Interpersonal rejection is the subjective perception of being ignored or excluded (Williams, 1997) and is one of the most aversive of human experiences (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Given the negative impact of rejection on people’s functioning, health, and well-being (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), identifying factors that lead to rejection and influence people’s reactions to it are important areas of research. Examining such factors may help us to better understand people’s interpersonal problems and perhaps lead to interventions to assist them with their interpersonal difficulties.

In my research with Dr. Jill A. Jacobson, I have examined how a relatively understudied personality variable, causal uncertainty, was related to interpersonal difficulties and more specifically, to the experience of rejection in both ongoing relationships and in a laboratory setting. Causal uncertainty, or low confidence in one’s ability to understand causal relations in the social world (Weary & Edwards, 1994), is an important construct to study because it, paradoxically, has been associated with more social and emotional difficulties, but also with effortful, less biased social cognitive activity that presumably would confer some benefits in social perception (cf. Edwards, Weary, von Hippel, & Jacobson, 2000). For example, causal uncertainty is positively associated with loneliness and shyness (Jacobson, Weary, & Chakroborti, 1997) as well as depression and anxiety (Weary & Edwards, 1994, 1996). However, causally uncertain people have been shown to engage in greater social information seeking (Weary & Jacobson, 1997) and processing (Jacobson, Weary, & Lin, 2005); to be less likely to engage in stereotyping (Weary, Jacobson, Edwards, & Tobin, 2001); and to base their attributions only on information about which they feel confident (Edwards, 1998).

In Study 1 of my Master’s research, I examined the relationships between causal uncertainty, reassurance seeking, depression and social rejection in ongoing relationships over time. Specifically, I used the roommate methodology over a five-month period and structural equation modeling to determine whether casually uncertain individuals were actually rejected more by their roommates. Causal uncertainty at the beginning of the school year significantly predicted reassurance seeking at eight weeks, and both causal uncertainty and reassurance seeking significantly predicted roommate rejection at five months. In comparing three structural equation models, a direct effects model, in which causal uncertainty and reassurance seeking independently influenced rejection, provided the best fit to the data. In addition, in both models that accounted for the direct relationship of causal uncertainty to changes in rejection, the relationship from changes in reassurance seeking to changes in rejection was not significant. Therefore, causally uncertain individuals were experiencing interpersonal difficulties and being rejected more by their roommates, but reassurance seeking did not account for the relationship between causal uncertainty and rejection. In another investigation of roommate rejection, my colleagues and I employed dyadic analyses to investigate the contribution of each partners’ causal uncertainty to their relationship difficulties. As predicted, high causally uncertain targets were rejected more by their roommates than were low causally uncertain targets. In addition, roommates who were higher in causal uncertainty evaluated their roommates more negatively.

In Study 2 of my Master’s research, I investigated whether causal uncertainty was related to more negative reactions to rejection after playing a virtual toss game called Cyberball (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000). Participants were either fully rejected, partially rejected, or fully included in a game that they played ostensibly with either their friend and a stranger or with two strangers. Afterwards, they reported their affect and sense of belonging. Regardless of experimental rejection or triad condition, higher causal uncertainty was related to greater negative affect and less belonging. However, this main effect was qualified by a three-way interaction. High causally uncertain participants playing the game with a friend and a stranger reported the same levels of negative affect when they were included as when they were rejected. In contrast, low causally uncertain participants in the partial rejection condition experienced significantly more negative affect and less belonging than did those in the inclusion condition. Together, my Master’s studies suggest that high causal uncertainty may be associated with poorer interpersonal self-regulation.

In order to identify the mechanisms underlying the relationship of causal uncertainty to interpersonal difficulties, my colleagues and I are examining several possibilities. For example, we discovered that high causal uncertainty was significantly associated with more rejection sensitivity, less attachment security in women, and with more anxious-ambivalence regarding the desire for merger in men (Passey, Jacobson, Edwards, & Hickey, 2008). In a follow-up to the roommate research, we are currently examining several possibilities including a rush to intimacy and disclosure, low levels of responsiveness, negative interpersonal style, and tolerance for behavior inconsistency. In other studies, I am examining whether priming of causal uncertainty beliefs and feelings leads individuals to be rejected by an interaction partner, or exhibit more extreme reactions to rejection. Another interesting finding from my work is that high causal uncertainty is associated with higher retrospective reports of being influenced by peer pressure in adolescence. In future I hope to continue this research in the hopes of uncovering an explanation for causally uncertain people’s interpersonal problems.