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On Social Death: Ostracism and the Accessibility of Death Thoughts a
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Caroline Steele , David C. Kidd & Emanuele Castano
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Department of Psychology , New School for Social Research , New York , New York , USA Accepted author version posted online: 04 Mar 2014.Published online: 08 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Caroline Steele , David C. Kidd & Emanuele Castano (2014): On Social Death: Ostracism and the Accessibility of Death Thoughts, Death Studies, DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2013.844746 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2013.844746
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Death Studies, 0: 1–5, 2014 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0748-1187 print=1091-7683 online DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2013.844746
On Social Death: Ostracism and the Accessibility of Death Thoughts Caroline Steele, David C. Kidd, and Emanuele Castano
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Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York, New York, USA
Being rejected, excluded, or simply ignored is a painful experience. Ostracism researchers have shown its powerful negative consequences (Williams, 2007), and sociologists have referred to such experiences as social death (Bauman, 1992). Is this is just a metaphor or does being ostracized make death more salient in people’s minds? An experiment was conducted in which participants experienced ostracism or inclusion using the Cyberball manipulation, and the accessibility of death-related thoughts was measured via a word-stem completion puzzle. Results showed enhanced death-thought accessibility in the ostracism condition, as well as a negative effect of dispositional self-esteem on the accessibility of death-related thoughts.
We have long known that social rejection hurts, and recent research shows that it elicits activation of brain areas associated with processing physical pain (Eisenberg, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003). Most important, rejection affects self-worth and identity, constituting a threat to one’s sense of meaningful existence. As Zygmunt Bauman (1992) noted, ostracism is social death (Case & Williams, 2004; Williams, 2007; Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000). And social death can mean, simply, death. Our evolutionary history makes us dependent on each other to survive, and many psychological theories suggest that our social connections and sense of belonging are central to our psychological and physical well-being (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; Jetten, Haslam, & Haslam, 2011; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991; Yalom, 2008). Social death is easily equated with death, for alone we do not survive. But there is another reason why the social death brought about by ostracism is related to death, and it has to do with the role that social connections play in keeping existential anxiety at bay. Ernest Becker (1973) argued that romantic partners, through transference, take on god-like characteristics, making their approval a promise of immortality. Without such relationships, one ‘‘is overwhelmed by Received 5 February 2013; accepted 30 August 2013. Address correspondence to Emanuele Castano, Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, 80 Fifth Avenue, Room 702, New York, NY 10011. E-mail: [email protected]
his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life’’ (p. 158; see also Yalom, 2008). Building on Becker’s work, terror management theory (TMT) proposes that cultural worldview defense and self-esteem (SE) together temper the existential dread ensuing from the awareness of the inevitability of one’s death by allowing individuals to feel they are valuable members of a meaningful universe (Greenberg et al., 1990; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999; Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004). These defense mechanisms are inherently social, but recent theorizing has yielded even more direct evidence of the importance of social connections in buffering existential anxiety. Empirical evidence suggests that after pondering their own demise, or being primed with the idea of death, individuals attach greater importance to relationships. Mikulincer and colleagues showed that participants who were primed with death were more likely than those in control conditions to endorse close, committed, and meaningful relationships rather than those characterized by insincerity or possessiveness (Florian, Mikulincer, & Hirschberger, 2002; Mikulincer, Florian, & Hirschberger, 2004). Similarly, next to SE and cultural worldviews (the two psychological structures proposed by TMT), the quality of one’s attachment (Bowlby, 1982) contributes to existential security. Hart, Shaver, and Goldenberg
