pain differently from physical pain, but there are many
commonalities. Probably what happened over the course of human evolution is
that as we came to rely more on social inclusion for survival, the body’s
physical-pain system became the basis for a social-pain system designed to
ensure we weren’t fending for ourselves in a hostile world. As a result, the
social-pain system functions much like its older cousin, which means it
responds similarly to analgesics.
So
responses to rejection are hardwired into us, like responses to physical pain?
Exclusion
certainly provokes intense reactions. People who’ve been rejected are more
likely to overeat, procrastinate, take financial risks, perform poorly on
measures of intelligence, and act aggressively. One thing I want to explore is
whether acetaminophen can also help reduce these behavioral consequences. In
any case, people will do almost anything to avoid rejection, whether by a
friend, a lover, or an employer.
A friend
or lover—I can see that. But an employer?
Fear of
rejection is probably one reason people make a big effort not to fail at work.
Work can be tedious and harmful to people’s health and relationships. Money is
thought to be the main compensation for those sacrifices, but don’t forget the
benefits of social acceptance. The sense of belonging is one of the most
important positives of work. In our research, when we ask people to imagine
being let go from their jobs, the first thing they tend to say is, “I’m going
to lose all my friends.” Praise, perks, raises, office parties,
outings—employees perceive all those things as evidence of acceptance. They
know that to continue to be included, they must avoid failure—they must
maintain a certain level of performance. The fear of rejection probably also
plays out in another way: It may prevent people from being creative.
That’s
troubling, because creative thinking is what companies need to grow.
True, but
creativity comes with a risk of failure—not all imaginative projects work out.
Fear of rejection or even outright termination may sap people’s will to be
creative. Think of a manager who tells employees to create an iPad app and says
that the developer whose app contains the most errors will be fired. On the
surface, this may be a rational strategy, but employees’ creativity just walked
out the door. Google, on the other hand, encourages employees to spend time on
activities that are personally meaningful to them, signaling that it doesn’t
disapprove of initiatives that go nowhere. If your project fizzles, you won’t
face rejection. A policy like that tends to engender a sense of acceptance, and
the research literature suggests this leads to greater innovation.
Should
all companies be like Google?
They
don’t have to go that far. An experiment my colleagues and I did showed that a
sense of well-being is boosted by just a little acceptance. When subjects were
told that all four people in a group preferred not to work with them, they
demonstrated hostility and aggressiveness, but their aggression diminished
dramatically if they learned that just one person in the group wanted to work
with them. The positive effect of each additional accepting person was much
smaller, however. By offering employees frequent tastes of acceptance, firms
can harness the full potential of their creativity.
Wouldn’t
it be easier just to give them acetaminophen?
Definitely
not! A lot more research is needed before anyone can say that any analgesic is
an effective means of treating social pain. And drugs aren’t necessary: It’s
not hard to create an environment that reduces employees’ anxiety about
rejection. Rigid rules, for example, send a message that the deviations in
thinking that are necessary for creativity won’t be tolerated. Greater
organizational flexibility can send a message of acceptance, breeding a greater
sense of security.
But
businesses don’t exist to make us feel accepted. Shouldn’t employees just suck
it up?
Our
culture tells us not to make a big deal out of rejection: “Don’t be a whiner.”
But it’s just as big a deal as breaking a bone. Even if we try to soldier on,
our socially attuned nervous systems are telling us that exclusion is very bad
for our survival prospects.
C. Nathan
DeWall (nathan.dewall@uky.edu) is an
assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Kentucky.
Quelle: Harvars Business Review Nr. 4, April 2011
(Aktuell auch im Harvard Business Manager Juli 2011)
LG Katharina K.