Many of us find it difficult to talk ourselves out of the hurt we feel when we experience rejection. One of the reasons rejection is often so devastating is that our reason, logic, and common sense are usually ineffective when it comes to mitigating the pain we feel. For example, when scientists told participants who had been excluded in a computerized version of the ball-tossing experiment (called Cyberball) that their exclusion had been rigged, finding out the rejection wasn’t even “real” did little to ease the pain they felt. Scientists are a tenacious bunch, so they told a different set of
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