Social Rejection Amplifies the Value of Choice

Social rejection has been routinely associated with negative physical and mental health outcomes. However, less is known about how social rejection impacts cognitive processes, including our decision-making abilities. This is critical to understand, given how ubiquitous experiences of rejection have become in the current era of social media. In this pre-registered study, we hypothesized that social rejection would amplify the value of choice. Participants made choices about whether to participate in a lottery themselves or defer the choice to a computer across a series of interactions with purported anonymous peers who provided varying degrees of positive (e.g., likes) and negative (e.g., dislikes) feedback to simulate experiences of rejection and acceptance. Subjective experiences of affect and the likelihood of future social engagement with peers was measured. Following experiences of rejection, results revealed that participants were more likely to want to choose for themselves rather than defer the choice to the computer. However, negative affect modulated this pattern, such that when participants reported feeling worse during the task after rejection, they were more likely to defer choice to the computer. Further, negative affect significantly predicted participant’s willingness to engage in future social behavior with their partners and individual differences in social symptoms (e.g., social anxiety and the need to belong), were significantly related to choice behavior. Taken together, our findings suggest that experience of social rejection can negatively impact our affective states, perceptions of others, and the degree to which we value choice.