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Ostracism- being ignored and excluded- is a common experience that yields painful consequences and threatens our fundamental needs, including the need to belong, the need for self-esteem, the need for a meaningful existence, and the need to feel in control of your environment (Williams, 2009). Some have likened ostracism to being socially dead and stripped of meaning (Case & Williams, 2004). Similarly, research shows that individuals who are subliminally aware of death will try to grasp onto the sources that imbue their lives with meaning, in some cases becoming more extreme in their world views (e.g., Greenberg, Vail, & Pyszczynski, 2014). This study builds upon research by Steele, Kidd, and Castano (2015) which showed that those ostracized in a game of Cyberball (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000) demonstrated increased accessibility of death-related thoughts compared to those who were included. However, Steele and colleagues (2015) did not directly compare the effects of ostracism to mortality salience, nor were they adequately powered (N = 35). Our aim is to directly compare the effects of ostracism to mortality salience and to inclusion on measures of death-thought accessibility, need satisfaction, and world view defense with an adequately powered sample.

These studies are part of a special issue in The Journal of Social Psychology entitled Interpersonal Relationships in the Digital Age.

Ostracism- being ignored and excluded- is a painful experience that threatens the need to belong, the need for self-esteem, the need for a meaningful existence, and the need to feel in control over the environment (Williams, 2009). Case and Williams (2004) suggest that ostracism is a metaphor for death, because being ostracized can give individuals a taste of what it would be like if they ceased to exist, and this can trigger existential threat. Research on mortality salience suggests that it also triggers existential threat and causes individuals to cling onto sources that give their lives meaning, such as their world views and self-esteem (Greenberg, Vail, & Pyszczynski, 2014). Our aim was to compare the effects of chronic or frequent ostracism to those of mortality salience, by examining the link between chronic ostracism and death-thought accessibility— a common effect of mortality salience primes (Hayes, Schimel, Arndt, & Faucher, 2010). Since chronic ostracism is difficult to manipulate ethically in the lab, we employed a correlational design.

Ostracism – being ignored and excluded – and sexual objectification – when an individual is regarded only as an object that exists for the use and pleasure of others – are conceptually related, yet the connections between the two phenomena have yet to be examined empirically. Both involve aspects of the self being ignored by others. Sexual objectification involves attention that focuses on one’s appearance while other characteristics of the individuals are ignored. This fits within the parameters of the definition of “partial ostracism” – in which the individual is acknowledged and included in some ways (or times), but not in others. Furthermore, some of the outcomes of being ostracized, such as negative affect, depression, and substance abuse, have also been identified as outcomes of sexual objectification. This dissertation, therefore, looks at potential connections between ostracism and sexual objectification. Studies 1 (A, B, & C) and 2 demonstrated that women feel ignored and excluded to a greater extent when men focus on the appearance of their body, signaling objectification, than when men focus on their face, signaling attention to their personality. These results establish that sexual objectification is experienced as a form of ostracism, and suggest that research regarding ostracism can be applied to sexual objectification. Because ostracism elicits behaviors that are meant to re-establish belongingness and reconnection and recognition by others, it is possible that portraying a sexualized image of oneself could achieve both goals. Studies 3 and 4 examined whether ostracism causes women to self-objectify (i.e., present a sexual image of themselves). In these studies, included and ostracized women were asked how revealing they would like their clothing (Study 3) or their online artificial avatar’s clothing (Study 4) to be. The results of these studies did not support the original prediction that ostracism would lead to more self-objectification, however they provided some initial evidence that hostile and benevolent sexism may play a role in the relation between ostracism and self-objectification. Study 5 examined whether ostracized individuals are also more tolerant of sexual objectification. Because ostracism induces an increased need for attention, individuals may view any type of attention as better than no attention at all. In this study ostracized and included women were asked to imagine having a conversation with a man in a pre-recorded video who was either focusing on their face, on their body, or who was looking away from them. They were then asked to rate their interaction partner and to indicate their willingness to interact with him in the future. I hypothesized that ostracized women would rate the interaction partner who was focusing on their body more positively than included women. However, this hypothesis was not supported because in this study ostracism did not significantly affect women’s evaluation of their interaction partner. Women were most fond of their interaction partner and were most willing to interact with him when he was looking at their face and were most threatened by him when he was looking at their body. This work suggests that whereas sexual objectification makes women feel that their body is under the spotlight, they nevertheless feel ignored and unacknowledged.

One behavioral consequence of ostracism is to seek and strengthen connections with others. The current research tests whether a brief episode of ostracism by strangers strengthens targeted individuals' perceptions of their romantic relationship and increases their desire to be closer to their partner. In Study 1a and Study 1b, participants were either included or ostracized by strangers in a Cyberball game, and then completed relationship evaluation measures. Interactions of ostracism and gender emerged, suggesting that as hypothesized, ostracized women tended to evaluate their relationships more positively than included women. However, men who were ostracized tended to evaluate their relationships less positively than those who were included. Study 2 followed similar procedure, and explored control and belonging need-threat and mood as potential mediators, as well as the value of these needs and endorsement of social goals (agentic vs. communal) that may account for this divergent effect of ostracism and gender on relationship evaluations. The Gender X Ostracism interaction was not replicated; however, mediation analyses revealed that threatened-control led ostracized women to perceive their relationship as closer and to desire closeness, and negative mood led ostracized men to be less satisfied with their relationships.