Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and thanks for tuning into CARP Radio, the official podcast of George Mason University's Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Research Lab.
Speaker: Every month, we bring on new guests to explore the research into social influence, scandal, public character, and reputation management.
Speaker: My name is Deirdre Jane Prega and I'm a student at George Mason University and the Media Coordinator for the CARP Lab.
Speaker: We're a team of international scholars studying attacks on public character in politics, entertainment, and science.
Speaker: You can learn more about our mission at carpresearchlab.org.
Speaker: We'll be releasing conversations with authors, journalists, scholars, and other experts with valuable insights about reputation and character assassination.
Speaker: For updates on our work, make sure to follow us on Twitter at carp underscore lab.
Speaker: Our lab is particularly interested in studying the outcomes of cancel culture, which we define as the practice of expelling people from social or professional circles due to real or alleged offensive behavior.
Speaker: Those who are canceled are often subject to public shaming.
Speaker: They may be scapegoated, stigmatized, and exposed to the public's judgment.
Speaker: Whether rightly or wrongly, canceled people often feel that they have been silenced and that they are unable to speak on their own behalf.
Speaker: Cancel culture is often associated with the rise of social media.
Speaker: However, social exclusion and public shaming are much broader and older phenomena, ones that are intertwined with character assassination and have been a tool in power struggles, well, probably as long as there have been people struggling against each other.
Speaker: As scholars of reputation, we hope to understand how this form of ostracism works, as well as its effects.
Speaker: That's why I am so honored to welcome my guest today, Dr. Kipling D. Williams.
Speaker: Dr. Williams is a distinguished professor of psychology in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University.
Speaker: His research is mainly focused on issues in social influence, which he calls the heart of social psychology.
Speaker: Most importantly, Dr. Williams is well known for his work on ostracism and he has developed unique methods to study the process of ostracism and how individuals and groups are affected when they are ignored and excluded.
Speaker: He has also conducted research into many other topics in social psychology, including social loafing and social compensation, internet research, stealing thunder, and social influence's impact on the justice system.
Speaker: Dr. Williams was one of the social psychologists featured in the 2013 documentary Reject, the Science of Belonging, which examined the lifelong impact of ostracism, rejection, and exclusion on children.
Speaker: He was an associate editor of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Group Dynamics Theory, Research, and Practice, and the editor of Social Influence, which publishes research on topics such as conformity, persuasion, propaganda, and mass media effects.
Speaker: Dr. Williams, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker: It's really an honor to have you.
Speaker: Thank you, Deidre.
Speaker: It's an honor to be here.
Speaker: Since we are focusing on your work on social exclusion and ostracization today, I'd really love to hear more about what led you down this path.
Speaker: How did you decide to study psychology and what drew you more specifically to social psychology and social influence?
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That's a lot.
Speaker: What drew me to psychology was really a lot of chance occurrences.
Speaker: I signed up for one class at the University of Washington and I was locked out of it, so they automatically assigned me to psychology.
Speaker: And I really enjoyed the lectures by my professor, Leroy Beach, and
Speaker: Tom Murphy, thought that I didn't really know exactly what about it that I liked, but I decided pretty soon after that to major in psychology, not with really an eye towards a career or anything.
Speaker: I just was interested in it.
Speaker: Tom Murphy, Then about a year later, I was in a rat lab where we were training or teaching Tom Murphy, Rats to press a lever in order to get water and learning the principles of operant conditioning.
Speaker: And we were all given naive rats to begin our process with and mine learned to press a lever within about two minutes.
Speaker: I always suspected that my rat was not naive and I had somehow gotten one that had already been taught.
Speaker: But in any case, the instructor thought I was some sort of rat whisperer and asked me if I wanted to be part of his research lab instead of taking the class.
Speaker: And I did, and then I started
Speaker: two years of research training rats to bar press and studying rats preference for earned over free food.
Speaker: That got me involved in research.
Speaker: I really enjoyed the idea of coming up with hypotheses and testing them in the lab and figuring out ways to do that.
Speaker: I wasn't particularly enamored with
Speaker: Michael McGarry, Understanding rat behavior, but I, to me, it was just a puzzle trying to solve it.
Speaker: And I like that process and somewhere near my junior year I Michael McGarry, I thought I would be more interested in studying people and sort of shifted to working with professors on in the area of social psychology and and then
Speaker: As I was approaching graduation, I realized I needed to do something with what I was studying.
Speaker: And so I applied to graduate school, got into Ohio State University, and decided to go there and worked with BibLatinay, who was well known for his work with John Darley on bystander intervention.
Speaker: was not really working on that area anymore.
Speaker: And with him and Steve Harkins, we started working on the topic of social loafing.
Speaker: So that's kind of a short version of how I got interested in psychology.
Speaker: How I got interested in ostracism also occurred when I was at Ohio State.
Speaker: I was watching a documentary at home called The Silencing.
Speaker: about a young cadet at West Point who, when instructed to put their pencils down in the class when they were taking an exam, he continued writing for a little bit to finish his sentence.
Speaker: And that's a violation of the honor code there.
Speaker: When you violate the honor code at West Point, you are to basically self-expel yourself.
Speaker: But he did not.
Speaker: He chose not to.
Speaker: So they instituted the unwritten policy of silencing on him.
Speaker: And what that meant was that when he went back to his dorm room, his roommate had already moved out.
Speaker: When he walked in the hallway, nobody looked at him.
Speaker: If he talked to somebody, they wouldn't answer.
Speaker: No one would talk to him.
Speaker: When he went to the cafeteria and sat down at the table with his food, everybody at that table would get up and move to another table.
Speaker: And this silencing had been used in the past, and it was typically successful in getting the person to leave within a week.
Speaker: It was so unbearable.
Speaker: And why this was turned into a documentary is because
Speaker: James Pelosi, that's his name, stuck with it and was there for another two and a half years and graduated and was never talked to or looked at or included in anything by the other cadets.
Speaker: And when I watched that, I was just moved by it.
Speaker: I was thinking that is so powerful.
Speaker: And yet what was going on there was a series of non-behaviors.
Speaker: They weren't bullying him.
Speaker: They weren't harassing him.
Speaker: They weren't calling him names.
Speaker: They weren't obstructing him in any kind of tangible way.
Speaker: They were simply not doing a bunch of things.
Speaker: They were not looking at him, not including him, not talking to him, not answering him.
Speaker: And I also thought how whether we, I thought this is definitely social psychology, but I was not sure that anything had been studied on this topic in our field.
