Is inclusion a valid control for ostracism?

ABSTRACT

Considerable knowledge about ostracism’s impact comes from research using Cyberball, an online ball-tossing game. In Cyberball, the inclusion condition is the control condition, to which ostracism is compared. The assumption is that Cyberball-inclusion is not affirming and represents an expected level of inclusion. However, without a no-inclusion control condition, it is unclear whether inclusion elevates need satisfaction, whether ostracism depresses need satisfaction, or both. We introduce Cybertree—a control condition designed to provide a similar experience to Cyberball without inclusion. Individuals playing Cybertree did not differ from included individuals in terms of feeling ostracized, level of need satisfaction, and mood. Both Cyberball inclusion and Cybertree differed significantly from ostracized individuals. We conclude that Cyberball inclusion is a reasonable control group for Cyberball ostracism but discuss research questions that may benefit from the use of Cybertree.

KEYWORDS:

• Control condition
• cyberball
• ostracism
• social exclusion

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Disclosure Statement

This is an original report based on data collected with IRB permission at Purdue University. No funding was used for this research. We report all manipulations and measures relevant to the hypotheses of this study and report all exclusions of participants from the final analyses.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/pfjcg/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/pfjcg/

Notes

1. Participants were also told that a second stage of the study would involve watching a short video of people in a city and rating their behavior. However, this procedure followed all data reported in this manuscript, was irrelevant to the current project, and is not discussed further. A manuscript in which we examine these data is now in preparation.