The effects of popularity can even be seen in our body’s physiology. Recent evidence suggests that our connection to fellow humans has a strong effect on cortisol—a hormone that is produced as part of the autonomic nervous system in response to stress. Cortisol can be beneficial—in the face of a looming attack, it maintains the fight-or-flight response. When this hormone is released, our hearts pump more blood to our muscles, our airways expand so our brains can get more oxygen, and our body fat releases blood sugar so we can maintain our energy while we bolt or battle.
But cortisol has a Goldilocks-like quality: too much or too little can wreak havoc on a wide range of bodily functions. High levels of cortisol weaken our immune systems, leading to obesity, heart disease, gastrointestinal disorders, and even infertility. They can also damage the cortisol response system itself until it is no longer responsive to stress, much like overused shock absorbers compromise the performance of a car. Too little cortisol puts us at risk for chronic fatigue, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, eczema, and so on.
Can popularity affect cortisol levels, and thus place unpopular people at greater risk for dire health consequences?
My graduate student Casey Calhoun and I set out to determine whether that was the case. We invited about two hundred adolescent girls into our lab and measured a wide range of their prior social experiences. Then, we exposed them to a minor stressor and measured the cortisol in their saliva to assess whether the social experiences of these girls would influence how their bodies responded to stress. We did so by asking each girl to face a camera with a feedback screen and deliver an impromptu speech. A young male onlooker sat directly in front of them, ostensibly judging their performance. Giving a speech is a very safe task commonly used by social scientists to induce stress and provoke cortisol output.
As we expected, many of our participants had mild elevations in cortisol while giving their speech but quickly recovered to normal levels within fifteen to twenty minutes, a normal span of time. But some subjects as young as twelve already had abnormal responses. Their bodies produced too little cortisol, indicating an under-reactive stress response system. This was a sign that their brains were not prepared to handle stress, which put them at risk for developing later health problems.
Why did these girls have inadequate cortisol responses? One of the strongest predictors of this reaction was the extent to which they had been teased, excluded by others, and called names by peers in the past. It didn’t matter how old they were, or how many other stressful things they had experienced in their lives. The results also were not accounted for by their race, ethnicity, or symptoms of depression. The more unpopular they were, the more their cortisol response systems were severely compromised.
If unpopularity prevents our bodies from responding adequately to stress, then do social connection and support help us react more adaptively? We examined this question in a second study also involving adolescent girls and a speech task. But in this experiment, we asked girls to bring their best friends along.
After the subjects delivered their talks before the video camera, the girls, naturally, discussed them. Many of their friends were very supportive of their effort, listening carefully, helping the girls feel better about themselves after the speech, and being generally empathic. But the friends of some other girls were less responsive, and in fact, a few were so focused on themselves that they barely engaged in mutual conversation at all.
In this experiment, we focused on those girls who had an over-reactive cortisol response to stress—also an indicator of future health difficulties. For this group, cortisol levels spiked after the speech and remained high for far longer than they did for other girls in our study. But we found that the more girls’ friends were supportive after the talks, the more quickly cortisol levels reverted to normal. Overall, our results demonstrated that social experiences have remarkable power over our stress response system.
More recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have learned that the link between our membership in the herd and our health may go even deeper. It is not only when we feel stressed that being socially connected matters. Being unpopular may be sufficient to harm us on its own.
Mary Sue’s life changed forever late one afternoon. It was a nice day, and in fact, all days were nice for Mary Sue. She walked to school, sat with her friends at lunch, and then came home to milk and cookies that her mother had left out for her. Everything about Mary Sue’s life seemed perfectly pleasant. But there was something out of the ordinary. Mary Sue and everyone in her entire town existed in shades of black and white: their hair, their eyes, their clothes, their skin—everything.
When evening came, Mary Sue did her homework at a desk in the corner of her room, a cardigan draped over her shoulders and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. It started to get chilly, and she crossed the room to close the window. Down on the street she saw a boy she liked standing and looking up at her. He reached down, lifted a rock, and then sneered as he threw it at Mary Sue’s window. The rock landed in the middle of her bedroom floor, surrounded by shattered glass.
As he drove off with a group of laughing friends, Mary Sue stood in shock. How could something so horrible happen? Why would she be the target of a deed so . . . well, so unpleasant? Then she felt something she had never felt before: her heart ached; tears ran down her face. Suddenly, Mary Sue’s hair turned blond, her eyes became blue, and her lips pink. That act of unkindness had not only broken Mary Sue’s heart but seemed to change every cell in her body. Neither Mary Sue nor her town would ever be the same . . .
OK, this scenario also is adapted from a movie. But is an experience such as Mary Sue’s strictly fiction? How does rejection actually get under our skin and transform us?
