A new study from the University of Ottawa is diving into how young women handle being socially excluded — and shedding new light on the “mean girl” stereotype.
The study, which monitored the brain waves of dozens of young women playing a ball-passing video game, found that their pain was heightened when they were rejected by other women perceived to be less attractive.
Lead author Tracy Vaillancourt has spent her career studying women’s social dynamics, and the University of Ottawa professor’s past research had shown that young women were afforded social status based on how attractive and cruel they were.
That led Vaillancourt and her team to suspect participants in her latest study would be more “hurt” by rejection from these kinds of women — akin to the dynamics played out in popular films like Mean Girls — than by women without those features.
“We went in thinking that it would be attractive, unfriendly women that would elicit the greater pain reaction,” she told CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning last week. “From an evolutionary perspective, these are the women that probably could have inflicted more harm on us.”
But Vaillancourt said the final results — which showed the women were more bothered by rejection from women perceived as unfriendly or unattractive — were surprising.
Ottawa Morning8:41The psychology of mean girls
A new study from the University of Ottawa dives into the things that might make girls more sensitive to social rejection. And as researcher Tracy Vaillancourt tells us, how pretty bullies are has something to do with it.
‘Social pain’ measured in brain waves
The study involved 87 undergraduate women aged 18 to 22 who played a game called Cyberball that’s designed to simulate social exclusion.
Each of the participants were matched up with several other players, and they virtually tossed a ball among themselves.
When the participants didn’t get the ball passed to them, an electroencephalography (EEG) device registered a spike in their brain waves — suggesting they felt what Vaillancourt described as “social pain.”
The participants were asked to rate the other players in terms of friendliness and attractiveness, and the amount of pain they felt varied based upon how pretty they considered their fellow players’ photos to be.
“It was higher in the unattractive, unfriendly condition,” Vaillancourt said. “So they really didn’t like being rejected by unattractive women.”
However, none of the other players were real. The photos were taken from the Chicago Face Database — a set of faces developed at the University of Chicago for scientific research — and the ball was actually being passed around by the computer.
Vaillancourt said the hurt participants felt may have been due to them being “offended” over rejection by women they thought were less attractive than them.
Complexity of women’s interactions often overlooked
While the study’s results were unexpected, Vaillancourt said they speak to how complex women’s social interactions are.
She said women are more sensitive to social rejection cues, something that was once an advantage that allowed their ancestors to stay safe by fitting in.
But today, this hyper-awareness causes more harm, she said.
“This is really painful to women and we have ignored women’s interpersonal relationships for decades,” she said. “All of those things are problematic for health [and for] just getting along, co-operating to move ahead and [doing] better in society.”
Vaillancourt said in the future, she would like to repeat the study with men, but would need to find equivalent cues for social status.
She also added the results may vary between age groups, as women seem to care less about rejection as they get older.