Social Pain – The impacts of social rejection, discomfort and loss

Social Pain

We’ve all had moments of social pain, moments when something in the social domain happens and it leaves us feeling floored, or soured on this inside, or just plain distressed. Interestingly, when this happens our brains are responding to our social sources of pain in much the same way tha they respond to actual physical causes of pain.

The Neuroscience of Social Pain

Research in social neuroscience has demonstrated that social pain and physical pain share overlapping neural mechanisms. In other words, our brains react in very similar ways to social triggers of pain as they do to physical triggers of pain. This kind of makes sense, but it’s still an interesting finding. Specifically, fMRI research has shown areas of the brain activated by physical pain, such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the insula, are also activated during experiences of social pain. To evidence this, Naomi Eisenberger observed participants who were excluding from a virtual game and noted that they exhibited increased activity in their pain-related brain regions.

Our Thoughts and Emotions

It’s hard to unpick the relationship between social pain and our emotions and self-talk, but we know there are strong links. For example, we know that experiences which generate social pain, like rejection or loss, are linked to feelings of sadness, loneliness, and anxiety and all the associated self-talk. Furthermore, we know that chronic social pain, such as prolonged loneliness or ongoing social exclusion, has been linked to serious mental health issues, including depression and anxiety disorders. Moreover, we can predict social pain in different situations and, if we do, our anticipation can influence our behaviours. Sometimes it can change our behaviours so that it actually increases our social pain. For example, if we predict being rejected, we may behave in ways that increase the liklihoof of our being rejected by others, confirming our predictions and increasing our social pain. This nature of things can lead to unhelpful cycles in which our prediction of social pain increases, further increasing its liklihood. Breaking out of these unhelpful patterns can be difficult and individuals experiencing them may benefit from seeking professional support. Interestingly, the experience of social pain can also foster empathy and social cohesion. Observing someone else in social distress can activate similar neural regions in the observer’s brain, leading to empathetic responses and prosocial behaviors. This shared experience of social pain can strengthen social bonds and promote supportive interactions within groups.

What this means for leaders

As leaders, we should be aware of the fact of social pain, some of its sources and the way it impacts individuals in our teams. We should also strive to create human-centric, inclusive and supportive work places. While some social pain may be an inevitable part of interacting with other people and not always getting your own way, we should still seek to minimize unnecessary social pain where possible.

Learning to recognise and cope with social pain, or to mitigate it and minimise it is a great thing to be able to do. A good starting point is to be aware of some of the social threats that might cause social pain. To minimize it, we think some of the work and advice that exists in the emotional intelligence space, specifically things like meta-emotion and meta-cognition can help. We also believe that focusing on your wellbeing and resilience may give you further tools to help you weather moments of social pain. To learn more, you might enjoy our podcast on social pain:

Something we say all the time is that “we’re predominantly highly social beings”, so the theory of social pain makes good sense to us.

In fact, we think it really underscores the deep-seated nature of our social bonds. After all, who hasn’t experienced those moments of discomfort when something goes wrong in a social context? We certainly have. Our experiences through life have been filled by little moments of inter-personal discomfort that materially affect our experiences in the world, in both our personal and work contexts.

We’re pretty sure that different people have different levels of sensitivity to social pain as well, some feeling it far more accutely than others, and feeling it as a result of smaller negative stimuli. We also speculate that our levels of tolerance for social pain are not fixed, that we can become more resistence or resilient to social pain as our lives progress, both through developing coping skills and through broadening our range of experiences and support tools. 

We’re very clear that we can do things that minimise the impact of these experiences on ourselves. Perhaps what we think is more important to think about in the workplace, though, is that we can also consider our impacts on others. Are we causing others social pain through our actions or our inactions? We probably are some of the time. If we can reduce the prevelance of this, it can only be a good thing.

Of course, it’s not always easy to avoid moments that might lead to social pain in others, but we can certainly minimise them. To do this, should work to create safe and inclusive workplaces and focus some time and attention on supporting others in our teams, organizations and communities. We can also work to help others to develop the skills needed to better manage their own experiences of social pain, such as some of the emotional intelligence related practices we have detailed elsewhere in this post. 

As a final thought, we would argue that organizations with toxic workplaces probably cause high levels of social pain and do lasting damage to the individuals working in them. We don’t tollerate it when organizations cause physical pain to people, so we probably shouldn’t tollerate social pain much either.

A lot of our interest and insight in this subject came from our podcast on the topic with guest Lou Carter (Banks), which is linked above. Further research of interest may include: Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290-292. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1089134

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