Ostracized and observed: The presence of an audience affects the experience of being excluded.

Does social exclusion hurt more when an audience is present to witness it? Theories of reputation management and evolutionary fitness suggest that an audience would intensify the negative effects of social exclusion. Alternatively, the known benefits of social support suggest that an audience would buffer against the negative effects of exclusion. This question was addressed with two experiments varying the presence of an audience in an online ball-throwing game (Study 1) and in a large number of scenarios (Study 2). Findings suggest that effects of an audience depend on its physical immediacy: An audience helps when it is physically or temporally remote, but an audience hurts when it is physically present at the time of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]