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(2005) proposed that each component responds to mortality salience and threats to the other components. In their research, Hart et al. found that thoughts of death provoked cultural worldview defense among anxiously attached individuals but not securely attached ones, suggesting that a secure attachment serves as a natural buffer against death anxiety. Likewise, threats to cultural worldviews and SE (i.e., the two traditional psychological structures that TMT proposes serve as anxiety buffers) caused nonavoidant participants to seek more intimacy in relationships. Further evidence of the role that relationships play in keeping thoughts of death at bay comes from a study by Mikulincer, Florian, Birnbaum, and Malishkevich (2002). These authors looked at the effect of manipulating attachment security on the accessibility of death-related thoughts. Death-thought accessibility (DTA) has been the object of several publications, particularly in the context of TMT, and has been measured in a variety of ways, such as by asking participants to complete a wordsearch puzzle containing death-related words (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Simon, & Breus, 1994) or using a lexical decision task (Arndt, Cook, Goldenberg, & Cox, 2007; for a review, see Hayes, Schimel, Arndt, & Faucher, 2010). Mikulincer et al. measured DTA using the word-completion paradigm and found that it increased among Israeli participants who were asked to think about the end of a close relationship. Thus, not only does making mortality salient increase the importance of social connections; contemplating the undoing of such connections leads to enhanced accessibility of deathrelated thoughts. Although close relationships are likely to be more potent anxiety buffer mechanisms, research also shows that fleeting connections to strangers may also help. Wisman and Koole (2003) found that participants primed with death chose to sit closer to strangers who threatened their worldview, rather than to sit further away from others who shared their worldview. Affiliation with others, whether intimate partners or strangers in a psychology experiment, appears to independently defend against the potential for existential anxiety that characterizes the human condition. A sense of connection and belonging is achieved in direct, face-to-face relationships with others, but it can also be attained by identification with broad social entities. If so, death-primed individuals should place greater values in their social identities: By establishing a sense of connection and belonging, social identities also help buffer existential anxiety. Consistently, research shows that death-primed individuals identify more strongly with, and perceive more entitativity in, their national group (Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino & Sacchi, 2002). Other studies (Castano, 2004) show that subliminal death primes lead to greater ingroup over-exclusion (a phenomenon related to identification;
Castano, Yzerbyt, and Bourguignon, 2003), and that under mortality salience individuals list a greater number of ingroups and perceive greater overlap between the self and the ingroup (Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino, & Carnaghi, 2006; for a review see Castano and Dechesne, 2005). The research findings reviewed above suggest that affiliation to others (in the forms of attachment, a sense of connection, and social identities) becomes more important after contemplating death and that contemplating the undoing of such an affiliation enhances the accessibility of death-related thoughts. In the present contribution we aim to extend this research by testing whether incidences of social rejection lead to enhanced accessibility of death-related thoughts. Our rationale is as follows: If establishing and maintaining a connection to others serves, among other functions, to buffer existential anxiety, experiencing social rejection should somehow lift the lid and allow death thoughts to come to the foreground. We tested this hypothesis in a study that made use of the Cyberball paradigm, a virtual analog for a face-toface game of ball toss (Williams et al., 2000) used extensively in research on ostracism.
METHOD Participants A total of 36 participants were recruited from both an urban university and from New York City using an online classifieds service. One participant who showed up very early for the appointment and was enraged at having to wait was excluded from the study, since her strong feeling of being ignored compromised the integrity of the experimental manipulation. This participant also emerged as an outlier on the main dependent variable, DTA. It was thus decided to exclude the participant from analysis, leaving a final sample of 35. However, including this participant led to virtually identical results. More women (58.33%) than men participated in the study, but men and women were equally represented in the two conditions (v2 ¼ 1.02, n.s.). Also, the sample was predominantly White (61.11%) and younger than 30 (69.44%). Participants were offered course credit, the opportunity to win a $50.00 lottery, or $5.00 as compensation for their time.
Experimental Design The experiment followed a simple one-factor design. Participants were randomly assigned to either the ostracism or the inclusion condition.
