A Broken Heart Versus A Broken Arm.

Inclusion is important, and it's about time organizations took notice.

As I type those words, I can almost hear the collective huff of frustration from the sector of society vexed by the fragility of participation-trophy culture, but bear with me. I'm not talking important in the sense that people who aren't included will pout and not feel like the special little snowflake they are; I'm talking important in the sense that organizations who fail to heed the warnings science has provided regarding the implications of social exclusion will suffer in terms of efficiency, innovation, and employee health — both mental and physical.

To illustrate, let's start with a game, shall we? You, being the magnanimous individual you are, volunteer to participate in a psychological experiment. You walk into the lab at your local university and you're informed that you'll be playing a very simple game with two other participants, who have already been briefed and placed into their respective rooms. The instructions for your time in the lab are thus:

"In a moment, you'll be led into a room with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine — a fancy piece of scientific machinery that will allow us to scan your brain and monitor your neural activity throughout the experiment. The game you will play is simple: on the screen, you will see three virtual avatars — one for you, and one for each of the other two participants. You will control your avatar as you play an online game of catch with the other two players, who are also in full control of their avatars. Once the virtual ball is thrown to you and you 'catch' it, you will then choose which player you'd like to throw the ball to. When that individual catches it, they'll decide who they'd like to throw the ball to, and so on. Do you understand?"

You nod your head and are helped into the fMRI machine. Once settled, the machine begins humming away and the game commences. As was explained, the concept is quite simple, and you find yourself rather enjoying tossing the ball around with the two other participants. But as time begins to pass, you start to notice that the other two players seem to have developed a penchant for throwing the ball to one another, and consequently they are not including you as much as you'd like. Before you know it, they are only tossing the ball back and forth to each other while excluding you completely. This continues for a few moments, and then the game ends.

You are removed from the fMRI machine, thanked for your time and willingness to participate, and sent on your way. You smile as you exit, but truthfully, you're a little bothered by what just happened. Why didn't the two others want to play with you? And were your feelings seriously hurt by that brief, meaningless interaction with two complete strangers? Why do you care so much?

The Cyberball Experiment

The experiment above was originally carried out by Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman, and Kipling Williams (2003), and at the time the findings it produced were pretty jarring. The paradigm used is known as "Cyberball," and as some of the more psychologically-informed readers might have guessed, the other "participants" were nonexistent. What was really happening is that the actual, lone participant was unknowingly playing with a computer program, which was designed to share amicably for the first few minutes and then eventually exclude the participant completely.

So what was so momentous about this silly ball-tossing study? When the researchers examined the brain scans of participants as they were slowly excluded from the game, the neural regions activated in response to the social pain of being left out overlapped almost perfectly with those activated in response to physical pain. In other words, social and physical pain are represented in a remarkably similar fashion at a neural level. So similar, in fact, that subsequent studies have shown social pain can be reduced in the same manner as physical pain: by taking painkillers like Tylenol (Eisenberger, 2012).

Now, the takeaway here should not be that people experiencing social pain should be told to pop a painkiller and quit their bellyaching. Conversely, the takeaway should be the recognition that in spite of the staggering neural similarities of physical and social pain, the former is treated as a legitimate issue while the latter is routinely dismissed. When Cindy's work begins to suffer because she's dealing with a badly sprained ankle from her tennis match, though her colleagues might not be thrilled by the temporary drop in performance, they typically understand the legitimacy of it. However, when she comes in complaining of a broken heart, it's usually met with a polite smile and some contrived condolences to her face, and hushed chatter that she had better suck it up and do her job behind her back.

"Yeah, okay, I get the point you're trying to make, but they're not the same. Sure, maybe I should take social pain a little more seriously, but to argue that social pain is as detrimental as physical pain is just absurd!" Maybe. There is perhaps an argument to be made that the anguish of a broken heart is incomparable to the immediate pain of a broken bone (though I'd be willing to bet that some who have experienced particularly traumatic heartaches would jump at the opportunity to replace their emotional scarring with physical scarring). However, part of what contributes to underestimating the deleterious side effects of social pain is a pervasive misconception that social pain just hurts our feelings. Because it originates in the mind, its ramifications must therefore be confined to the mind, right?

Real Physical Consequences

Wrong. Study after study have found that enduring chronic social pain leads to a myriad of "real" health deficits. Berkman and Syme (1979) found that individuals with fewer social ties were at a higher risk of dying of cancer and heart disease. Moreover, they died at more than twice the rate of their more connected peers throughout the course of the nine-year study. Others have found that disconnected individuals have dramatically poorer health habits, including being 37% less likely to exercise but significantly more likely to eat a diet high in fats (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2007).

In an article published in the prestigious publication Science — widely regarded by many within the academic community as the gold-standard of scientific journals — a variable was identified that was a comparable risk-factor for illness and early death to more well-known dangers such as smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure. That variable? Social isolation (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988).

It's important to stop and make a quick clarification here. Social isolation can be conceptualized in both an objective or subjective manner. If a person is locked in solitary confinement within a prison, they are objectively socially-isolated; there is nobody with them. However, the experience of social isolation — often referred to as loneliness — is a subjective phenomenon. Loneliness can be catalyzed by objective social isolation (i.e. you feel lonely because nobody is near you), but social isolation does not necessitate loneliness; that is, someone can be objectively isolated and not feel lonely. Conversely, social immersion does not necessitate inclusion; someone can be surrounded by people and still feel alone. In short, loneliness is a feeling rather than a well-defined state.

