Rejection can make a person more intuitive

New research suggests individuals who have been rejected are more intuitive and can more easily spot phony people. The ability to spot a fabricated smile, exhibited by test subjects who had suffered rejection, could be a relic of our past, the researchers said. “This seems to be a skill we’ve acquired through evolution,” researcher Michael Bernstein, a doctoral student in social psychology at Miami University in Ohio, told Live-Science.com. “Living in groups several hundreds of years ago was extremely important to survival. Being kicked out of the group was like death, so they became very good at reading facial expressions and social cues.” “People these days who are rejected are in a dangerous place because of evolutional pressure to find their way back into a group,” Bernstein said. Bernstein and his colleagues, including MU psychologist Heather Claypool, studied this phenomenon in 32 individuals, about evenly split between men and women. The researchers had some individuals write about a time when they felt excluded or rejected, while others wrote about a time they felt accepted, and the control group just wrote about what happened yesterday. The participants then watched 20 quick videos showing a person with either a fake or real smile. The results showed that those primed to feel rejection distinguished the fake smiles nearly 80% of the time, compared with about 60% for the accepted and control individuals. Turns out, the eyes might hold the clues for bogus versus genuine smiles. “We think that rejected people are probably looking harder at these faces, and they may actually be looking at better spots on the face,” Bernstein told LiveScience. He added that rejected participants may have focused more on the smiling person’s eyes. “A real smile is not shown in the mouth; it’s shown in the eyes,” he said. “There are muscles around the eyes that are indicative of a real smile, whereas a fake smile just requires the mouth muscles.” The results were surprising to some of the researchers, who thought rejection would cause individuals to cling to any inkling of camaraderie. Rather, getting the boot from a group makes a person that much more savvy when it comes to entering another one. “Some thought the subjects who had been rejected would latch on to any sign of positivity and accept the insincere smiles as genuine,” Bernstein said. “But it’s clear we’re equipped with radar for identifying who is open to affiliation and who is not.”