Ostracism
Ostracism is being ignored and left out by others, often without being told why. In experiments, a few minutes of being left out of an online game of catch by strangers was enough to leave people feeling worse, less in control and less like they belonged.
A new nurse notices the others go on break together and never ask her. When she joins them at the table, the talk drops to small talk.
Where exclusion comes with threats, rumors or work being taken away, it may be bullying. Then the facts may matter more than the word: what was done, by whom and how often.
How it shows
At work
Not being copied on emails, not invited to lunch or meetings, conversations stopping when the person walks in. Ideas met with silence in meetings.
In close relationships
A friend group that makes plans without one person. A family member who looks through someone at gatherings. Messages read and left unanswered.
In ourselves
A sting out of proportion to how much the person likes the people leaving them out. Going over what they did wrong. Trying harder to please, or pulling away.
How it differs from similar ideas
Silent treatment
The silent treatment is one person refusing to speak to another, usually after a conflict, as a message that ends when the other gives in. Ostracism is the wider category. It can be done by a whole group, with or without a conflict, and with no message meant at all. The silent treatment page covers the one-to-one form.
Scapegoating
Scapegoating puts the group's blame on one person. Ostracism leaves them out. The two often travel together, as when the person blamed is also the one not invited.
Loneliness
Loneliness is the feeling of having less closeness than we want. Ostracism is something others do to us. Loneliness can follow it, and can also come with no one excluding anyone.
What it doesn’t mean
It isn't always intended. People can be left out through carelessness or habit. The sting can be just as real either way. In the experiments, it showed up when the people leaving someone out were strangers in a game of catch.
It isn't the same as being alone. Ostracism is something others do. A person can be surrounded by people and still be ostracized, or spend days alone and feel fine. Loneliness may follow, and it has its own page.
An example: Priya and the group that stopped asking
Priya is 41. She has been part of a group of five friends since their children started school together. After she disagreed with one of them about a school fundraiser, the invitations stopped. Nobody said anything.
- A Saturday in March She sees photos of the other four at a barbecue. For a moment she feels it in her chest. She puts the phone face down and can't remember what she was doing.
- April She texts the group about a film she thinks they'd all like. Two thumbs-up, no reply. She offers to host. One friend says they're all busy that weekend. She goes over her fundraiser comment again and again, and drafts an apology for it.
- June She snaps at a colleague who forgot to copy her on an email. At the school gate she stands a little apart, ready to be ignored before it happens.
- The next winter She has stopped texting. She tells her sister she doesn't really need friends, and that she probably wasn't much fun anyway. She goes out less in general.
In March the sting comes before any thinking. In April Priya works to get back in, and turns the exclusion over looking for her mistake. By the next winter the efforts have stopped, and the exclusion has become a story about her.
Kipling Williams's model describes the same three steps. First comes a quick, painful reaction to being ignored, which in experiments shows up even when the people doing the ignoring are strangers. Then comes a stage of thinking and coping, in which people try to shore up what was threatened: some try to please and fit back in, some push back. Then, after months or years, comes what Williams called resignation: alienation, a sense of being worthless, helplessness and low mood. The first two stages have been tested many times in short experiments. The third rests on far fewer studies, of the kind described below.
A different story would point elsewhere. If the group had kept inviting Priya and she still felt on the outside, the loneliness and rejection sensitivity pages describe that better. If one friend had gone silent on her to make a point after a fight, the silent treatment page covers that form. If the group had also started blaming her for whatever went wrong, scapegoating is part of it.
What the research shows
Most ostracism research is experimental: people are left out of a short online game and then asked how they feel. The studies below cover the first of those experiments, a pooled analysis of 120 of them, one of the first studies of long-term exclusion, and what workplace surveys find.
Being left out of a short online game by strangers reliably makes people feel worse, with a large effect across 120 experiments. Long-term exclusion has far less research, and one study found more alienation, helplessness and depression in people living with it. At work, ostracism goes with poorer performance and well-being, and which comes first is open.
Strangers stopped throwing a virtual ball to people, and those people felt worse within minutes
In 2000 Kipling Williams, Christopher Cheung and Wilma Choi put a game of catch online. In the first study, 1,486 people from 62 countries played with two others who were in fact run by the computer. Some were thrown the ball their fair share of the time, and others were left out to different degrees.
Slight as the experience was, the more people were left out, the worse they felt, and the more they reported losing a sense of control and of belonging. In a second study, people who had been left out were more likely to go along with others on the next task.
Doesn’t show A brief game with strangers, measured straight after. It shows that even minimal exclusion stings in the moment. It says nothing about how long the sting lasts, or about months of exclusion by people who matter.
Across 120 experiments, being left out had a large effect that held across ages, genders and countries
In 2015 Chris Hartgerink, Ilja van Beest, Jelte Wicherts and Kipling Williams pooled 120 Cyberball studies with 11,869 participants. Straight after the game, people who had been left out scored on average 1.36 standard deviations worse than people who had been included, a large effect. On the last measure, taken about five minutes later on average, the gap was still about three quarters of a standard deviation.
The effect held across the number of players, how long the exclusion lasted, the gender, age and country of the people taking part, and the kind of measure. One prediction of Williams's model, that the first reaction is harder to change by circumstances than later ones, got little support, and the authors suggested changes to the model.
Doesn’t show Every study used the same short game, and most measures were self-reports taken within minutes. The pooled results show a strong short-term effect. They can't speak to long-term exclusion, which the authors set aside.