Speaker: It didn't seem to me that it had.
Speaker: I was aware of research by Stan Schachter in the 50s that found that when somebody holds an opinion different than the rest of the group, if they fail to change that person's mind, which they try to do, then they will, if they can, exclude them from future meetings.
Speaker: And so that was the closest that social psychology had been.
Speaker: had gotten to studying this idea, but I was really interested in what effect it has on people and what does it make them do afterwards and how do they think and feel and behave and how does it affect their motivation and their performance after it's happening.
Speaker: So I kind of vowed at that point to study it, but it took me quite a long time to actually turn my attention to ostracism.
Speaker: I was always looking out for it.
Speaker: I was looking at articles and whatever was out there, but it really wasn't until 1994 or so.
Speaker: So I watched that documentary in 1978.
Speaker: And so it was a long time in between.
Speaker: One thing did happen to me, you know, some people assume that when we do research in psychology that it's me search that we study things that happened to us.
Speaker: And that really wasn't the reason that I was interested in it.
Speaker: But there was something that did happen to me that gave me the idea of how I could study ostracism in the laboratory.
Speaker: I went to a park with my dog when I was teaching at Drake University and
Speaker: a frisbee rolled up on my on the blanket or sitting with the dog and i looked around and i saw two guys waiting for the frisbee so i got up and threw it to them and then i was going to go back and sit down again uh and to my surprise they threw it back to me so i uh stepped forward and we formed a triangle and they we were throwing the frisbee back and forth to each other uh but then after about a minute they just started throwing it to each other
Speaker: and they stopped throwing it to me.
Speaker: And it was very awkward.
Speaker: It was something that I felt almost viscerally.
Speaker: It hurt.
Speaker: And I
Speaker: sort of went back to my blanket and petted my dog and tried to form a connection there.
Speaker: But at the same time, in the back of my head, I thought, wow, that was amazing in many ways.
Speaker: There was really very little context.
Speaker: We didn't know each other.
Speaker: We were strangers.
Speaker: I certainly never thought I'd even talk to them, and nor did we talk during it.
Speaker: And it was a silly thing.
Speaker: It was a trivial thing.
Speaker: It was throwing a frisbee.
Speaker: And yet it had this powerful effect on me.
Speaker: And it happened quickly, you know, within seconds.
Speaker: So I thought I could do that in the lab.
Speaker: If I'm interested in studying ostracism at some point, I could basically do the same thing and have somebody be a part of a group.
Speaker: The group initially includes them in something and then stops including them and doesn't
Speaker: look at them or respond to them.
Speaker: And then I can then study what the subsequent impact of that behavior is.
Speaker: So that's how I got started on ostracism.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: There is so much there and so much I really want to talk about.
Speaker: I'm thinking about the example you gave me, the example of James Pelosi.
Speaker: And what a powerful punishment that is how you mentioned people basically can't tolerate more than a week of it.
Speaker: And he was just a special kind of character that he could tolerate that for years.
Speaker: I think people tend to feel like social ostracization or bullying is really getting worse.
Speaker: But ostracism, it's definitely not something that's new.
Speaker: Banishment probably has to be one of the oldest punishments for lawbreakers that's out there and I think everyone knows about shunning.
Speaker: Can you give your thoughts on why ostracism is such a common and powerful punishment that reoccurs again and again?
Speaker: Yeah, so I would agree with you that it's not new.
Speaker: And in my library research on the topic, I learned that not only did it have historical roots, the word itself comes from the Greeks.
Speaker: And it has to do with a shard of clay that they would write down the person's name on if they wanted to banish them, Ostraka.
Speaker: But the phenomenon was occurring long before the word came out.
Speaker: And then I also found out that all social animals engage in ostracism.
Speaker: Uh, so lions and primates and deer and bees, and you name it, uh, ostracized, non-working, non-functional, potentially dangerous members of their group.
Speaker: And, uh, the anthropological and reason for this is that that's offered is that it strengthens the survival likelihood of the group.
Speaker: And so even though they might get rid of one member,
Speaker: they are a stronger unit and are more likely to survive.
Speaker: And in the case of social animals, and also in the case of more primitive tribes around the world, which also tend to use ostracism more than capital punishment or even corporal punishment, it results in death.
Speaker: Within a week or so, the animal is unable to garner the support of the rest of the group, share the food, share the
Speaker: the dwellings and become easy prey for predators.
Speaker: Also in the case with tribes, often the individuals who are ostracized die for similar reasons.
Speaker: The evolutionary argument is that because it's tied so directly to survival,
Speaker: that first of all, it's an evolutionarily caused behavior that lower animals are instinctively doing it as a way to ensure their survival.
Speaker: They're not aware that that's why they're doing it, but that's what effect it has.
Speaker: And that we are vestiges of that.
Speaker: We also, in our ancient history, died because of ostracism.
Speaker: It was something that...
Speaker: was very evolutionarily tied to the success of the group, but also that individuals who suspect that they're being ostracized, it's to their advantage for survival to detect it quickly, maybe over-detect it.
Speaker: And it's better to think it's happening when it's not than to not think it's happening when it is, because by the time you figure it out, it's going to be too late to do anything about it.
Speaker: And so I think that we are also evolutionarily wired to detect ostracism, to be very sensitive to any signs of exclusion and ignoring.
Speaker: We are social animals.
Speaker: It's important that we belong to at least a few others.
Speaker: But we also are organisms that survive and thrive because we are confident and have a sense of self-esteem that's at least moderately high.
Speaker: We also have a sense that we have some control over our environment, and when we don't, we can lapse into learned helplessness.
Speaker: And we wish to think of ourselves as having some purpose or some meaning.
Speaker: And it turns out that ostracism can deprive individuals of all four things, belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence within seconds.
Speaker: And so it's a very powerful social process that then requires some kind of reaction.
Speaker: It turns out that in my lab, when we do this research, we get really big effects.
Speaker: I mean, when you compare it to other phenomena in social psychology, our effect size is very large for immediate reactions.
Speaker: So it's not like on a scale from one to 10, we can manipulate ostracism for half the group and inclusion for half the group and get a difference of like a seven to a six, which is common in social psychology.
Speaker: We get like a seven down to a three.
Speaker: And so we get these very big effects.
Speaker: We get physiological effects.
Speaker: We get motivational effects, emotional effects, very quickly, very reliably.
