Social Rejection can Lead to Increased Creativity Among People With High Self Esteem

People who have a strong sense of self esteem and independence manage to overcome social rejection by being more creative, says a new study.

"For people who already feel separate from the crowd, social rejection can be a form of validation," says Johns Hopkins assistant professor Sharon Kim, who led the study.

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"Rejection confirms for independent people what they already feel about themselves, that they're not like others. For such people, that distinction is a positive one leading them to greater creativity," Kim was quoted as saying in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Conversely, social rejection has the opposite effect on people who value belonging to a group: It inhibits their cognitive ability. Kim says numerous psychological studies over the years have made this finding, according to a Johns Hopkins statement.

With her co-authors, Lynne Vincent and Jack Goncalo of Cornell University, she decided to consider the impact of rejection on people who take pride in being different from the norm. Such individuals, in a term from the study, are described as possessing an "independent self-concept".

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"We're seeing in society a growing concern about the negative consequences of social rejection, thanks largely to media reports about bullying that occurs at school, in the workplace, and online," said Kim.

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"Obviously, bullying is reprehensible and produces nothing good. What we tried to show in our paper is that exclusion from a group can sometimes lead to a positive outcome when independently minded people are the ones being excluded," said Kim, who earned her doctorate in organisational behaviour from Cornell.

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Kim states that the paper has practical implications for business because of the desire among managers to employ imaginative thinkers who can maximize creativity.

A company might want to take a second look at a job candidate whose unconventional personality might make him an easy target for rejection, but whose inventiveness would be a valuable asset to the organization, the study concluded.

Source-IANS