Abstract
Given the negative costs of exclusion and the relevance of belongingness for humans, the experience of exclusion influences social affiliation motivation, which in turn is a relevant predictor of prosocial behavior. Skin conductance is a typical measure of the arousal elicited by emotions. Hence, we argued that both inclusion and exclusion will increase skin conductance level due to the increase of either positive affect or anger affects, respectively. Moreover, we argued that emotional arousal is also related to social affiliation motivation and prosocial behavior. A total of 48 students were randomly allocated to either an inclusionary or exclusionary condition and their skin conductance levels were recorded during an experiment in which they completed an online questionnaire and played the game “Cyberball.” Results indicated that (a) individuals who perceived high exclusion felt angrier than individuals perceiving high inclusion, who feel positive affect; (b) no differences were evidenced in terms of skin conductance between exclusion and inclusion situations; (c) over-aroused individuals were less motivated to affiliate; and (d) individuals with lower affiliation motivation behaved in a less prosocial way. The results were congruent to the argument that behaving prosocially may be a way to gain the desired affiliation.
Highlights
People are inherently motivated to maintain connections and to belong to a group (Baumeister and Leary, 1995)
The results of the correlational analyses performed by comparing the included and the excluded groups revealed the results showed in Table 2, where support was found for Hypothesis 3a and 3b
We argued that anger produced by exclusion will enhance social affiliation motivation when individuals feel especially aroused by their exclusion, but not when the evolution of emotional arousal after exclusion is lower
Summary
People are inherently motivated to maintain connections and to belong to a group (Baumeister and Leary, 1995). There is a traditional controversy about whether social exclusion leads to low or high social affiliation motivation, and different studies have evidenced in which circumstances excluded individuals’ affiliation motivation will increase or decrease (Maner et al, 2007; Romero-Canyas et al, 2010; Molden and Maner, 2013; Cuadrado et al, 2015). Some questions remain unexplored regarding how individuals react to situations of social exclusion that offer the possibility of developing prosocial or antisocial behaviors (Debono et al, 2020). Exclusion usually triggers emotions that lead to anger (Cuadrado et al, 2015), and anger has been related to more antisocial behavior (Chow et al, 2008)
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