People living with long-term exclusion reported more of what the model calls resignation
Long exclusion can't ethically be created in a lab, so in a study published in 2017 Paolo Riva and colleagues, Williams among them, compared groups already living with something long-term: 82 people with chronic experiences of social exclusion, 82 with chronic physical pain, 69 with chronic high blood pressure, 60 with chronic kidney disease, and 83 healthy people.
The chronically excluded group reported more negative feelings, and more of the four outcomes Williams linked to resignation (alienation, a sense of being unworthy, helplessness and depression), than every other group. In their analysis, threatened needs carried the link. A second study found no sign that a short, single exclusion raised those outcomes.
Doesn’t show The groups weren't assigned, so the excluded group may differ from the others in ways besides exclusion, and everyone reported on themselves at one time. It is one of the first studies of the resignation stage, which had almost no research before it.
At work, ostracism went with poorer performance and well-being, and the order of cause is less clear than once thought
In 2020 Matt Howard, Joshua Cogswell and Mickey Smith pooled the research on ostracism at work. Features of leaders were the strongest correlates of being ostracized, followed by personality and features of the setting such as social support. Workplace ostracism went very strongly with deviance (behavior that breaks workplace norms), and strongly with poorer performance, less helping and speaking up, lower well-being, and lower job satisfaction and commitment.
Where studies measured performance, well-being and feelings before the ostracism as well as after, the links were about the same size either way. The authors concluded that some of what had been counted as outcomes of ostracism may instead help bring it about.
Doesn’t show Built from survey studies, which show what goes together at work. As the authors point out, they can't settle which comes first.
Try it: what the exclusion hit
Think of a time you were left out, recently or long ago. Write four short notes.
- What happened, and how I found out
- What it felt like in the first minutes
- What I did over the next days: tried harder, pushed back, pulled away
- Which part hurt most: not belonging, feeling worth less, having no say, or feeling I didn't count
The second and third notes match the first two stages in Kipling Williams's model: the quick sting, then the effort to repair it. The fourth names which of the four needs the model says exclusion hits. If the exclusion has gone on for months and the third note now says only “pulled away,” the model's third stage, resignation, may be what is happening.
What is ostracism?
Being ignored and excluded by others, by a group or by one person, often without being told why. The psychologist Kipling Williams, who has studied it since the 1990s, describes it as a threat to four needs at once: belonging, self-esteem, control and a sense that our existence matters.
Why does being left out hurt so much?
In Williams's model, because it hits several basic needs at once, and people seem quick to detect it. In experiments, a few minutes of being left out of an online game by strangers was enough to make people feel worse, with a large average effect across 120 studies. The need to belong page describes the need underneath.
Does social rejection hurt like physical pain?
A well-known 2003 brain-scan study by Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman and Kipling Williams found that the anterior cingulate cortex, an area also active in physical pain, was more active when people were left out of Cyberball, and that its activity rose with their distress. Later work questioned how far the overlap goes. In 2014 Choong-Wan Woo and colleagues found that brain patterns for physical pain and for rejection, in their case looking at photos of an ex-partner, could be told apart, even within the same regions. The hurt is real. Whether the brain treats it the same way as physical pain is disputed.
What are the stages of ostracism?
Williams's 2009 model names three. Reflexive: the quick, painful first reaction, before any thinking. Reflective: thinking it over and coping, often by trying to win back what was threatened, through pleasing and fitting in or through pushing back. Resignation: after months or years of exclusion, alienation, a sense of being unworthy, helplessness and depression. The first two are well tested in short experiments. The third has much less research.
What is workplace ostracism?
Being ignored or excluded by others at work: left off emails and meetings, not greeted, left out at lunch. In 2008 D. Lance Ferris and colleagues built a 10-item questionnaire for it across six samples, and found it went with poorer well-being, job attitudes and performance, and with more pulling back from work. A 2020 pooled analysis found the same links and noted that some may run both ways.
What is Cyberball?
An online game of catch, built by Kipling Williams and colleagues in 2000 to study being left out. A participant plays with others who are run by the computer and, in the exclusion version, stop throwing the ball to them. By 2015 more than 120 studies had used it.
Where the idea comes from
The word comes from ancient Athens, where citizens could vote to send a man away from the city for ten years. The votes were written on pieces of broken pottery, called ostraka.
The social psychologist Kipling Williams, who has taught in Australia and the United States, most recently at Purdue University, made ostracism a research subject from the 1990s. He set out a model in 1997 and revised it in 2009 as the temporal need-threat model. It holds that being ignored and excluded threatens four needs (belonging, self-esteem, control and a sense of meaningful existence), and that the response comes in three stages: reflexive, reflective and, after long exclusion, resignation.
To study it in the lab, Williams and his colleagues built Cyberball in 2000: an online game of catch in which the other players, run by the computer, stop throwing the ball to the participant. By 2015 more than 120 studies had used it. In 2008 D. Lance Ferris and colleagues built a 10-item questionnaire for being ignored and excluded at work, and much of the workplace research since uses it.
The question it adds
When being left out stings more than seems reasonable, this idea asks which need it hit.
What did being left out take from me: a place, my sense of worth, a say in things, or the sense that I count?
Kipling Williams, 1997 and 2009 (the temporal need-threat model). Kipling Williams, Christopher Cheung and Wilma Choi, 2000 (Cyberball). D. Lance Ferris and colleagues, 2008 (workplace ostracism)
Questions to carry
- When I was last left out, what did I do next: try harder, or pull back?
- Who has felt left out by me, and did I notice at the time?
Situations where it comes up
Related
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