A Commentary on 'Cyberball: A Reasonable Paradigm for Studying Ostracism in Developmental Science?'

In this commentary, the authors discuss the topic of ostracism--being ignored and excluded--as a painful social phenomenon that most individuals have experienced at least once in their lives, and sometimes daily. The harmful power of ostracism is not short-lived; data suggest that participants asked to relive ostracism by writing an autobiographical narrative about past ostracism, or even asked to imagine future ostracism, experience psychological pain. The focus of this special issue is on the most common ostracism paradigm (model)--"Cyberball". Cyberball is an interaction cyber-based model designed to capture the drama of the face-to-face ostracism, but allow for tighter experimental control for any interested researcher to employ for replication and extension purposes. The papers in this special issue present a strong case that Cyberball is a useful experimental paradigm for developmental scientists to use when studying ostracism. With this tool, researchers can discover more nuanced information about the powerful forces of ostracism, exclusion, and rejection.