The Ordinal Effects of Ostracism: A Meta-Analysis of 120 Cyberball Studies
Hartgerink and colleagues pooled a hundred and twenty studies using Cyberball, the online ball-tossing game in which a participant is left out by the other players, covering nearly twelve thousand people. Two findings matter. The effect of being excluded is large, considerably larger than most effects in social psychology, and it is remarkably robust: it holds regardless of how many players there are, how long the exclusion lasts, how many throws occur, which questionnaire is used, and regardless of the participants' gender, age or country. Being left out of a trivial game by strangers on a screen reliably hurts. Their second contribution is a test of the standard theoretical claim that the immediate pain of exclusion cannot be moderated by anything, and that only the later recovery differs between people. The data do not support that cleanly; both early and later measures showed moderation, and time since exclusion did not predict the later effect. They propose the model be revised.
Hartgerink and colleagues pooled a hundred and twenty studies using Cyberball, the online ball-tossing game in which a participant is left out by the other players, covering nearly twelve thousand people. Two findings matter. The effect of being excluded is large, considerably larger than most effects in social psychology, and it is remarkably robust: it holds regardless of how many players there are, how long the exclusion lasts, how many throws occur, which questionnaire is used, and regardless of the participants' gender, age or country. Being left out of a trivial game by strangers on a screen reliably hurts. Their second contribution is a test of the standard theoretical claim that the immediate pain of exclusion cannot be moderated by anything, and that only the later recovery differs between people. The data do not support that cleanly; both early and later measures showed moderation, and time since exclusion did not predict the later effect. They propose the model be revised.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
PLOS ONE. 120 studies, N = 11,869; average effect above d = 1.4, generalising across age, gender, country and structural variation.
Where we use it
- The Invisible Weight of Belonging, Why We Belong
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127002
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0127002