Is receiving Dislikes in social media still better than being ignored? The effects of ostracism and rejection on need threat and coping responses online

ABSTRACT

When posting content in social media, users can feel excluded due to lacking (cyber-ostracism) or negative (cyber-rejection) feedback. Referring to the temporal need-threat model, this study examined the impact that both exclusion experiences have on social media users’ need threat and on their online coping behavior to fortify threatened needs. For this purpose, a pre-registered between-subjects experiment (N = 211) was conducted by manipulating the type of social exclusion on three levels (ostracism; rejection; inclusion). Results indicated that both types of exclusion threatened media users’ needs for belonging, self-esteem, meaningful existence, and control. Compared to ostracized users, rejected ones were more threatened in their needs for belonging and self-esteem, but equally threatened in their needs for meaningful existence and control. Regarding social media users’ coping behavior, ostracized users showed more prosocial behavior, whereas rejected ones rather withdrew from social interactions. Material, code, and data can be found at https://osf.io/3daxq/.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Sophia Hippe and Ngoc Huyen Nguyen for proofreading the paper, Mirko Drotschmann for his help in collecting the data, as well as Jessica Vetter and Dominic Peipelmann for their assistance in coding the profile descriptions. We also thank the latter for his support in customizing the program code of the Ostracism Online Tool to implement our experimental manipulation. Further thanks go to the editors and anonymous reviewers, for their useful feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Excluding these participants was necessary as this study covers the first two phases of Williams’ (2009) temporal need-threat model. As the reflective reactions to social exclusion (= Research Problem 2) strongly depend on situational factors (e.g., doubting the authenticity of the exclusion experience), this procedure should prevent confounding effects. However, additional analyses including these participants (see file “output main study_N = 349”) and an overview of their similarities with/differences to the results reported in this paper (see file “results depending on sample size”) can be found in OSF.