Speaker: And so it speaks to the, I think, the primitiveness of the phenomenon, that it has these really big effects quickly.
Speaker: And often we find that it has these big effects even when logically it shouldn't.
Speaker: The way we tend to do a lot of the research is we have people play this game called cyberball and they're led to believe that we're interested in the effects of mental visualization on some subsequent tasks.
Speaker: So we give them an example.
Speaker: We might say, imagine if you were imagining that you are sinking free throws in a basketball court.
Speaker: would that improve your basketball performance?
Speaker: That's the cover story.
Speaker: We tell them, but not everybody's good at mental visualization, so we're going to have you play this game with the other participants that are taking this in the same session as you, but in different rooms.
Speaker: You're going to toss this imaginary, this virtual ball between the three of you.
Speaker: When the ball comes to your character on the screen, you click one of the other two people.
Speaker: And we don't really care who's getting the ball and who's throwing the ball.
Speaker: What we care about is that you're mentally visualizing.
Speaker: Where are you?
Speaker: What's the temperature?
Speaker: What's the geography?
Speaker: What are these other people like?
Speaker: How would you describe them?
Speaker: And really engage in mental visualization.
Speaker: Again, that's the cover story.
Speaker: What we really are interested in is how does it make them feel when the other two don't throw the ball to them?
Speaker: compared to when the other two do include them.
Speaker: And so this game only takes two minutes.
Speaker: They haven't met the people.
Speaker: They don't anticipate meeting the people.
Speaker: They're even told that it's not important who's getting the ball and who's throwing, just that they engage in mental visualization.
Speaker: Yet this two-minute period has large effects, which of course greatly underestimate the impact of ostracism by your parents or by your church or by your society or by your friends or whatever.
Speaker: But it's powerful enough that we're able to study the impact of ostracism in the laboratory.
Speaker: I don't know if I answered your question.
Speaker: I kind of went all over the place there.
Speaker: No, there was so much there.
Speaker: And in fact, that was like answers to several questions I was going to ask.
Speaker: So that's perfect.
Speaker: And I can actually vouch for some of that in my own life.
Speaker: When you talk about how primitive the fear of ostracism is, I remember being a little kid and always worried, do my friends not like me?
Speaker: That's what I was always looking out for, signs that my friends didn't like me, probably at like five or six years old.
Speaker: But it is very powerful and no one ever told me that.
Speaker: No one ever told me, you know, be worried that your friends won't like you.
Speaker: They were giving me the sugar-coated interpretation of the world that we're all gonna be friends if you're just nice.
Speaker: But I knew to look out for that somehow.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I mean, I agree.
Speaker: And there's a lot of research showing that it's something that occurs in children seemingly without any kind of instruction, not only
Speaker: how they look out for it, but how they engage in it.
Speaker: And so even when you think of childhood games, I remember as a kid,
Speaker: we'd be with maybe there'd be three of us.
Speaker: And for whatever reason, two of us would start saying, do you hear what, did you hear something?
Speaker: No, I didn't hear anything.
Speaker: And the other kid would say something and you'd act like you didn't hear it.
Speaker: And for some reason, this was hilariously funny and except for the person who's getting very frustrated, it was being ignored.
Speaker: And then childhood games, you know, monkey in the middle or keep away, musical chairs, it's all kind of based on exclusion.
Speaker: And being out and not being included.
Speaker: And so it's an interesting thing that we're kind of, we use it in game and play, maybe as it gives us some instruction as to what does it feel like when you're not part of the group, when they're no longer including you in their activities, when they ignore your existence.
Speaker: That is interesting and I never thought about it that way that these games everyone else is essentially taking joy at the expense of the person that ends up excluded in the end but.
Speaker: Yeah and of course it doesn't stop with children if you look at reality TV it's all based on social exclusion too.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: Who gets kicked off the island.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Voting you off.
Speaker: It even shows that you can come back from social exclusion.
Speaker: Like all these games, they never end.
Speaker: The kids start doing it again.
Speaker: And then the kid that won the first time will be excluded the next.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the other thing it also, I think, resembles in real life is that there aren't people who are, well, there are, but in general, most people are both sources and targets of ostracism.
Speaker: that we've all, like the silent treatment is a common kind of everyday behavior that we engage in often in our close relationships.
Speaker: And we do it for a number of reasons, but we've all, most all of us have given somebody we care about the silent treatment for at least some short period of time, sometimes a long period of time.
Speaker: And most all of us have gotten it from somebody that we care about for at least a short period of time.
Speaker: And again, sometimes a very long period of time.
Speaker: So there's not like a personality type that you are an ostracizer or you are an awesome person who's going to be ostracized.
Speaker: Unless we're talking about extremes, like people who use it all the time, no matter how trivial the irritation is, they immediately go into the silent treatment.
Speaker: Or people who are ostracized by their family, their friends, their church, their co-workers, their
Speaker: everybody.
Speaker: Well, then in those cases that when it's occurring by everybody, perhaps there's some character logical explanation for it.
Speaker: But in general, most of us have experienced it both ways.
Speaker: I'd really like if we could talk about those extremes because I find your research into the reactions that people have to ostracism very interesting.
Speaker: We discussed why and how it's so painful for most people to be ostracized.
Speaker: But clearly there are people that even if they find it painful, they can still tolerate ostracism more than other people.
Speaker: Like the example of James Pelosi.
Speaker: Are there any particular traits or personality types, to put it very broadly, that you find that have a better tolerance for ostracization?
Speaker: Yeah, and another good example, in addition to Pelosi, also from West Point, maybe even a better example is General Benjamin O. Davis, who was silenced at West Point, not for two and a half years, but for all four years that he was there.
Speaker: He didn't violate the honor code.
Speaker: This was back in the 1930s or early 40s.
Speaker: And he was African-American.
Speaker: And they didn't want him there because of that reason.
Speaker: So as soon as he arrived, they gave him the silencing.
Speaker: And not only did he put up with it and whatever those special characteristics that you asked about that he possessed to get him through all four years, but he
Speaker: succeeded in ways that 95% of the cadets didn't.
Speaker: He became a general.
Speaker: You know, if you drive on the freeway in Cleveland, you can look up and see the Benjamin O. Davis High School.
Speaker: I mean, so it's, whereas James Pelosi continued to be ostracized for most of his career, even though he stayed in the army, Benjamin O. Davis turned it into something that allowed him to become extremely successful.
