Thank goodness I’ve got you: group membership as a buffer to the experience of rejection

People respond to rejection with a complex range of motives and behaviours. In particular, the experience of rejection can produce shifts in mood and elicit hostility and aggression, and increased antisocial behaviour. Establishing effective means of moderating the effects of rejection will contribute to both public health and interpersonal conflict resolution. Consistent with research that conceptualises rejection as a threat to belonging, the present study employed an experimental design to examine the buffering effect of people’s group memberships on their reactions to rejection. It was hypothesized that as a greater number of group memberships were made salient, the negative effects of rejection would correspondingly decrease, and the positive effects would increase. Participants were randomly allocated to one of four group memberships conditions, in which either zero (N=27), one (N=28), three (N=26) or five (N=26) social category group memberships were made salient utilizing a free-response task, which involved participants writing about ‘why each group was important to them’. An experience of rejection was then created by falsely informing participants that they weren’t sufficiently liked by others in the experiment to be chosen to work collaboratively on a task. Participants then completed self-report measures of mood and group identification, an attribution perception task and behavioural measures of aggression and executive functioning. Results indicate that when a greater number of group memberships were made salient, participants demonstrated increased loyalty, decreased hostile attributions and decreased aggressive responding toward the source of the rejection. Findings are interpreted as evidence for the buffering effect of cognitive representations of social category group memberships on the experience of rejection. Applications for the mitigation of the effects of bullying and the de-escalation of conflict are proposed