Ostracism in Everyday Life: The Effects of Ostracism on Those Who Ostracize

ABSTRACT

Ostracism is a negative interpersonal experience that has been studied primarily in laboratory settings. Moreover, these studies have focused primarily on how people feel when they have been ostracized. The present study extended this research by investigating ostracism as it occurs in daily life, focusing on how people feel about ostracizing someone. Using a method modeled after the Rochester Interaction Record (RIR), for two weeks, 64 participants (adults residing in the community) described what happened each time they ostracized someone. The questions in the diary were based on Williams’s (2001) need–threat model of ostracism. Most ostracism episodes were directed toward people of equal status, and participants reported lower levels of belonging but higher levels of control after ostracizing someone. Punitive ostracism was associated with more positive outcomes for the source than when people ostracized someone for other reasons.

Keywords:

• event-contingent diary
• social exclusion
• sources of ostracism

Notes

1. In this article we discuss only results of analyses of participants’ descriptions of ostracizing someone. We do not consider the frequency with which they ostracized, e.g., the number of times they ostracized each day. We did not analyze how often people ostracized because there was some ambiguity about this measure. On average, participants returned their completed forms every 2–3 days. Unfortunately, when they did this, they were not asked why there were some days for which they described no events. A missing day could mean that they had not ostracized that day or that they had not maintained the record. Regardless of the assumptions made about missing days, our data suggest that ostracizing someone is a regular occurrence. If days for which no event was recorded are assumed to be days that the record was not maintained, the average number of ostracizing events each day was 1.54 (SD = .88). Depending upon the assumptions made about why days were missing, the mean per day is lower than 1.54, but it is always close to 1.0 or more than 1.0. See Nezlek (2012) for a discussion of estimating the frequency of events in event-contingent diary studies.

2. Williams et al. wrote their chapter assuming that a published article in a refereed journal would follow and supplant it. Given this, we do not compare and contrast the analyses we present and the findings Williams et al. (2001) presented.

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of this article was funded in part by a Senior Research Fellowship from the Council for International Exchange of Scholars to John B. Nezlek. Data collection was funded by an Australian Large Research Council Grant (A79800071) and an ARC small grant (“Testing the Visibility Dimension of Ostracism Using an Event-Contingent Self-Recording Method”) awarded to Kipling D. Williams.

Notes on contributors

John B. Nezlek

John B. Nezlek is affiliated with the Department of Psychology, College of William & Mary, and with the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poznan.

Eric D. Wesselmann

Eric D. Wesselmann is affiliated with the Department of Psychology, Illinois State University.

Ladd Wheeler

Ladd Wheeler is affiliated with the Department of Psychology, Macquarie University.

Kipling D. Williams

Kipling D. Williams is affiliated with the Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University.