Speaker: So in answer to your question, this is sort of, you might think this would be a question we would have looked at right off the bat, but really most of, when I first started, people didn't believe it mattered that much.
Speaker: And they told me, you know, like cyber ball and that, they said, you're wasting your time.
Speaker: That's not going to have any impact on anybody.
Speaker: And you're wasting your students' time to even study this.
Speaker: And so it was an uphill battle just to convince people this was bothersome, that this was distressing.
Speaker: and then showing how it affected everybody similarly.
Speaker: And so even though you might think there are personality characteristics that are associated with dealing with it, it doesn't seem like there's very many personality characteristics that allow someone to be immune to it.
Speaker: What we find is that everybody from, we've studied age seven up to 95,
Speaker: John Zeeb, Is significantly impacted by a laboratory induced instantiation of ostracism typically cyber ball, but what what varies or what differs is how soon they get over it.
Speaker: John Zeeb, So it hurts everybody initially
Speaker: But some people can get over it more quickly than others.
Speaker: And people cope with it differently.
Speaker: Some people will try to kind of bend over backwards to fit in so that people like them again and will go along with the crowd, even if they don't agree with the crowd, and do things that they ordinarily wouldn't do just to be accepted.
Speaker: Some people, on the other hand, especially when they don't think that re-inclusion is a possibility, get violent or aggressive or retaliative, and they lash out.
Speaker: compared to fitting in and conforming and complying and obeying and all those things that happen when we are trying to fit in, being aggressive is not going to ensure inclusion.
Speaker: In fact, it's going to perpetuate your exclusion.
Speaker: So even though it's a reaction, it doesn't solve the problem.
Speaker: It just sort of
Speaker: keeps it going, makes it more likely to occur.
Speaker: And then a third reaction we see is that people kind of crawl into a hole.
Speaker: Sometimes I call this turtling, that they just pull themselves in and don't allow themselves to be rejected or ostracized by others because they go, I just not going to join or try to even engage in social behavior.
Speaker: And that will prevent that from happening to me again.
Speaker: If that's done for a short period of time, maybe it allows you to garner your resources and go out and try again.
Speaker: But if you do it for a long period of time, that too perpetuates ostracism.
Speaker: So of the three general reactions we see to it,
Speaker: really the only one that reduces the likelihood of future ostracism is going along to get along.
Speaker: Which is probably why it's such a ubiquitous behavior, because it worked.
Speaker: If it generally caused aggression or violence, then I don't think it would be used that often, because it would backfire.
Speaker: But because it tends to keep people in their place, make them harmonious, make them agree, then that's reinforcing
Speaker: the behavior and so it's more likely to be used across the board.
Speaker: But in addition to those kind of coping paths, one can also look at how soon they recover.
Speaker: Do they ruminate and worry about it and think about it a lot?
Speaker: And that keeps it going, which is more likely to then to lead to some kind of response like going along or aggression or seeking solitude.
Speaker: But for people who can kind of like go, OK, I don't really care or that doesn't that's not going to change me or something like that, then they're more likely to recover before even having to do those kinds of paths.
Speaker: And what characteristics do they possess?
Speaker: Well, as I said, you would have thought that would have been something we would have studied early on, but it's just really something we're starting to look at now.
Speaker: And certainly things related to resilience or grit or learned optimism, there's a number of terms that are out there that suggest that we get back on the horse when we're thrown off and persist.
Speaker: And people who are high in possessing those characteristics
Speaker: seem to be the likely candidates for people who are able to cope with it more effectively and to, I guess, live with it.
Speaker: I think that even if you're resilient, you still seek ways to fortify the needs that are threatened.
Speaker: So even in the case of Benjamin O. Davis, if you read his autobiography and the chapter on silencing, he spent a considerable time that he was at West Point calling his parents on the phone and talking to them.
Speaker: And so he was making social connections and maintaining them and nurturing them.
Speaker: And so he wasn't like totally without that opportunity.
Speaker: So I think that people will seek out somebody to make a connection with when they are ostracized.
Speaker: You mentioned social media.
Speaker: The people who have shot people, mass shooters, whether they're alive or dead, they're
Speaker: web pages are alive and there are people devoting web pages to them and they have lots of friends.
Speaker: And so no matter what you do, no matter how canceled you are by one segment of society or another, there seems to be another segment of society that embraces you.
Speaker: And so that gives you that sense of belonging.
Speaker: And you go along with that group and you're more likely to agree with them and do what they do as a way to ensure your inclusion in that group.
Speaker: And so in some ways, then what that does is it perpetuates a kind of a more extreme set of behaviors in order to maintain your inclusion in that particular group that likes you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I think that really profoundly shows that we are social animals deep down to our bones and we're always going to find a way to fulfill those social needs.
Speaker: Even if we might be doing it through crazy outlets, frankly, in the case of, you know, people that are dedicated to killers.
Speaker: That's... I think we can all agree that that's not ideal, but still they're getting something out of it.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think, you know, the advent of social media, I don't think has caused something, but it's facilitated.
Speaker: It's afforded something.
Speaker: And so, you know, there might have been people who were attracted to killers back in the 40s, and they'd write a letter to prison.
Speaker: And
Speaker: The person might get a couple letters and maintain some kind of a pen pal situation.
Speaker: But now you've got literally thousands of people who can indicate their allegiance to you immediately and it spreads.
Speaker: And so it's just more visible, it's more accessible, it's more likely to occur, it's more likely to spread out to a larger population quickly.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: The same thing goes for, you know, cyber bullying.
Speaker: I mean, you know, if a kid in school is bullied, back in the old days, you were bullied by one bully, maybe a couple.
Speaker: There'd be a bunch of bystanders that might be tolerant of it or something like that.
Speaker: But it didn't, like, spread to every single thing you did everywhere.
Speaker: Now you can organize people to ostracize or cyber bully or spread malicious gossip.
Speaker: And all that can happen
Speaker: you know, within a few minutes and you've got the whole school on board and perhaps other people.
Speaker: So social media has certainly facilitated these behaviors, the rapidity and the breadth of these behaviors in a way that didn't happen, I think, pre-internet.
Speaker: When we talk about the effects of ostracism and how people are reacting when they're ostracized, you have two papers on the traits of the ostracized and the effects of ostracism that I found really interesting.
Speaker: One of them suggested that extremism leads to ostracism.
Speaker: So people that have more extreme ideas are probably more likely to be ostracized.
Speaker: They're not going along with the crowd.
Speaker: So people are more likely to want them to adopt the main line.
