What is an interpersonal ostracism message?: bringing the construct of ostracism into communication studies

ABSTRACT

Research on ostracism overwhelmingly suggests that being ostracized is a painful experience. Much of this research comes from the field of psychology and uses various adaptations of the Cyberball experiment to specifically examine the effects of being ostracized through the Temporal Model of ostracism. As a result, there is much less understanding about how ostracism is communicated interpersonally, the interpretive process of receiving an ostracism message, or the antecedent communication conditions that allow someone to recognize various cues as ostracism. Thus, the purpose of this manuscript was twofold. The first goal was to conduct an extensive review of literature to reveal the discrepancies, variations, and disunity of the operationalization and conceptualization of ostracism related terminology across disciplines and to show how such a landscape has made it difficult for communication scholars to study ostracism as communication. The second goal was to propose a new terminology, interpersonal ostracism messages (IOMs), and to define it in order to fill this gap. By using Expectancy Violations Theory and Relational Dialectics Theory, we further shape the definition of IOMs so that communication researchers can begin focusing on ostracism as an interpersonal communication phenomenon and begin looking beyond the psychological effects of being ostracized.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Katheryn Maguire for her support in the creation of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.