Some have contended that perhaps it is only objective isolation that increases risks of illness and early death — not because of the social pain it engenders but rather due to an absence of physical support. Maybe it's not that feeling lonely matters, but rather that being lonely is dangerous because there is nobody around to help you should you get hurt? An interesting thought, however theories such as these have proven unnecessarily cumbersome. Contrary to the idea that the health risks associated with social isolation stem from not physically being around people, there is a compendium of literature showing it is actually the subjective experience of social isolation — that is, merely feeling lonely — that is the primary catalyst of the litany of negative health implications.

The brilliant Dr. John Cacioppo, in his book entitled Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, cites the work of prominent immunologists, endocrinologists, and neuroscientists to show that it only takes feeling lonely to produce ramifications that include — but are not limited to — elevated blood pressure, depression, reduction in sleep quality, and chronic health issues (Cacioppo, Hughes, Waite, Hawkley, & Thisted, 2006). While the threats of these physical health issues should get the attention of most organizations — who are suffering the ramifications of higher medical costs and lost productivity due to illness-related absences — the cognitive deficits engendered by feelings of social exclusion should serve to drive the seriousness of the issue home.

The Cognitive And Motivational Toll

Similar to studies which show that schools with high rates of bullying perform far worse than their more inclusive counterparts on tests ranging from algebra to world history (Lacey & Cornell, 2013), adults induced to experience social pain during a GRE-style test scored significantly lower than the group of peers spared from enduring such social pain (Baumeister, Twenge, & Nuss, 2002). And the actual results weren't even close. Non-rejected adults managed to answer, on average, 68% of the test questions correctly, while those made to feel rejected only managed 39%. Perhaps the most staggering part of this finding is that these weren't even individuals who had been coping with chronic social exclusion for an extended period of time. These results were obtained by randomly assigning "normal*" people to two different groups, and simply telling one group of individuals that their scores on a fake personality questionnaire indicated that they were more likely to be alone in the distant future. That was it. Just one moment of anticipated social isolation produced such profound results.

(*Please excuse the use of the term here. Obviously classifying individuals experiencing loneliness as "abnormal" is problematic as it further stigmatizes a group whose stigmatization is already troubling and unwarranted. Massive swaths of the population report experiencing loneliness (Berguno, Leroux, McAinsh, & Shaikh, 2004; Pinquart & Sorensen, 2001), and some estimates conclude that up to 30% of the general population suffers from chronic loneliness (Heinrich & Gullone, 2006). My goal is certainly not to perpetuate such a stigmatization, but rather to show individuals that would typically classify non-lonely people as "normal" that they are not immune to the pernicious effects of social pain either.)

Along with an impairment of overall cognitive function, social pain also negatively affects motivation. Lonely and socially excluded individuals are less likely to "stand up to challenges," and instead respond to these obstacles with pessimism, apathy, and avoidance (Cacioppo, Ernst, Burleson, McClintock, Malarkey, Hawkley, Kowalewski, Paulsen, Hobson, Hugdahl, Spiegel, & Berntson, 2000).

Finally, individuals who don't feel secure with their social standing within a group are less likely to deviate from the norms of such a group (Dittes & Kelley, 1956). This type of strict adherence to group norms is precisely the style of organizational behavior that promotes groupthink — a phenomenon wherein an organization unknowingly suppresses innovation and novel ideas due to a pervasive yet often unspoken ethos of refusing to challenge the status quo. In other words, people will publicly agree that an idea presented is great despite privately knowing its flaws and perhaps even knowing of a better idea entirely.

The Evolutionary Argument For Inclusion

In sum, organizations who actively foster or passively condone work environments where ostracism, alienation, and social exclusion are the norm should prepare to pay the price (and I do hope organizations take that idiom literally).

When I share these findings, there's always someone who unfortunately equates loneliness with weakness. Such a comment is invariably accompanied by an ill-contrived "survival of the fittest" rebuttal. I believe this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what "fittest" actually means. In an evolutionary sense, fitness refers simply to the ability of an organism to survive long enough to reproduce and therefore pass their genes on to the next generation. Though physical prowess undoubtedly plays a role in evolutionary fitness, it is by no means the sole — or arguably even the most important — contributor.

Humans, who sit atop the apex of the food chain, did not ascend to that throne via physicality. In fact, strength-wise humans are pound-for-pound one of the weakest organisms in the animal kingdom. However, we are exceptional in terms of intelligence and social strategizing. Humans did not conquer prehistoric beasts such as the woolly mammoth by overpowering it; they did so by outsmarting it, via techniques like cooperative hunting.

I've found that a good rule of thumb is the following: individuals who attempt to seriously cite social Darwinism as a means of lazily justifying the unnecessary brutality of their corporate policies typically possess an impoverished understanding what Darwinism actually is.

What Organizations Must Do

If you care about maximizing the success of your organization, the feelings of your employees — especially related to social inclusion — can no longer be classified as simply "their issue." It is now your issue, as well. And with technological advancements allowing for more remote, diverse, and decentralized workforces, even greater attention must be paid. There is a happy ending here, however. Whether you wish to be a more successful organization, or just a better human, your objectives are aligned: take some time to make someone feel a little more welcomed.