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Requirements for Presentation of Written Assignments
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00113591
PSYC1142
BSc Psychology with Counselling
Psychological Research Methods
Assessment: Quantitative Lab Report
Coursework title: Investigating the Differences Between Different Levels of Ostracism on Conversation Satisfaction
Coursework Deadline: 09/11/2022
Module Leader: Dr. Damian Poulter
Word Count:
Please note the word count limit of 2000 words does not include Abstract, Title page, List of references, Appendices, Tables or Figures. The abstract should be no more than 120 words.
NB. Use 1.5 line spacing or double line spacing in your essay and add page numbers in the footer
ABSTRACT:
There has been much written that focus on the harmful psychological effects of ostracism. This study investigates the differences between different levels of ostracism on conversation satisfaction. We hypothesized that there is effect on the type of conversation on the satisfaction score. A survey conducted on university students studying in the United Kingdom assessed and found that significant difference can be seen in needs satisfaction due to social inclusion versus ostracism. Negative but differing consequences where experienced by the target and source groups.
Acknowledging the negative consequences of cellphone induced ostracism on psychological wellbeing, and the necessity of further research into fortifying fundamental needs was inferred.
INTRODUCTION:
Ostracism refers to intentionally ignoring and excluding an individual(s) from a social group or activity (Williams, 2000). Ostracism is a social phenomenon that can occur cross-culturally in humans, in a variety of different forms. Exclusion can be seen in families, friendship groups, love relationships, organizations, workplaces, or the internet. This process can occur in the act of ignoring someone in order to pay attention to ones phone, also known as phubbing (Hales, 2018). This topic of exploring the effects of ostracism, has received empirical interest, over the last fifteen years (Williams, 2009).
Zhong & Leonardelli (2008) found that people felt cold or preferred warm food when they experienced being socially excluded, regardless of whether such experience was induced through recalling past experience or participating in a virtual interaction. Ostracism is known to be a distressing experience that often leads to emotional pain and hurt feelings (Williams, 2009). This conclusion is supported by more recent research (Samma et al. 2020), who discuss how ostracism, particularly in a workplace environment, can lead to job anxiety and a decrease in organizational performance. Feelings of depression, anger, and helplessness can also be linked to episodes of ostracism (Williams, 2007). From this it can be inferred that there are adverse effects which ostracism can have on psychological wellbeing.
According to Williams (2007), most people have experienced social exclusion or rejection in the past. Baumeister & Tice (1990) found that the real threat of social exclusion can lead to anxiety. This is supported by a recent study (Samma et al. 2020), which argues that workplace exclusion can lead to job insecurity and poor organizational performance. Feelings of depression, anger, and helplessness can also be linked to episodes of ostracism (Williams, 2007). From this, it can be inferred that social exclusion can have a negative impact on psychological wellbeing. The comprehensive theoretical framework for constructing the research in this area is largely credited to Williams (2009) for constructing the Temporal Need-Threat model (TNT). This theory states that ostracism threatens the four basic needs for human social behaviour: belonging, control, self-esteem, and meaningful existence (Williams & Nida, 2011). Ostracism has a negative psychological impact in the first stage of the TNT Model, the immediate (or reflexive stage). Subsequently, there is a coping (or reflective) stage where the ostracised individual redirects on their experience and its importance. If this shows enough cause for enough concern, they then attempt to fortify the threatened relational needs (Williams & Nida, 2011). In the final stage of the model, resignation (or long-term ostracism) occurs persistent exposure to ostracism leads to a reduction on in motivational resources to fortify fundamental needs, prompting feelings of alienation and depression (Williams, 2009). This can be linked to the exclusion theory of Baumeister & Tice (1990), where anxiety derives from an innate human need to belong to social groups one of the fundamental needs.
Ostracism has been studied with a variety of methods, namely the diary, cyber-ball and autobiographical methods. The diary method: participants recorded their experiences of exclusion and their subsequent emotions over a two-week period. Need satisfaction (self-esteem, belonging, control and meaningful existence) was low (Nezlek, Wesselmann, Wheeler & Williams, 2012). In ihe cyber-ball method participants are included or excluded from online ball toss games. Those in the excluded condition had lower needs satisfaction scores of self-esteems, belonging, control and meaningful existence (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000). For the autobiographical method: participants were asked to recall an experience of time of inclusion or exclusion. The excluded group reported feeling of physical coldness (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008).
