Commentary on Sources of Ostracism Research

ABSTRACT

This article briefly introduces and provides commentary on this special issue, “Investigating How Individuals Feel Ostracizing Others” in the Journal of Social Psychology. This commentary uses first-person recollections from early ostracism studies to help frame the special issue in the larger scope of ostracism research. Modern ostracism research started in the early 1990s and hundreds of studies have advanced our understanding of this phenomenon. However, the preponderance of research has focused on the target of ostracism (those being ostracized) and relied primarily on a single method in experimental studies. The present special issue includes articles that employed a variety of research approaches and focused exclusively on the sources (those who do the ostracism). Finally, this commentary invites researchers to more fully investigate this understudied aspect of a common phenomenon that people are likely to engage in regularly.

Keywords:

• sources of ostracism

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank Katie Coddington for providing comments on this article.

Notes

1. We were careful in this special issue to delineate between ostracism, exclusion, and rejection (Williams, 2007). While some use these terms interchangeably and they often have similar negative outcomes, Williams (2009) has argued that there may be situations in which these different phenomena have important empirical nuances (see also Smart Richman & Leary, 2009). Thus, we feel that best practice is for researchers to pick the term that best fits a given manipulation and to be clear that they know there are differences but are simply being parsimonious because their theorizing does not require those distinctions.

2. Zadro and Gonsalkorale (2014) defined recall inductions as those where participants report on an ostracism incident that occurred previously, direct-source inductions as those where participations are instructed to ostracize another, induced-source inductions as those where participants have a choice to either ostracize or include but tell the participant that they need ostracizers, and motivated-source inductions as those where participants experience a situation where participants naturally ostracize another because the target seems to deserve it.

3. We induced two participants in discussion groups to ostracize a third participant during a conversation about sensitive topics. When I changed institutions, promising effects were not replicating and we abandoned the study due to limited resources and a subject pool that had recurring evidence of cross-talk during debriefing. We offer our materials and poster slides on an Open Science Framework project page since the paper was never published (Grahe & Coddington, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jon E. Grahe

Jon E. Grahe is Professor of Psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, President-Elect of Psi Chi, and Executive Editor of the Journal of Social Psychology.