Speaker: On the other hand, another paper suggested that the experience of being ostracized itself makes you more open to extremist ideas or extremist groups.
Speaker: I'm saying extremist in a neutral sense because your paper studied whether excluded college students would be more likely to join a group that was advocating lowering tuition.
Speaker: So it doesn't always have to be
Speaker: But they were advocating lowering tuition by defacing property, disrupting classrooms.
Speaker: So we did make it not just that you agree with lowering tuition, because that would be about 99.9% of the population, but to do it in a way that was highly disruptive and destructive.
Speaker: What we're looking at, this is with Andy Hales at University of Mississippi, and we're continuing to look at this, is that when you are ostracized, you want to fortify the four needs that have been threatened, belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence.
Speaker: you are open to overtures of groups who want you.
Speaker: I mean, in general, if you're ostracized, then if a group says, we'd like you to join us, you're going, yeah, you know, because that fulfills those things.
Speaker: But all other things being equal, which group would fulfill, would you imagine would fill those needs better?
Speaker: A moderate group or an extreme group?
Speaker: So we find that people believe, whether they're right or wrong, they believe that extreme groups are more cohesive.
Speaker: that people are more tight, more connected, more mutually supportive than moderate groups.
Speaker: So as long as the group wants you, you think if you're in an extreme group, you are a more integral part of that group and more supported.
Speaker: You also think that extreme groups feel superior to other groups more so than moderate groups do.
Speaker: So your self-esteem bumps up more.
Speaker: You feel that you're more likely to do something.
Speaker: You know, a lot of times people don't like moderate groups because it seems like they never get anywhere.
Speaker: They don't achieve anything.
Speaker: But extreme groups do stuff and they're noticed.
Speaker: They're having an impact.
Speaker: So that increases your sense of control.
Speaker: And then, you know, moderate groups, you say, what exactly does this moderate group stand for?
Speaker: It might be a little bit difficult to kind of
Speaker: articulate that.
Speaker: But if you say, what does this extreme group stand for, then you know.
Speaker: So this idea of meaningful existence, that there's a clear idea and mission behind the group is greater for extreme groups.
Speaker: So what we're proposing is that all other things being equal, if two groups want you and you feel ostracized, especially in real life, when you're feeling ostracized by your family, by society, in your workplace, maybe in your church,
Speaker: The extreme group is going to have some features that are more attractive than the moderate group.
Speaker: That is really interesting.
Speaker: One thing I'm wondering, does that effect hold true for people who have not been excluded?
Speaker: For example, does a person that is relatively happy in the moderate group, for example, if you ask them, would they still perceive the extremist group to be closer, to be more tight knit, to have a more defined goal, or does that only apply to the excluded person?
Speaker: Those are attitudes or opinions of the general population, at least the general population as we've studied, which typically means introductory psych students or people that are on MTurk or these methods that you can get online attitudes.
Speaker: So it isn't just excluded people that have these beliefs about extreme groups.
Speaker: But there are certainly reasons that not everybody enjoys an extreme group.
Speaker: Obviously, by definition, that's going to be the case.
Speaker: You see that the larger population doesn't like extreme groups.
Speaker: As you said earlier, we found that if you are extreme, you're more likely to be ostracized, at least by mainstream society.
Speaker: You may be embraced by those in the extreme group.
Speaker: But there's going to be a large segment of the population that doesn't like you.
Speaker: But as long as you have that embracing, that mutual support, then that need for connection, that belonging need is fulfilled in extreme groups.
Speaker: But if you're not excluded, you may be aware that extreme groups might be particularly tight
Speaker: But you don't have, you're also aware that you're going to face sanctions or penalties from maybe your friends and your family and things like that.
Speaker: So that's what keeps you from just jumping out and joining any extreme group any old time.
Speaker: It's only when you feel invisible, you feel unimportant, you feel like you're not on anybody's radar,
Speaker: that then you actively seek out something that will take you.
Speaker: And what I'm saying is, if two groups want you and one is more extreme than the other, that group may have the advantage.
Speaker: That makes sense because probably those people have a lot less to lose, whereas the people that already have enough social connections, have people fulfilling those needs, they have something to lose.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: They have a lot to lose.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: So the people that are excluded and ignored habitually in society may have a certain amount of freedom to join an extreme group because there's, I think it was what Chris Christopherson and Janis Joplin or the freedom system, another word for nothing left to lose.
Speaker: And so they, I think they, it allows them to go ahead and seek out those groups.
Speaker: I'm also interested in how stigma and stigma communication overlap with your research on ostracism and how people know who to socially exclude.
Speaker: At the CARP Lab, one of our main research areas is how character attack can be used to mark and stigmatize certain individuals, which warns other people to stay away from them.
Speaker: Can you tell us a little bit about how your work on ostracization is linked to stigmatization and if these processes overlap or interact in any way?
Speaker: Yeah, I do think there's an overlap.
Speaker: Now, we define ostracism as being ignored and excluded.
Speaker: people who are stigmatized can be ignored and excluded, but they can also be harassed and paid a lot of attention to and negative attention.
Speaker: And so that's sort of the difference between ostracism and bullying.
Speaker: One is excessive attention that is aversive,
Speaker: whereas the other is inattention, which is aversive.
Speaker: And so, you know, somebody who has some kind of a socially recognized stigma in society, I'm sure has faced both of those.
Speaker: And you get unwanted over-attention, you're stared at, you're pointed at, you're made fun of, or people turn their heads and act like you're not there.
Speaker: And so, you know, there's a connection between the two.
Speaker: Our research suggests that
Speaker: Being ignored and excluded deprives you of something above and beyond what being bullied deprives you of.
Speaker: And that you're not even worthy of punishment.
Speaker: You're not even worthy of negative attention.
Speaker: And that's sort of an existential threat that goes above and beyond what being bullied or vilified do.
Speaker: So people who are canceled, I guess, to use the term that's being used these days, often they don't feel ignored.
Speaker: They feel like they're being paid a lot of attention and they don't like the attention, but they're getting a lot.
Speaker: So as weird as it sounds, they know they're important enough for people to care about and to vilify and to talk about.
Speaker: And comparing that to someone who nobody even acknowledges as existing, then you don't even feel like you're important enough to be disliked.
Speaker: And so that's sort of a distinction that we look at in our lab, that a difference between ostracism and being bullied or being harassed or something like that.