Research focused on the experiences of sources and targeted exclusion, by Poulsen & Kashy (2012) investigated whether the cause of ostracism is experiencing negative emotions associated with social exclusion. Their study results revealed that both targets and sources would be negatively affected by ostracism, with various types of emotional consequences and stronger impact on the target than the source. This shows that sources of ostracism also experience negative consequences which can effects the basic psychological human needs of belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence being (Zadro, Williams & Richardson, 2004).
Based on the theoretical underpinnings of the TNT model, Hales et al. (2018) provided influential research on the topic of phubbing, by examining whether people feel ignored/shunned when their conversational partner used a mobile phone. Basic need satisfaction was shown to decrease significantly when participants remembered that their conversation partner looked at their phone during social interaction. They were compared with a control group whose conversation partner gave them their full attention. This shows that pubbing a friend during a conversation indicates lack of attentiveness which can lead to feelings of devaluation in the relationship. The ostracized individuals experienced unmet needs for inclusion.
The aim of the current study is to adopt the same approach as Hales at al., (2018) by comparing different conditions, in order to see if results replicate and extend to when individuals are responsible for phubbing their conversation. Our hypothesis is that there is effect on the type of conversation on the satisfaction score.
METHODS:
Sample:
269 university students were recruited during a Psychological Research Methods seminar (42 male, 220 female; 4 non-binary, 3 prefer not to say, mean Age=24.59, SD=8.24). Participants were randomly assigned to a conversation type group.
Design:
This study was a between-participant experimental design. The independent variable (IV) was the type of conversation, and the dependent variable (DV) was satisfaction score. A one-way ANOVA was used to test our hypothesis that there is an effect on the type of conversation on the satisfaction score.
Measures:
The Assessment of Need Satisfaction (Jamieson, Harkins & Williams, 2010). This presents as a 20-item questionnaire with responses ranging from 1 (Not at all) to 5 (Extremely). Scores are averaged across each answer, with higher scores meaning high need satisfaction. Conversation type: Participants in the inclusion group imagined being included in a conversation with their friend. Participants in the exclusion group imagined being excluded in a conversation with their friend. Participants in the group doing the exclusion imagined being the source of exclusion in a conversation with a friend.
Procedure:
Data was submitted on a survey via Qualtrics platform during a seminar in which the students were attending. Informed consent was gained from participants at the beginning of the study. Participants were asked to recall a time where they were either included, excluded, or excluded a friend during a conversation. Participants then filled out this questionnaire. The procedure took participants approximately 10 minutes to complete. There was also a de-brief from which included thanks for participating.
Ethics:
The study was reviewed by the School of Human Sciences ethics panel. Participants were not given any incentives to take part in this study. Students had complete anonymity when answers to respect confidentiality, as well as the right to withdraw data. Protection from harm was considered, it was anticipated that neither psychological nor physical harm would be expected. Although, there was an option to receive online support from Togetherall if needed from the university.
RESULTS
We looked for outliers by looking at boxplots. Seven people in the Social Inclusion group and four people in the Target Ostracism group were not significant outliers and were kept in the analysis. Homogeneity of Variances was assessed by Levenes test, which was not significant, p= .76. Descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1.
Table1 Column1 Column2
Group N Mean
Social Inclusion 80 3.64
Target Ostracism 89 2.36
Source Ostracism 84 3.03
There was a significant difference between the type of conversation groups, F (2, 250) =64.37, p = 0.001; p < .05. This means the type of conversation had an effect on someones needs. Post-hock tests were carried out to look for differences between the groups. To correct for multiple comparisons the significance value was divided by 3 to give a new significance level of .017.