Have you ever noticed that when people talk about feeling lonely, rejected, or unpopular, they tend to use words typically associated with physical illness? Terms like “heartbreak” or “homesick,” emotional “scars,” and “hurt” feelings are common to many languages. Are these just expressions, or is there something about unpopularity that can actually do us physical harm?
UCLA neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger wondered the same thing and took a special interest in the question of whether unpopularity may affect us in more fundamental ways than we are aware of. She conducted a series of studies designed to examine the regions of our brain that become activated when we experience social rejection. She did so by having her participants take part in a computer game designed to simulate a negative interaction with peers.
Imagine playing catch over the computer with two other players who, you are told, are in nearby rooms. On-screen are two stick figures, one on each side, representing the other players, and a hand in the center representing you. To take part in the game you hold a joystick, and when someone throws a ball to you, you catch it, and then choose to whom you would like to throw it next by moving the joystick left or right.
This game is called Cyberball, and it was developed by researchers to understand social experiences. In Eisenberger’s study, subjects were scanned in an fMRI machine while playing. But unbeknownst to them, there were no other actual participants in the game—the stick figures were controlled by a computer simulation program. For about ten minutes, the program ensured that the ball was thrown to each player an equal number of times.
But then, without explanation, the program made it appear as though the other two players had decided to exclude the study participant from the game. Imagine watching as the ball is tossed back and forth, over and over, but never to you. Eisenberger let the game go on in this manner for another ten minutes.
During this latter period the researchers noticed something interesting happening: according to fMRI results, the parts of the brain that were activated during this part of the experiment were the same as those that are involved when we experience physical pain. Two regions in particular surprised Eisenberger—the dorsal anterior ci
ngulate cortex (dACC) and the anterior insula (AI). Of course, the participants playing Cyberball did not experience any actual pain. The part of our brains responsible for the sensation of burning, stinging, or aching is elsewhere. But it is the dACC and the AI that work with our sensory input to interpret those sensations and tell us if we’re feeling something extremely unpleasant. In fact, these regions are part of the most powerful alarm systems in the brain, motivating us to escape the source of our pain at all costs. In short, Eisenberger found that at least some regions of our brain experience unpopularity in the same way that they respond to physical distress—a phenomenon that she refers to as “social pain.”
Subsequent research found that these same regions are activated during a whole host of social rejection experiences. As soon as we fear that we might get rejected from the group, our brain sends the most powerful signal at its disposal to warn us and motivate us back into the fold. Worrying about a breakup, seeing pictures of someone being teased, remembering a lost friend or loved one, or even just thinking about being negatively judged by others in the future all seem to implicate the same brain regions.
The neural overlap between social pain and physical pain has been identified in several other studies as well. For instance, research has found that those who have a low tolerance for physical pain also seem to be more sensitive to interpersonal rejection, and vice versa. In one experiment, Eisenberger even found that taking a Tylenol can actually reduce the sensation of social pain. Our brains try to ease the pain of headaches and heartbreaks in the exact same way.
Unpopularity also is felt in millions of other places in our bodies simultaneously and just as quickly: within our cells. Every day we lose millions of cells as they die off, and new ones are born, built to specifications dictated by our DNA. But there’s an interesting thing about DNA: it contains far more information than is needed for any given cell. Some of its genes are turned on, while others are left off, depending on where in our bodies the cell is located. It’s kind of like when you buy a computer that has a lot of software preloaded—some has already been activated to help make the computer run, but other software just sits on the desktop, dormant, waiting for you to double-click it.
So, if a cell is located in a kidney, the parts of DNA with the blueprint for a kidney cell are activated, while the gene that determines, say, the color of eyes remains inactive. This is useful—we don’t want an eye growing out of our kidney—so that part of the DNA strand literally coils up and moves to the edge of the nucleus, far from the center where DNA gets double-clicked.
Recently, neuroscientists discovered that unpopularity affects that mechanism. At the first sign that we may be banished from the group, our DNA unravels and reorients. In fact, social rejection experiences activate a surprisingly large number of genes, while also deactivating many others.
UCLA psychologists George Slavich and Steve Cole, experts in the field of human social genomics, have described DNA as being “exquisitely sensitive to social rejection.” They studied what happens immediately after we’ve been dumped by a romantic partner, excluded from a social event, rejected by a stranger, or even simply told that we may be socially evaluated by others we care about. Within forty minutes, they found, a wide array of changes in our DNA can be detected in the blood. Only a few dozen out of at least twenty thousand genes turn on or off in these moments, but even that small number seem to play a very significant role.
