Ilja van Beest
Ilja van Beest is a social psychologist, at Tilburg University when the work below was done and latterly at Breda University of Applied Sciences, and second author of the 2015 meta-analysis of 120 Cyberball studies. That paper is the reason this site treats ostracism as one of the better-evidenced effects in social psychology rather than as another casualty of the replication crisis.
Who they are
His research covers ostracism, social exclusion and negotiation. The pooling he co-authored with Chris Hartgerink, Jelte Wicherts and Kipling Williams gathered 120 studies using Cyberball, a deliberately trivial online ball-tossing game in which the other players simply stop throwing to you, and asked how large and how general the effect of being left out actually is.
The answer is that it is large and it is general. The average effect across the pooled studies is well above one standard deviation, which is very big for this literature, and it holds across age, gender, country and structural variation in the task. That last part is the important one. An effect that survives being run differently, on different people, in different places, is not a fragile laboratory artefact.
He is second author, and this page says so. The work is usually cited to its senior name.
Key papers
Hartgerink, C. H. J., van Beest, I., Wicherts, J. M., & Williams, K. D. (2015). "The Ordinal Effects of Ostracism: A Meta-Analysis of 120 Cyberball Studies." PLOS ONE. Second author. One hundred and twenty studies and 11,869 participants pooled. The average effect is above one and a third standard deviations, and it generalises across age, gender, country and variation in how the task is structured.
Key ideas
Exclusion does not need to matter to hurt. Cyberball is a trivial game with strangers, and being left out of it still registers.
Generality is the finding. The effect holding across age, gender, country and task variation is what makes it usable, more than the size of any single estimate.
Credit the first author. Hartgerink is first on the 2015 paper, and this page names van Beest for the role he actually held on it.
Sources
- Hartgerink, C. H. J., van Beest, I., Wicherts, J. M., & Williams, K. D. (2015). "The Ordinal Effects of Ostracism: A Meta-Analysis of 120 Cyberball Studies." PLOS ONE. 120 studies, N = 11,869; average effect above d = 1.4, generalising across age, gender, country and structural variation.
- Vault note: [[Ilja van Beest]], which records that no claim is made here beyond his co-author role, and a links check of 2026-09-10 noting that his Scholar profile now gives Breda University of Applied Sciences rather than Tilburg.