The difference between Social inclusion and Target ostracism was significant, t(167) =11.00, p < .001, d = 1.70. The difference between Social inclusion and Source ostracism was significant, t (162) = 5.32, p < .001, d =.83. The difference between groups Target ostracism and Source ostracism was significant, t (171) = -6.19, p < .001, d = .94. These results show that social inclusion group has the highest Need satisfaction score, and the Target ostracism has the lowest with all groups significantly different from each other.
DISCUSSION
The purpose of this study was to examine the connection between the levels of need satisfaction and three different conversation groups. The results showed a substantial difference between the groups, supporting the idea that the type of talk had an impact on the satisfaction rating.
Strong social ties are essential for human existence, and people are highly skilled at detecting and responding to exclusion threats brought either by physical separation or indicators of social avoidance. Being ostracised and neglected by someone or something causes social anguish, which is what ostracism is. Ostracism is a common strategy used by social animals to divide up resources among themselves. A tiny incident of ostracism occurs to each person daily on average. Ostracism is terrible for the one who is experiencing it, even though it can have a social purpose. People frequently act aggressively toward the ostracizers and occasionally even toward innocent bystanders in response to being shunned. Exclusion can occur within families, friendship groups, romantic partnerships, workplaces, organisations, or online communities. When someone ignores them to focus on their phone, a practice known as "phubbing," this process can take place (Hales et al., 2017).
In the past 15 years, ostracism has attracted a great deal of empirical study, in part due to renewed interest in the significance of membership for social conduct in people. Threats to four basic needs are triggered by the reflexive pain reaction, and this draws the person's attention to consider the significance of the ostracism incident and how to cope (Williams, 2009). Upon consideration, if the rejection is seen as substantial and significant, it prompts the person to feel, think, and act in ways that reinforce or restore the needs that are under threat. People will become more inclusive if their sense of belonging and self-worth are seriously threatened. They'll be friendlier and more hospitable overall as they become more receptive to others, attentive to others, compliant, and conforming. However, if one's ability to impose control over others and their sense of significance or recognition by them are seriously challenged, they will forego making a good impression on them and instead agitate them and use force to exert control over them (Uskul and Over, 2017).
The result of the present study indicates that social inclusion and target ostracism differed significantly from each other. These findings demonstrate that the social inclusion group has the highest Need satisfaction score, and the Target ostracism group has the lowest, with all groups significantly different from one another. Ostracism raises negative affect and lowers positive affect. Ostracism is a bad experience, so it makes sense that it would be painful on an emotional level in addition to endangering basic requirements. Positive affect should diminish, as is typical for responses to pain, while negative affect, such as sadness, anger, and anxiety, should rise. These consequences are frequently observed in the majority of rejection, social exclusion, and ostracism models (Williams, 2007b).
Coping strategies are then used to strengthen the threatened need (s). Over time, exposure to ostracism regularly depletes the motivational resources needed to spur someone to defend threatened demands, which finally results in resignation, alienation, helplessness, and melancholy. Although there is a large body of literature on the connection between ostracism and violence, most studies have concentrated on controlled mechanisms of aggression. The link between ostracism and increased instinctive violence in ostracised people is mediated by anger. In addition, it was found that ostracism only made persons with low forgiveness angrier than those with high forgiveness, which is a necessary border requirement of this mediated effect (Zhang et al., 2019).