Speaker: You asked something else, and I kind of lost track of the question there, but it had to do with, we do know that people who have a stigma, when they are ostracized randomly, just in our lab, they assume it's because of their stigma.
Speaker: They interpret it that way, even when it's actually random.
Speaker: So when we've done studies with
Speaker: We did the studies with 600 representative people in the United States, half of them African American, half of them Caucasians, and they were either included or ostracized by people who are the same ethnicity as them or a different ethnicity, that African Americans were more likely to attribute this randomly assigned ostracism to the fact that they were black.
Speaker: And so when you are stigmatized, that's the lens with which you perceive the explanation for the behavior that you're experiencing.
Speaker: And when you do do that, it's harder to get over.
Speaker: It's harder to recover from.
Speaker: So to the extent you attribute the ostracism to prejudice and discrimination and racism, then it takes you longer to recover from two minutes of not getting that ball from two people you don't know.
Speaker: So in that sense, stigmatization, I think perpetuates the pain of ostracism.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: I think that does show how profound the effects of ostracism are and how deeply they affect us psychologically.
Speaker: That also reminds me of how sometimes people who are excluded or ignored, they try to trigger other people to pay them negative attention.
Speaker: might act out get aggressive and it's because they just want someone to notice them even if it's negative yeah i mean that that came out in our interviews well you know a lot of our work is lab research where we randomly assign somebody to two minutes of being ostracized or included but and then another portion of our work is interested in what are the long-term effects of ostracism of long-term ostracism and that we're not doing in the lab of course and so we
Speaker: We interview people who have been ostracized for a really long time, sometimes up to 40 years by people that are important to them, their parents or their spouse or something like this, or their children.
Speaker: But once again, I've lost the train of thought here, sorry.
Speaker: What was your question?
Speaker: You forgot your question.
Speaker: Oh my goodness.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I think I was talking about, now I remember, I was talking about how people will often act out to trigger some sort of negative attention.
Speaker: I know where I was going now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in these interviews, there was a lot of times where a spouse would get a long-term silent treatment from their partner.
Speaker: And at first they would be really nice and apologetic, even though they didn't know what they were apologizing for some of the times they're trying to fit in.
Speaker: But if it continued, then exactly what you said, they would be provocative.
Speaker: They would force the person to pay attention to them.
Speaker: And then often they would do so by hurling insults or hurling ashtrays, something to get the person's attention.
Speaker: Of course,
Speaker: then that aggressive response can then spiral out of control and cause mutual aggression.
Speaker: But that indeed is something that people do.
Speaker: To the extent that they feel like they're not being paid attention to, it's very frustrating and they will act provocatively simply to get attention.
Speaker: We did this one study when I was at the University of Toledo before moving to Australia, where I was for seven and a half years.
Speaker: And there were five of us on the fifth floor of the building
Speaker: and one other faculty member and three graduate students.
Speaker: And we all agreed that during the week, the next week, the week before I left, we were going to, each day, one of us was going to be ostracized by everybody on the floor, by the other four.
Speaker: And that would be signified by getting a
Speaker: Scarlet letter O above the door when you walked into your office, you would know I'm going to be ostracized that day.
Speaker: And then we agreed that we would take notes and keep kind of a diary of every time we were thinking about the ostracism, either as a target or as a source.
Speaker: Thomas Hatchman, Whereas some people bake cookies prior to the ostracism and handed them out and did all kinds of pleasant nice behaviors.
Speaker: Thomas Hatchman, When it was done to me, I, I, it was very frustrating not to be noticed and I would be in a lab meeting and I would make a suggestion.
Speaker: Thomas Hatchman, And they would act like I didn't make it and then somebody else would make the same suggestion and get the credit for it and.
Speaker: They would talk right over me.
Speaker: And I ended up sticking a scarlet letter O on my forehead.
Speaker: And my colleague, the other professor, finally happened to glance at me and says, take that off your head.
Speaker: Don't be so childish.
Speaker: And instead of feeling reprimanded, I felt successful.
Speaker: I go, yes, I was noticed.
Speaker: And
Speaker: On that same day, we were driving back to the school because we had our lab meeting somewhere else.
Speaker: And I saw the same guy walking to class and I honked my horn.
Speaker: He turned around instinctively and waved and then saw it was being then pulled it down.
Speaker: And once again, I'm victorious.
Speaker: I wasn't being aggressive, but I was being provocative.
Speaker: I was trying to get noticed.
Speaker: And that I think supersedes belonging in some cases that, yes, we want to belong, but maybe first we want to be noticed.
Speaker: We want to be acknowledged as existing.
Speaker: And then once we have that, then we want to belong.
Speaker: And then once we have that, we want to be liked.
Speaker: And I think so.
Speaker: I think there's like several steps there, kind of maybe a little bit similar to some ideas that Maslow had.
Speaker: That really reminds me of when I was in school, a popular joke was whenever anyone was wearing camouflage to say like, oh, who's that?
Speaker: I can't see them.
Speaker: I can't see them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know what's happening kind of thing.
Speaker: And if it was me, if I was the one wearing camouflage and someone started doing that to me, I would get irritated.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: Ridiculously so.
Speaker: They were just making a joke, but it really bothered me.
Speaker: And I'd be like, what are you doing?
Speaker: Did that decrease the likelihood that you'd wear camouflage?
Speaker: Well, I didn't wear camouflage that much to begin with.
Speaker: If I had really loved camouflage and I knew that my friends would keep doing that, probably it would have decreased the likelihood, to be honest.
Speaker: Or you would have joined a group that all wore camouflage.
Speaker: They would be the extremists because they need the camouflage to go and do their direct action.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: That is really interesting.
Speaker: Even when we know it's just a joke or it's even something we've agreed to in your case, it still irritates us.
Speaker: Something else that we're looking into, I have a master's student, Ebony Bradley, and we're studying the phenomenology of feeling invisible.
Speaker: And in the social sciences, we regard invisibility as kind of a, well, certainly as a negative condition where people lack voice and lack and feel like they're not being paid attention to and aren't contributing.
Speaker: and people who are marginalized people because of their ethnicity or sexual orientation or whatever feel invisible, socially invisible.
Speaker: But we're looking at both the negative side of feeling invisible, which we find quite easily in the lab, but also the idea that when you feel invisible over a period of time, it affords you the opportunity to do something that you wouldn't ordinarily do because you feel like no one's going to notice in the first place.
Speaker: And so you may engage in shortcuts or sabotage or any kind of behavior that is self gratifying that you wouldn't do normally because people would see you and say something about it.
