How low can you go? Ostracism by a computer is sufficient to lower self-reported levels of belonging, control, self-esteem, and meaningful existence☆
Section snippets
Study 1
In Study 1, participants were either ignored or included during Cyberball—a cyber analogue of a ball-tossing game (Williams et al., 2000, Williams et al., 2002)—by two other players whose identity was manipulated. Targets were told that they were playing Cyberball with either two computer-generated players or two human players prior to the start of the game. If the identity of the source is an important component in determining the aversiveness of ostracism, then targets who are ostracized by
Study 2
In Study 2, we examined whether providing an explicit and external reason for ostracism reduced its negative impact. If ostracized individuals know that the reason they are not being thrown the ball has nothing to do with them personally, but rather the other participants (be they human or computer) are simply following a script, will they still report reduced levels of the four needs? If so, we believe this suggests that it is the perception of one's own ostracism, not one's understanding of
Discussion
The results of Study 2 largely replicated the findings of Study 1. Once again, we found that ostracism resulted in lower self-reported levels of four needs. However, in Study 2 we also found that ostracism resulted in less positive mood than did inclusion. Thus, the inconsistent nature of mood effects following social exclusion that exists in the broader literature was mirrored in our two studies. We regard this inconsistency as evidence of the less than robust effect of social exclusion on
General discussion
The findings of both studies lead us to conclude that ostracism is such an important warning signal that individuals are pre-cognitively attuned to its employment on them. For primates, and many other species (see Williams, 2001), ostracism means death. For humans, it surely signals the potential for hard times, possibly loss of contact with important others, loss of resources, and in some cases, death. Hence, it appears that even the slightest hint of ostracism, in the present case by a
References (16)
Implicit and explicit processes in social judgments and decisions: An integration
- et al.
Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion
Science
(2003) The sinister attribution error: Paranoid cognition and collective distrust in groups and organizations
Motivation and Emotion
(1994)- et al.
Emotional responses to interpersonal rejection
- et al.
Teasing, rejection, and violence: Case studies of the school shootings
Aggressive Behavior
(2003) Feeling the pain of social loss
Science
(2003)- et al.
The media equation: How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places
(1996) - et al.
If you can't join them, beat them: Effects of social exclusion on aggressive behavior
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(2001)
Cited by (824)
Social stress in an interaction with artificial agents in virtual reality: Effects of ostracism and underlying psychopathology
2024, Computers in Human BehaviorEffects of ancestral information on social connectedness and life meaning
2024, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyUncovering the underlying factors of ERP changes in the cyberball paradigm: A systematic review investigating the impact of ostracism and paradigm characteristics
2023, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
- ☆
This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Grant to the second author, and comprised part of the first author's doctoral dissertation. We would like to extend our thanks to Bibb Latané for comments that initially triggered our interest in pursuing this line of inquiry, and Keith Lim and Trevor Case for their technical assistance.