The Painful Fallout of Social Estrangement

Picture this: You're a member of the executive team for a large corporation. You consider yourself friends with the seven other members of the team, comprised of the CEO, COO, and various vice presidents (including yourself). Sally, the VP of sales, is the one person on the team with whom you feel closest. Your families vacation together in the Carolinas regularly, and you and she have a standing coffee catch-up every Thursday. She's kind of your bestie.

Sally's husband, Charlie, is someone you've known for years. He is in the field of information technology. The current VP of IT at your company has announced his retirement and Charlie has applied for the replacement and has been short-listed for the position. Today, the executive team is set to decide who will get the offer for this position.

The search committee has forwarded three files to the executive team. Charlie's file is among them.

You've never had a problem with Charlie. But you've always seen him as pretty ho-hum. And compared with the other candidates, Charlie looks like a dud. One candidate has three graduate degrees from Stanford and has served as head of IT for the state of Texas. And her letters of recommendation are glowing. And the third candidate, who has served as head of IT for three different Fortune 500 companies, seems similarly stellar.

When you signed up for this employer, you vowed (to both your employer and yourself) to do whatever you could to advance the goals of the company. You are fairly certain that hiring Charlie into this position would be disastrous for the company.

Somewhat unfortunately, the process that your team has developed over the years includes an open vote. That is, the votes are made publicly by a show of hands (within the board room).

Sally recuses herself, appropriately, from the vote. Yet she stays at the table during the meeting.

You are nearly trembling with nerves. There is no way that you could, in good conscience, vote for Charlie. But you do wonder how Sally might take this.

As Murphy's Law would have it, there are exactly three votes for Charlie and four votes for the candidate from Texas. Raising your hand for the Texas candidate was not done lightly. You found yourself glancing over at Sally at the time of the vote. She's fuming. You start to prepare yourself for the worst.

Only you didn't realize just how bad "the worst" was going to be. Not only does Sally immediately stop talking to you—in a way that clearly implies permanence—but you quickly find that she has also blocked you on her phone and all social media platforms.

Over the next few months, it gets worse. With time, you find yourself (and members of your family) on the outs with all kinds of other people—as fallout. Sally's kids block your kids on social media. You are suddenly finding mutual friends dropping from your Facebook friends list one by one. Even Sally's mother cut you out.

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The Psychology of Social Estrangements

As documented in a series of studies by my lab (e.g., Geher et al., 2019; Sung et al., 2021; Di Santo et al., 2022), social estrangements correspond to a suite of adverse psychological outcomes. People who report relatively high numbers of estrangements tend to show the following:

• Tendencies toward borderline personality disorder
• Emotional instability
• Insecure social attachments
• Feelings of low social support from others
• Relatively low satisfaction with life

Humans evolved to live in small-scale societies capped at no more than 150 or so others. Under such conditions, we evolved mechanisms to avoid estrangements; seemingly because, under such small-scale conditions, a high number of estrangements could have been disastrous. Our minds, to this day, show signs of major problems associated with social estrangements.

Two Reasons that Social Estrangements Often Come with Fallout

With the (totally hypothetical) Sally example from the top of this piece, we see that being socially estranged from one person may well come with all kinds of fallout. In this scenario, both you and Sally have potentially lost dozens of people in your respective worlds, all because of that one action in the boardroom.

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From an evolutionary psychological perspective, we often think of behavioral tendencies as having both "ultimate" and "proximate" causes (Tinbergen, 1963). That is, a behavioral process may be thought of as having one or more ultimate causes (representing how this process might have affected the reproductive success of our ancestors) as well as one or more proximate causes (representing immediate factors that bring on that behavioral process, such as, perhaps, specific factors in an immediate environment or specific neural pathways related to the behavioral process).

When it comes to thinking about why estrangements so often come with fallout, it may be helpful to think about an ultimate cause and a proximate cause.

People are highly coalitional by nature (see Bingham & Souza, 2009). Such coalitional psychology helped our ancestors solve all kinds of problems related to survival and reproduction. Being part of an effective group comprised of members who have one another's backs has been a winning formula for humans for generations.

In terms of the example at hand, while you may have taken a step that was for the betterment of your company, in the same breath, you showed Sally that you are no longer someone whom she can trust. To Sally, you have gone from friend to foe.

From an ultimate perspective, foisting you from her life could have adaptive benefits for her. And the more people that she can get to be against you, unfortunately for you, the more adaptive such an action on her part would be for her.

From a proximate perspective, the classic social psychological concept of Balance Theory (Heider, 1946) comes into play. Balance theory is as simple as it is powerful in helping us understand so much of the social world. In short, it says that relationships among three or more people are motivated to be in balance. If Evan and Benny both like Oscar, things are in balance. Similarly, if Evan and Benny both dislike Oscar, things are in balance. Evan and Benny share the same attitude in each of these cases.

However, if Evan raves about Oscar and Benny sees Oscar as a total scoundrel, Evan and Benny are likely to have a problem. For similar reasons, after the boardroom incident, your and Sally's mutual friends had a problem foisted upon them. Being friends with both of you would be imbalanced.

Forces that underlie Balance Theory play a large role in helping us understand why one estrangement may have all kinds of unanticipated ripple effects. If Sally is on the outs with you and I'm good friends with Sally, you may well not be on my birthday party invite list next year.

When two people are on the outs with one another, others who are close to them often end up feeling pressure to pick sides.

Bottom Line

Doing the "right thing" often comes with unanticipated social fallout. In the example used in this piece, you clearly voted your conscience. But wow, that act came with all kinds of adverse consequences for you and those around you.

When we become estranged from one person, we often become estranged (unwittingly) from a bunch of people. We are a coalitional ape. Further, we strive for balance among the members of our social worlds. "Friend-or-foe" thinking is, for a broad array of reasons, a foundational part of how humans are.

Social estrangements are, in many ways, a bane of the human experience. And estrangements, perhaps more often than not, come with all kinds of fallout.

Understanding how estrangements work—and how they can wreak havoc on our lives in ways that are often beyond our imaginations—can help us understand all kinds of social actions in a broader context.

Importantly, none of this is to say that one shouldn't do the right thing. By definition, we should strive to do the right thing across situations. Rather, the lesson here is simply that people should note that, in some cases, doing "the right thing" may come with a storm of unanticipated and potentially adverse consequences.

While these consequences might come along for the ride, the world sure does need people who do the right thing regardless of anything.

Human social psychology is famously nuanced and complex. And often treacherous. Applying an evolutionary lens can help us understand why this is the case—and perhaps how to live better lives along the way (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022).

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