According to Slavich and Cole, these activated genes have a radical effect on the immune system. Some are linked to the body’s inflammation response, which comes in handy when we need to heal wounds or fight off bacterial infections. Slavich and Cole suggest that this response to rejection may be nature’s mechanism to help those who were unpopular. Millennia ago individuals who had no peers to protect them faced a high risk of an untimely death due to injury or attack. Those whose bodies preemptively activated a “pro-inflammatory” response that would be ready to heal them from any impending wounds were the most likely to survive. Ultimately, evolution favored bodies that were quickest to respond, and thus most sensitive to rejection.
Other genes implicated in this process are related to viral protection; social rejection seems to deactivate these DNA. Slavich and Cole suggest that those who had no peers to protect them no longer had a great need to be protected from viruses—who would infect them?—so their bodies conserved energy by reducing their vigilance to infection.
But today our lives are different. There’s no longer a great need for our immune systems to respond to the dangers associated with loneliness. Being unfriended on Facebook doesn’t require a systemic inflammation response. Our bodies, however, continue to respond as they did sixty thousand years ago. Today humans suffer from a wide range of diseases related to chronic inflammation, like cancer, asthma, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s, hepatitis, lupus—the list goes on and on. We’re also very likely to catch a cold.
Our DNA doesn’t reorient itself only when we actually experience severe social rejection. Such changes occur even at the most subtle suggestion that we may be shunned. There’s even research to suggest that our pro-inflammatory genes are activated when we merely imagine being rejected, or when we play a video game that simulates our being left out.
Why, then, don’t we all fall ill after every heartbreak and betrayal? It’s likely that we do experience an inflammatory response on such occasions, but only in a few cells out of the thirty-seven trillion in our bodies. It’s those who are chronically rejected who may suffer harm from these hypersensitive cells. Slavich suggests that unpopularity, even if it occurs over a period of just a few months, may be sufficient to trigger an entire “molecular remodeling” of the body as cells are gradually replaced by those containing DNA that’s hypersensitive to social rejection.
Is this a cause for concern?
Holt-Lunstad, the BYU psychologist who conducted the meta-analysis on popularity and mortality, believes so. She argues that despite all of our attempts to create ways to feel more connected than ever, we have never been more apart. Today, we are more likely to live alone, get married later in life, and move our families farther from our loved ones than ever before. In just the past twenty years, the number of people reporting that they feel they have no close confidant has tripled.
Our species is programmed to care about popularity. But we may be searching for connections in all the wrong places. What does this mean for our future?
Thomas was walking through a city surrounded by others, but still he felt alone. He could see those around him and even talk to them, but none of it seemed real. Soon, he realized that he was not really connected to other people at all. He was actually strapped to a computer, linked to others at their computers, all networked within a matrix of simulated interactions. Everything was mediated by technology, although everyone secretly longed for genuine social interaction. They built ever more complex programs to help them network across the globe, rapidly share information, and simulate real human discourse. But it didn’t work. It just made the people feel farther apart. Thomas and a small group of others discovered the truth—that their lives had been taken over by the machines—and dedicated themselves to bringing the world back together again, so no one would be alone, and no one would be unpopular.
This sounds like a movie, too, right? But it is a true story.
CHAPTER 5
The Popularity Boomerang
How We Create the World We Live In
It was early in the morning. The crowd was jittery. Sitting in a large auditorium at Emory University were hundreds of young students on their first day of law school. For most, this was the start to the career of their dreams. Soon a professor would arrive onstage and begin explaining what the next three years of life would entail. In the meantime, the students shifted in their chairs, offered overly animated introductions to those sitting nearby, and imagined their futures as legal titans.
Seated at the back
of the large hall were Jeff and Steve, who hadn’t yet met. Steve was tall and sandy-haired, and wore gold wire-rimmed glasses. He had a new leather laptop case with an Emory logo. Jeff wore jeans, a plain brown T-shirt, and a Yankees baseball cap that couldn’t quite contain the thatches of curly red hair escaping out its sides and front. He was about to introduce himself when Steve leaned over to pull a few papers from his briefcase and accidentally dropped them onto Jeff’s shoes.
“Damn it,” Steve mumbled as he reached under Jeff’s seat to retrieve them.
“I got it. No problem!” Jeff said as he handed over the pages. “Hey, I’m Jeff.” He pointed to Steve’s briefcase with the Emory logo and asked, “Did you go here for undergrad?”
“No. Brown,” said Steve, who then turned away to review his papers.
Steve and Jeff didn’t subsequently spend much time together in law school. They would go on to have very different careers and markedly different lives.
Steve had graduated near the top of his class at Brown and had substantial experience as an intern at a law firm in Providence. Through his mother’s professional connections, he had met the governor of Rhode Island on several occasions, drafted briefs for a few high-profile cases, and had a letter of recommendation from a federal judge who predicted his “meteoric rise through the ranks of the legal profession.” Steve was nervous on his first day of class, but confident in his future and focused on his desire to become a judge before he turned forty.
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