Speaker: But if they're not paying attention to it, you feel like you can get away with it.
Speaker: So that's something that's interesting to us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's like what we talked about earlier.
Speaker: It can almost have a liberating effect because it's I have nothing left to lose.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, what do I care?
Speaker: They don't care about me anyway.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We talked a little bit about the impact of social media and the Internet on how ostracization works these days.
Speaker: You and your colleagues have actually devised the social media ostracism paradigm, which is kind of a framework for understanding the varieties of ostracism and their effects in the social media context.
Speaker: I think this model is really relevant to what we were discussing today, especially with things like cancel culture, online pylons, et cetera.
Speaker: Could you describe this model a little bit and talk about what you found about how ostracism works online?
Speaker: So, you know, even when you think about our early work, Cyberball, that's kind of an online experience, too.
Speaker: In fact, the very first study was indeed truly online and it wasn't in the lab.
Speaker: It was people on their own computers thinking that they were interacting with people somewhere else in the world.
Speaker: But yeah, we've devised a paradigm, a method of studying this called ostracism online, which really kind of simulates a simplified Facebook type of page where you have a profile, you read other people's profile, and then you have a chance to do the thumbs up or the like response.
Speaker: And just as you might suspect from the other stuff that we've done,
Speaker: If you have a profile and there's eight other people that have a profile and you've liked five people or six people and everybody else has five or six or seven thumbs up and you have one or none, it has the same impact on you.
Speaker: You feel a loss of belonging and self-esteem and control of meaningful existence.
Speaker: Similarly, in other types of social media, if you're unfriended or befriended,
Speaker: if you're hidden, if people don't respond to your posts, these things have immediate impact.
Speaker: When I said we studied physiological effects, we found that when people are playing cyberball, that the area of their brain that detects physical pain is activated.
Speaker: And so it's the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.
Speaker: And if you put your finger on fire or a pinprick or ice cold water or extreme pressure is put on there, that's the area of your brain that is activated.
Speaker: So it's truly painful experience.
Speaker: And these same effects occur when people don't respond to our
Speaker: posts or they don't include us in a thread, a message thread that we think that we belong to or something like that.
Speaker: And so the social media, as I say, I don't think it's invented ostracism, but it certainly has made it easier and faster to engage in and it can enlist larger numbers of sources more quickly as well.
Speaker: But on the other hand, it also affords the person the opportunity to join another group very quickly.
Speaker: I mean, it's not like you have to go outside your home and travel 10 miles to find someone that will like you.
Speaker: You just find some other group and join them.
Speaker: And so it's a two-edged sword.
Speaker: You have massive, quick ostracism capabilities, but you also have instantaneous abilities to join
Speaker: others.
Speaker: I pretty much guarantee that anybody that has been so-called canceled has supporters.
Speaker: I mean, at this point, it's almost politically, ideologically divided.
Speaker: So one side cancels you, the other side embraces you.
Speaker: And so you're not truly ostracized.
Speaker: It amazes me that when you started doing this research, people thought, no, this isn't that relevant to our daily lives.
Speaker: It's a waste of time.
Speaker: Because as we're talking, I cannot think of anything more relevant even to my life.
Speaker: Like the example with the ostracism online, I know a lot of people who will post a photo on Instagram.
Speaker: And if they don't get a certain amount of engagement within the first few minutes, they will delete it immediately because it would be too unbearable and too embarrassing to see that post up there with one or two likes because they think, well, it says something about me in that post.
Speaker: I must look ugly.
Speaker: Or people will say, I have to edit my photos to make myself look better because I need that engagement.
Speaker: I won't get the same engagement with an unedited photo.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it's engagement, it's acknowledgement, it's validation.
Speaker: It's a number of things all together.
Speaker: But yeah, you're right.
Speaker: Even that phrase valid, it's interesting because I don't know if you hear this a lot, but probably since I was in middle school, that was a word people would use a lot.
Speaker: They would say you're valid.
Speaker: If you are, I don't know, if you want to procrastinate today and just lay in bed and relax, you're valid.
Speaker: And I always thought that's kind of funny, that use of the word valid.
Speaker: It's not the way we hear it most of the time.
Speaker: You know, that's a valid statement or that's invalid.
Speaker: But it means something deeper.
Speaker: I had never heard that.
Speaker: You know, I'm a different generation than you.
Speaker: We might have been groovy or something.
Speaker: But it also points to the terrible meaning behind the word invalid, invalid, and how people who are
Speaker: physically challenged, have that label put on them, which says you're invalid.
Speaker: I mean, it's just like, wow.
Speaker: It's like what we talked about, the ability to act.
Speaker: If you can't act, no one will acknowledge you for anything.
Speaker: You just are completely lacking all that social capital.
Speaker: There was one shooter in Oregon who had followed another shooter in California, a member of the incel group who, you know, blames women for their lack of connections.
Speaker: And the guy from Oregon who also engaged in school shootings said, you know, it seems like the more blood you spill, the more you're noticed.
Speaker: And so, you know, you're not necessarily liked by society, but you're noticed by society, you get more attention and that fulfills a threatened need of being ostracized.
Speaker: Yeah, even someone who feels that they lack connections, they feel they lack the power to act, you know, I can't get the girlfriend I want, I can't have the future I want.
Speaker: So they do act and they have an impact, you know, and it ends up being horrific.
Speaker: As a thought experiment, I tell my class, I said, if you wanted, if you felt ignored and excluded on a daily basis and you just wanted people to notice you from all over the world,
Speaker: what could you do within 24 hours?
Speaker: And at first they say things that I quickly correct them on.
Speaker: They'll say, I didn't vent a cure for cancer.
Speaker: I said, do you have the know-how to do that?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I said, well, what could you do that you actually could do to get noticed by the rest of the world?
Speaker: And it soon becomes apparent that the only thing they can really do is not a positive thing, but it's a horrific, terrible thing.
Speaker: And so unfortunately,
Speaker: either because of the way we pay attention to things or the way media works or what, we publicize the horrific events, and that gives people immediate attention worldwide.
Speaker: And so when they really feel like there's no other alternative, that's the course that they may take.
Speaker: Yeah, I think about the terror attacks that happened by the so-called lone wolf terrorists.
Speaker: A lot of these people, they're not even particularly ideological or their ideological beliefs are quite recent.
Speaker: They used to have very few beliefs according to anyone that knew them.
