Sociometer Hypothesis

What it is

The proposal appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under the title Self-esteem as an interpersonal monitor: The sociometer hypothesis. The authors, Mark Leary, Ellen Tambor, Sonja Terdal and Deborah Downs, suggested that the self-esteem system functions as a monitor of other people's reactions. On this view a drop in self-esteem is the signal, and it prompts the person to attend to the risk of being excluded.

The paper reports five studies. In the first, shifts in state self-esteem, the feeling a person has at a particular moment, matched whether participants expected an event to lead others to accept or reject them. In the second, participants' sense of inclusion in a real social situation closely tracked their self-esteem. In the third and fourth studies, exclusion lowered self-esteem only when it was based on personal reasons and not when it was random, and the authors found that self-presentation did not explain the effect. In the fifth, trait self-esteem, a person's usual level, was strongly related to how included or excluded people generally felt.

Taken together, the authors described the results as converging support for the sociometer model. The name carries the idea: a meter, like a fuel gauge, reports a state without being the thing it measures. Here the thing measured is social inclusion.

In effect

The hypothesis supplies the part of the need to belong that the 1995 review by Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary left open, which is how a person would know from the inside that belonging is at stake. A motive needs a signal, and the sociometer account proposes self-esteem as that signal.

The most informative result concerns the reason for exclusion. Being excluded by chance left self-esteem alone, while being excluded for personal reasons lowered it. That pattern suggests the gauge reads acceptance by particular people on grounds that concern the individual, and does not simply count how much company a person has. It also fits a plain observation: being turned away by a lottery feels different from being turned away by a team that has judged you.

In the article Why Do We Need to Belong?, the sociometer result is the point where the belonging research meets Will Storr's second drive. Being accepted for something about oneself is already the start of being valued for it, and a gauge that responds to personal reasons is a gauge that responds to value.

What it does not say

The paper does not say that self-esteem is nothing but a monitor of inclusion, and it does not claim that every change in self-esteem has a social cause. It reports five studies, which support the model without ruling out other accounts of what self-esteem is for.

It also says nothing about wellbeing or health, and this page makes no claim about either. The studies concern how self-esteem moves with acceptance and rejection, and a measured association between the two is not the same as a demonstration that low inclusion causes anything beyond the changes the studies recorded.

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