Whether a participant agrees or disagrees with the others, or whether the others start chatting about something quite unrelated to the topic at hand, ostracism is strongly noticed. In the same way, robust detection arises in chat room paradigms, independent of the subject or degree of agreement with the others. Several studies have shown that ostracism can be effectively handled by communication. Effective communication reduces the chance of social isolation. Fundamentally, language is a means of communication. Since language is fundamentally social, it should come as no surprise that certain components of it, such as using positive emotion, asking questions, or mimicking other languages, have been demonstrated to boost social acceptance and promote relationship formation. These factors are especially pertinent to this study since ostracised individuals feel detached and are looking for reconnection (Klauke and Kauffeld, 2020). Further, positive emotionality also improves satisfaction scores. Positive emotional expression has been linked to (low-status) people seeking approval: Low-status members used the word "happy" and "pleasant" more frequently in email negotiations and online forums. Regardless of status, utilising positive emotion phrases enhances the likelihood of coming to a compromise in online discussions. Candidates use these words more frequently before than after an election. Together, these findings imply that displaying pleasant emotions fosters a positive self-perception and raises a person's likeability and popularity (Belkin et al., 2013). Therefore, it is concluded that language is crucial for group coordination and can alert people to a variety of processes and emerging conditions (Van Swol and Kane, 2019). We can roughly divide the words we employ into two categories: content words (such as nouns and verbs) and function words (e.g., pronouns and articles). Words having content typically have a meaning that can be grasped without additional context or explanation. The conventional focus of content analyses explores the concepts that people desire to express through these meaningful and largely deliberate phrases (Boyd, 2017). To summarize, by connecting ostracism research with language style, we were able to demonstrate how being the target or the cause of ostracism is expressed in a person's language use. Our theory that targets concentrate on themselves immediately after being excluded has been confirmed. The way they spoke, however, did not suggest that they are particularly perceptive of their social environment or that they made any effort to appear particularly amiable and nice in order to facilitate reintegration.
REFERENCES
Baumeister, R. F., & Tice, D. M. (1990). Point-counterpoints: Anxiety and social exclusion. Journal of social and clinical Psychology, 9(2), 165-195.
Belkin, L. Y., Kurtzberg, T. R., & Naquin, C. E. (2013). Signalling dominance in online negotiations: The role of affective tone.Negotiation and Conflict Management Research,6(4), 285-304. https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12016Boyd, R. L. (2017). Psychological text analysis in the digital humanities. InData analytics in digital humanities(pp. 161-189). Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54499-1_7Hales, A. H., Ren, D., & Williams, K. D. (2017). Protect, correct, and eject Ostracism as a social influence tool.The Oxford handbook of social influence, 205-217.
Klauke, F., & Kauffeld, S. (2020). Does it matter what I say? Using language to examine reactions to ostracism as it occurs.Frontiers in Psychology,11, 558069.
Nezlek, J. B., Wesselmann, E. D., Wheeler, L., & Williams, K. D. (2012).
Ostracism in everyday life. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 16, 91104.
Van Swol, L. M., & Kane, A. A. (2019). Language and group processes: An integrative, interdisciplinary review.Small Group Research,50(1), 3-38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496418785019Samma, M., Zaho, Y.Rasool, S, F., Han, ft., & Ali, S. (2020, Desember). Exploring the relationship between innovative work behaviour, job anxiety, workplace ostracism and workplace incivility: Empirical evidence from small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).In Healthcare (Vol. 8, No. 4, p. 508). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.
Williams, K. D., Cheung, C. K. T., & Choi, W. (2000). Cyberostracism: Effects of being ignored over the Internet. Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology, 79, 748-762.
Williams, K. D. (2009). Ostracism: A temporal need-threat model. In M. P.
Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 275314. Elsevier Academic Press.
Uskul, A. K., & Over, H. (2017). Culture, social interdependence, and ostracism.Current Directions in Psychological Science,26(4), 371-376.
Zadro, L., Williams, K. D., & Richardson, R. (2004). How low can you go? Ostracism by a computer is sufficient to lower self-reported levels of belonging, control, self-esteem, and meaningful existence.Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(4), 560567.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2003.11.006Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 275314. Elsevier Academic Press.
Zhang, D., Li, S., Shao, L., Hales, A. H., Williams, K. D., & Teng, F. (2019). Ostracism increases automatic aggression: The role of anger and forgiveness.Frontiers in Psychology,10, 2659. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02659Zhong, C.-B., & Leonardelli, G. J. (2008). Cold and lonely: Does social exclusion
literally feel cold? Psychological Science, 19, 838842.
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
I felt disconnected
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt rejected
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt like an outsider
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt like I belonged to a group
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt like other people interacted with me a lot
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt good about myself
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
My self-esteem was high
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt liked
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt insecure
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt satisfied
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt invisible
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt meaningless
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt non-existent
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt important
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt useful
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt powerful
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt in control
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt I had the ability to significantly alter events
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt unable to influence the actions of others
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
I felt as though other people influenced everything
1. Not at all
2.
3.
4.
5. Extremely