ON SOCIAL DEATH
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Procedure After giving consent, participants were randomly assigned to either the ostracism (N ¼ 18) or inclusion (N ¼ 17) condition. The manipulation consisted of a virtual balltoss game, Cyberball, that appears to be taking place online in real-time among actual people (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 2003; Williams et al., 2000). All participants began by receiving a few passes from other players. As the game continued, participants in the inclusion condition continued to receive passes from other players whereas those in the exclusion condition were excluded for the rest of the game. Next, participants completed 20 word-stem completion puzzles, seven of which could be solved with either a death-related or neutral word. This measure of DTA has been widely used (e.g., Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Simon, & Breus, 1994; Hayes, Schimel, Faucher, & Williams, 2008; Mikulincer et al., 2002). Participants then completed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965). A measure of SE was included for it is argued in TMT that it is a crucial psychological structure buffering existential anxiety. If so, it could be expected that the higher the SE, the lower the DTA. RESULTS The sum of completed death-related words formed a DTA score (M ¼ .94, SD ¼ 0.80), and SE items were averaged into an SE score (a ¼ .91, M ¼ 3.15, SD ¼ 0.57). The SE score was not affected by the manipulation, F(1, 33) ¼ 2.41, p < .13 (Ms ¼ 3.30 and 3.01 in the exclusion and inclusion conditions, respectively). A general-linear model using condition (dichotomous) and SE (continuous) was computed with DTA as the dependent variable. A main effect of condition emerged, F(1, 32) ¼ 5.43, p < .03, g2p ¼ :14. Participants completed more puzzles with death-related words in the exclusion (M ¼ 1.16, SD ¼ .85) than inclusion (M ¼ 0.70, SD ¼ 0.69) condition. The main effect of SE was also significant (b ¼ .48, t ¼ 2.12, p < .04, g2p ¼ :12). Higher SE predicted lower DTA. Given that the design was not set up for the testing of an interaction between the manipulation and SE, the sample size is not entirely adequate to test such an interaction effect. However, for exploratory purposes, this model was tested. While the interaction between ostracism and SE did not reach significance, F(1, 31) ¼ 1.25, p ¼ .27, among low SE individuals (mean estimated at 1 SD) the effect of the ostracism manipulation was strong (t ¼ 2.39, p < .02), with ostracized participants solving the puzzles with an average of 1.76 death-related words and included participants generating an average of 0.83 death-related solutions. Among high SE individuals (mean estimated at þ1 SD) the effect of the ostracism manipulation was
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nonsignificant (t ¼ 0.91, p ¼ .37), death-related solutions being similarly rare for ostracized (M ¼ 0.82) and included (M ¼ 0.49) participants.
DISCUSSION The results of this study support the first hypothesis that social rejection enhances DTA. These results are consistent with a host of theorizing and research findings on the importance of social connection in general (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; Jetten et al., 2011) and particularly with regard to the idiosyncrasies of the human condition (Becker, 1973; Lifton, 1979; Solomon et al., 1991; Yalom, 2008). Feeling connected to others, and belonging to entities larger and longer lasting than the individual self, buffers the existential anxiety that stems from the awareness of the inevitability of one’s death. When these connections are severed, the death thoughts that we spend considerable energy to keep at bay come to the foreground. The results of the present study are also consistent with the literature on social rejection, or ostracism. One could ask whether it is really the exclusion condition that causes the effect we interpret, and not the ‘‘control,’’ inclusion condition. This is a potential critique that is not specific to our study, but rather to most research on ostracism, from which we borrowed the paradigm used. In addition, it stands to reason that the inclusion condition be considered the ‘‘default’’ situation, and the exclusion the ‘‘eventful’’ one. By and large, and thankfully, we expect to be seen, acknowledged, and included in most of our daily interactions. Our findings are particularly in line with recent theoretical developments in ostracism literature. Ostracism, originally a term referring to the practice in ancient Greece of expelling a citizen from the city of Athens, is today conceived of as any behavior in which a group or individual excludes or simply ignores another group or an individual. Williams (2007, 2009) argued that ostracism threatens psychological equanimity by compromising four needs that are fundamental to wellbeing: SE, belonging, control, and a sense of having a meaningful existence. These needs are similar to what TMT proposes as anxiety buffer mechanisms, and, as reported above, a relationship between these needs and psychological structures and the accessibility of death thoughts has been established in the literature for SE, belonging, and meaning (for a review, see Solomon et al., 2004), and, more recently, for control (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankha¨nel, 2008). Our finding that ostracism leads to enhanced accessibility of death thoughts appears as yet another piece in the puzzle that psychologists are putting together to understand how the existential dilemma inherent in the human condition
