Social Ostracism in Task Groups: The Effects of Group Composition

Social ostracism—being ignored or excluded—threatens needs for self-esteem, belongingness, control, and meaningful existence. In the conventional laboratory paradigms, a lone participant is ostracized by either confederates or imagined group members and then completes measures of threatened needs. This approach prohibits asking questions about the group dynamics involved in ostracism situations, such as conditions under which sources of ostracism choose to ignore targets and the communication between them. This new paradigm for studying social ostracism uses unstructured group discussions in which an uninformed member is ignored. In an experiment using three-person, mixed-gender groups, we found that the psychological threat associated with being ignored during group discussion depended on the group’s composition. Being a target of ostracism hurt more when the pair of sources included one in-group (same sex) and one out-group (opposite sex) member compared with when both sources belonged to the out-group (opposite sex).