Speaker: And they pick up on certain ideology and certain actions they can take.
Speaker: violent actions to further their ideology because they view themselves as now I finally have a real purpose.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that meaningful existence component has been has been fulfilled by their choice to join some group or to have some cause and it's enacted by being massively violent.
Speaker: And unfortunately,
Speaker: They're right.
Speaker: They get worldwide attention, even if they die.
Speaker: Many of them do die.
Speaker: They know that they're kind of they've achieved immortality through their mortality.
Speaker: That is a horrible thing to think about, because I think even without the context of someone doing violence to other people, when we are trying to fight against suicide and we have people who want to commit suicide partially because
Speaker: They want other people to realize their pain and quote unquote, notice them or recognize them.
Speaker: And you want to say to that person, no, you are much more valuable.
Speaker: You're so much more valuable, alive for who you are.
Speaker: And it's heartbreaking.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, you take two singers, Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain, probably we could argue they're equally talented.
Speaker: One gets a lot more t-shirts than the other.
Speaker: one that that died by suicide they get more attention yeah that mystique of you know living hard and dying young is something that's so attractive to people you wish it was not i wish i could stop them because it basically tells you if that's how i go and of course people don't realize they're not
Speaker: Kurt Cobain.
Speaker: And so it's not going to happen for everybody.
Speaker: But I mean, they get this feeling that I'm going to be remembered and mourned and revered forever if I do this.
Speaker: And I think that's because they've basically cherry picked a few examples, but the mass majority, that's not the case.
Speaker: I want to ask one more thing.
Speaker: You talked about the needs, things like social connection and these almost coping mechanisms.
Speaker: They help us gain these certain needs.
Speaker: What about the need for control?
Speaker: Do you think that when people do things like these very negative behaviors, like doing a horrible act of violence, terrorism, even in some cases, committing suicide, do they feel that they have more control when, because they're taking action?
Speaker: I firmly believe that.
Speaker: I think that that is the allure of those behaviors is that they are doing something that is having an impact over other people.
Speaker: And when they feel in general that no matter what they do, it doesn't matter, that it is especially reinforcing to think, I can do this, and it's going to be noticed, and it's going to affect people.
Speaker: And so that ends up being a very attractive path to follow.
Speaker: I'd love to move on to the implications of your work that can benefit our listeners.
Speaker: Anyone that's feeling ostracized, maybe feeling like they are not noticed or that they are struggling to kind of find their purpose.
Speaker: How should someone who is feeling ostracized or has recently been ostracized try to deal with those resulting feelings in a healthy way?
Speaker: Are there any coping mechanisms you guys have investigated which have a meaningful positive effect for people?
Speaker: Yeah, a lot of the research we've done on these coping mechanisms occur within the laboratory and whether they extend to real life needs to be pursued.
Speaker: So we find that mindfulness training helps people recover more quickly, that self-affirmation or prayer.
Speaker: improves people's ability to prayer if they're religious, increases the rapidity with when they recover.
Speaker: Reminders of people who matter to them, that care about them, that they care about, even in the form of pictures or things like that, can allow for more quick recovery.
Speaker: Dogs, especially dogs maybe, who seem to be like
Speaker: They have an acceptance of their masters no matter what their masters do, the unconditional positive regard.
Speaker: Those are things that people can do that seem to allow for more quick recovery.
Speaker: I tell people who contact me because I'm not a clinical psychologist and I don't do therapy and I don't have clients and I'm not allowed to, nor should anybody think that I could do it, that what our research would suggest is that it's not the number of people, but the quality of those who you do have a connection to.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: having a mutually supportive relationship with at least one other person is vital.
Speaker: But I also make sure to tell people that that doesn't mean that, you know, you get it from them and it's a one-way street.
Speaker: You also nurture that behavior with them, that you support them, that you are there for them, they are there for you.
Speaker: And that can, there is research that shows that one person, including you, can offset three people ostracizing you.
Speaker: and probably more.
Speaker: And so it doesn't mean if we're ostracized by 20 people, you don't have to be included by 20 people.
Speaker: You need to have a sense of connection, social connection with at least one other.
Speaker: And so not only if you are facing ostracism, is that something for you to keep in mind, but if you notice somebody being ostracized, if you notice somebody that looks like they're being ignored in a conversation or
Speaker: at work or at school or in your family, that it only takes one person, you, to go out of your way and make that connection.
Speaker: And we've also found that that can be very minimal.
Speaker: If you just look at them briefly and acknowledge their existence, that can make them feel connected.
Speaker: And if you look through them into the distance or you don't look at them at all, then they feel disconnected.
Speaker: So if you just...
Speaker: You don't even have to be nice.
Speaker: You just have to acknowledge them.
Speaker: You just have to see them, that that can be something that can offset their feelings.
Speaker: One of my colleagues had a student write in her paper at the end of the semester after she had been taught about ostracism that it turns out in high school, she kind of went out of her way to make connections with people who seemed socially excluded in her high school.
Speaker: And she would invite them to her table to eat or she would at least say hi.
Speaker: And one guy she noticed that she had said hi to and smiled at was gone for a couple of months and she wondered what happened.
Speaker: She finally got a message in her locker from this kid who said, I want to thank you, Megan, because my parents don't care about me.
Speaker: They don't care if I come home or not.
Speaker: Nobody is friends with me.
Speaker: Nobody cares whether I live or die.
Speaker: So I took a bunch of sleeping pills.
Speaker: And then I remembered you smiling at me.
Speaker: So I called 911 and I recovered.
Speaker: And I want to thank you for saving my life.
Speaker: All she did was smile at him every day.
Speaker: And so, you know, the power of one, I think, is an important thing to think about.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: I mean, and I can't exhort people enough to do that.
Speaker: In my own life, I've had similar experiences where, you know, I didn't do anything more than what a normal friend does.
Speaker: But I can look back and say, I made a positive impact in their lives.
Speaker: And sometimes you don't know how positive that impact is going to be.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: I have to say this interview has gotten a lot more touching and emotional than I expected it would.
Speaker: And I hope everyone that listens can get something out of it.
Speaker: And I just want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing your research and your experiences because it has been really an honor to talk to you.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: I've enjoyed the conversation too.
Speaker: You were right when you told me that it goes by quickly.
Speaker: It really did.
Speaker: Thank you so, so much.
Speaker: You're welcome.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: See you later.
Speaker: See you.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of CARP Radio.
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Speaker: We really appreciate it.
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