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affects and is affected by psychological processes and behavior. This new piece, as customary, opens up new questions. One question relates to the relationship between ostracism, death thoughts, and individuals’ satisfaction of the fundamental needs listed above. In several studies, ostracized participants reported feeling less meaningful, less in control of events, less positive about themselves, and as having a reduced sense of belonging (CarterSowell, Cheng, & Williams, 2008; Gonsalkorale & Williams, 2007; Goodwin, Williams, & Carter-Sowell, 2010; Jamieson, Harkins, & Williams, 2010; Smith & Williams, 2004; Zadro, Williams, & Richardson, 2004). Future research investigating whether these effects are correlated with DTA is surely needed. A second, related question has to do with the well-documented negative effects of ostracism, namely antisocial and aggressive behavior (for reviews, see Leary, Twenge, & Quinlivan, 2006; Williams, 2009). Priming participants with death has been shown to lead to a host of negative behavior as well, such as denigration of different others and aggression (McGregor et al., 1998). Here, too, future research is needed to investigate whether increased DTA goes hand in hand with, or perhaps mediates, ostracism effects. Third, future research is to explore the relationship between ostracism, DTA, and SE. In the present study we found an association between SE and DTA, such that SE was a negative predictor of DTA across conditions. This result supports the main effect hypothesis, based on previous TMT findings, that SE independently buffers existential terror (Harmon-Jones et al., 1997; Hayes et al., 2008). Early work on TMT suggested that SE might moderate the negative effects of death primes, such that the effects would be visible only among low SE individuals. Evidence for that is rather mixed, however, and recent findings suggest a different picture, namely that it is individuals with insecure SE (high explicit and low implicit SE) who are the most sensitive to mortality primes ((Schmeichel et al., 2009). Given this uncertainty, the fact that the role of SE was not central to this work, that we were not priming death (but rather the feeling of being ostracized vs. included), and that our design was not set up to test an interaction, we conducted our main test entering SE as a covariate (i.e., without testing the interaction) as opposed to a full factor. For exploratory purposes, however, we computed that analysis and found that the effect of the manipulation was strong among low SE individuals, and nonsignificant among high SE individuals. This result is consistent with previous findings showing the buffering effect of SE. Yet, this result should be interpreted with caution and explored further in future research. Our primary findings, though consistent with theoretical expectations, should be considered in light of several
limitations to our study. Our small sample size, though it points to the strength of our observed effects, limited our ability to adequately test whether SE moderates the effect of ostracism on DTA. Also, our measure of DTA, though commonly used, may not be as subtle or sensitive as the lexical decision task-based DTA (e.g., Arndt et al., 2007). Similarly, although the computerbased ostracism manipulation has been well-validated, we included no direct measure of the extent to which participants felt excluded and so cannot explicitly confirm the effectiveness of the manipulation. In sum, the present study offers initial evidence that ostracism increases DTA. Although past research has demonstrated that ostracism threatens fundamental needs, assessed explicitly in the context of the manipulation, this study shows that ostracism may more generally assail those psychological structures that help keep death-related thoughts, and the anxiety they generate, at bay.
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aggression: Evidence that mortality salience promotes aggression against worldview-threatening individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 590–605. doi:10.1111=1467-8721.00094 Mikulincer, M., Florian, V., Birnbaum, G., & Malishkevish, S. (2002). The death-anxiety buffering function of close relationships: Exploring the effects of separation reminders on death-thought accessibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 287–299. doi:10.1177=0146167202286001 Mikulincer, M., Florian, V., & Hirschberger, G. (2004). The terror of death and the quest for love: An existential perspective on close relationships. In J. Greenberg, S. Koole, & T. Pyszczynski (Eds.), Handbook of experimental existential psychology (pp. 287–304). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Pyszczynski, T., Greenberg, J., & Solomon, S. (1999). A dual process model of defense against conscious and unconscious death-related thoughts: An extension of terror management theory. Psychological Review, 106, 835–845. doi:10.1037=0033-295X.106.4.835 Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosenblatt, A., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Lyon, D. (1989). Evidence for terror management theory: I. The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 681–690. doi:10.1037=0022-3514.57.4.681 Schmeichel, B., Gailliot, M., Filardo, E., McGregor, I., Gitter, S., & Baumeister, R. (2009). Terror management theory and self-esteem revisited: The roles of implicit and explicit self-esteem in mortality salience effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1077–1087. doi:10.1037=a0015091 Smith, A., & Williams, K. (2004). R U there? Ostracism by cell phone text messages. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 8, 291–301. doi:10.1037=1089-2699.8.4.291 Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1991). A terror management theory of social behavior: The psychological functions of self-esteem and cultural worldviews. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 24, pp. 93–159). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2004). The cultural animal: Twenty years of terror management theory and research. In J. Greenberg, S. Koole, & T. Pyszczynski (Eds.), Handbook of experimental existential psychology (pp. 13–34). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Williams, K. (2007). Ostracism: The kiss of social death. