Kipling D. Williams’s research while affiliated with Purdue University West Lafayette and other places

Ostracism—being ignored and excluded—is part of many individuals’ daily lives. Yet, ostracism is often studied in laboratory settings and rarely in natural settings. Here, we report one of the first investigations into ostracism in everyday life by documenting how often and where ostracism occurs; who the sources of ostracism are; and how ostracism affects targets’ feelings and behaviors. Two experience sampling studies using event-contingent (N = 323, k = 1,107 ostracism experiences in 14 days) and time-signaling sampling approaches (N = 272, k = 7,943 assessments including 767 ostracism experiences in 7 days) show that ostracism is an aversive experience that takes place in a range of contexts and relationships, as often as two to three times per week on average. Reconciling previously mixed findings regarding ostracism’s effects on behavior and extending existing theory, we propose a novel framework of behavioral reactions based on need-threat levels: When psychological needs are severely threatened, individuals react to everyday ostracism with avoidance (i.e., withdrawal) and antisocial inclinations (i.e., they exhibit significantly stronger antisocial intentions, although they do not engage in antisocial behavior more frequently). Conversely, when psychological needs are threatened to a lesser extent, individuals are more likely to adopt approach behaviors (i.e., prosocial behavior, talking to others, or connecting with them on social media). Our findings considerably extend present theorizing in ostracism research as they allow to understand when and how individuals experience everyday ostracism and how behavioral reactions after ostracism form in real life.

The question of how people develop extreme, radical or even terrorist ideas and behaviors is one which is attracting more and more scientific attention. There are many factors that contribute to such extremist attitudes. This book focuses on one specific contributor which has received only little attention in the past: social exclusion. Recent research shows that being kept apart from others, physically or emotionally, is a powerful event in people's lives. The chapters provide an overview of the existing body of research for the first time and explore the exclusion-extremism link in depth by gathering together a seminal collection of essays, written by leading social psychologists. Timely, novel, and highly instructive, this volume delivers an expert understanding of psychological underpinnings of such behavior and offer inspiration for future research.

Extremism of all types arises from a motivational imbalance wherein one need outweighs all other needs. When such a process occurs, more means to achieving the focal goal, including those considered extreme, become available to the individual. Presently, we focus on the need for significance, an existential social need. When the quest for significance is dominant, an individual may be willing to make extreme sacrifices in order to achieve their goal. The quest for significance can be activated through many different means, one of which is the loss of significance through exclusion. When one perceives that they have been excluded, their motivation to regain respect is activated. When this motivation to restore significance comes to suppress one’s other needs, the individual becomes willing to engage in activities they may have previously considered socially unacceptable, including joining extreme groups and participating in violence, in order to fulfill their quest for significance.

Can the experience of being ostracized – ignored and excluded – lead to people being more open to extremism? In this chapter we review the theoretical basis and experimental evidence for such a connection. According to the temporal need-threat model (Williams, 2009), ostracism is a painful experience that threatens fundamental social needs. Extreme groups have the potential to be powerful sources of inclusion and could therefore address these needs, thereby making them especially attractive to recent targets of ostracism. We also identify a set of factors that is theoretically likely to affect this link and review evidence for the opposite causal path: People are especially likely to ostracize others who belong to extreme groups. Together, this suggests a possible negative cycle in which ostracism may push people toward extreme groups, on which they become more reliant as social contacts outside the group further ostracize them.

Although controversial, numerous memorials venerating the Confederacy of the American Civil War remain standing across America, and removal efforts are met with backlash. Although research has investigated how racial bias and Southerner identification predict Confederate statue/symbol support, we investigated how conservatism and opposition to political correctness (anti-PC attitudes) explain attitudes toward controversial public statues. Across Studies 1a–5 ( N = 885), results revealed that conservatives consistently reported greater anti-PC attitudes than liberals, and anti-PC attitudes predicted support for Confederate statues even after accounting for anti-Black bias. However, conservatives’ anti-PC attitudes were not applied in a principled way. In Studies 2 to 5, conservatives and participants high in anti-PC attitudes opposed the removal of Confederate statues and statues of controversial right-wing figures. However, this pattern was reversed when participants considered statues of controversial left-wing figures. Furthermore, Study 5 investigated how participants’ immediate negative reactions (e.g., moral outrage) predicted their attitudes toward removing controversial statues.

Unlike one-time lab manipulations of exclusion, in real life, many people experience exclusion, from others and from groups, over extended periods, raising the question of whether individuals could, over time, develop hypo- or hypersensitive responses to chronic exclusion. In Study 1, we subjected participants to repeated experiences of inclusion or exclusion (three Cyberball games, time lag of three days, N = 194; 659 observations). We find that repeatedly excluded individuals become hypersensitive to inclusion, but not to exclusion. Study 2 ( N = 183) tested whether individuals with chronic experiences of real-world exclusion show hypo- or hypersensitive responses to a novel episode of exclusion. In line with Study 1, exclusion hurt to the same extent regardless of baseline levels of chronic exclusion in daily life. However, chronically excluded individuals show more psychological distress in general. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for dealing with chronically excluded individuals and groups.

Humans naturally have an orientation toward forging social connections, and they suffer both physically and psychologically when denied those connections. Individuals can be denied a sense of social connection in various ways, sometimes via direct negative attention (e.g., rejection) or other times by complete inattention (e.g., ostracism). These diverse experiences can be considered types of social exclusion, broadly defined as being kept apart from others physically or emotionally. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the empirical literature on social exclusion. Then we highlight new areas of research that provide future opportunities to help the literature continue to mature and interface with other research areas, both within psychology and beyond.