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1, 236–237. doi:10.1111=j.17519004.2007.00004 Williams, K. (2009). Ostracism: A temporal need-threat model. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 41, pp. 279–314). New York, NY: Academic Press. Williams, K. D., Cheung, C. K. T., & Choi, W. (2000). Cyberostracism: Effects of being ignored over the Internet. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 748–762. doi:10.1037=0022-3514.79.5.748 Wisman, A., & Koole, S. L. (2003). Hiding in the crowd: Can mortality salience promote affiliation with others who oppose one’s worldviews? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 511–526. doi:10.1037=0022-3514.84.3.511 Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming the dread of death. Carlton North, Victoria, Australia: Scribe. Zadro, L., Williams, K., & 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, 560–567. doi:10.1016=j. jesp.2003.11.006
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On Social Death: Ostracism and the Accessibility of Death Thoughts a
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Caroline Steele , David C. Kidd & Emanuele Castano
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Department of Psychology , New School for Social Research , New York , New York , USA Accepted author version posted online: 04 Mar 2014.Published online: 08 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Caroline Steele , David C. Kidd & Emanuele Castano (2014): On Social Death: Ostracism and the Accessibility of Death Thoughts, Death Studies, DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2013.844746 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2013.844746
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Death Studies, 0: 1–5, 2014 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0748-1187 print=1091-7683 online DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2013.844746
On Social Death: Ostracism and the Accessibility of Death Thoughts Caroline Steele, David C. Kidd, and Emanuele Castano
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Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York, New York, USA
Being rejected, excluded, or simply ignored is a painful experience. Ostracism researchers have shown its powerful negative consequences (Williams, 2007), and sociologists have referred to such experiences as social death (Bauman, 1992). Is this is just a metaphor or does being ostracized make death more salient in people’s minds? An experiment was conducted in which participants experienced ostracism or inclusion using the Cyberball manipulation, and the accessibility of death-related thoughts was measured via a word-stem completion puzzle. Results showed enhanced death-thought accessibility in the ostracism condition, as well as a negative effect of dispositional self-esteem on the accessibility of death-related thoughts.
We have long known that social rejection hurts, and recent research shows that it elicits activation of brain areas associated with processing physical pain (Eisenberg, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003). Most important, rejection affects self-worth and identity, constituting a threat to one’s sense of meaningful existence. As Zygmunt Bauman (1992) noted, ostracism is social death (Case & Williams, 2004; Williams, 2007; Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000). And social death can mean, simply, death. Our evolutionary history makes us dependent on each other to survive, and many psychological theories suggest that our social connections and sense of belonging are central to our psychological and physical well-being (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; Jetten, Haslam, & Haslam, 2011; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991; Yalom, 2008). Social death is easily equated with death, for alone we do not survive. But there is another reason why the social death brought about by ostracism is related to death, and it has to do with the role that social connections play in keeping existential anxiety at bay. Ernest Becker (1973) argued that romantic partners, through transference, take on god-like characteristics, making their approval a promise of immortality. Without such relationships, one ‘‘is overwhelmed by Received 5 February 2013; accepted 30 August 2013. Address correspondence to Emanuele Castano, Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, 80 Fifth Avenue, Room 702, New York, NY 10011. E-mail: [email protected]
his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life’’ (p. 158; see also Yalom, 2008). Building on Becker’s work, terror management theory (TMT) proposes that cultural worldview defense and self-esteem (SE) together temper the existential dread ensuing from the awareness of the inevitability of one’s death by allowing individuals to feel they are valuable members of a meaningful universe (Greenberg et al., 1990; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999; Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004). These defense mechanisms are inherently social, but recent theorizing has yielded even more direct evidence of the importance of social connections in buffering existential anxiety. Empirical evidence suggests that after pondering their own demise, or being primed with the idea of death, individuals attach greater importance to relationships. Mikulincer and colleagues showed that participants who were primed with death were more likely than those in control conditions to endorse close, committed, and meaningful relationships rather than those characterized by insincerity or possessiveness (Florian, Mikulincer, & Hirschberger, 2002; Mikulincer, Florian, & Hirschberger, 2004). Similarly, next to SE and cultural worldviews (the two psychological structures proposed by TMT), the quality of one’s attachment (Bowlby, 1982) contributes to existential security. Hart, Shaver, and Goldenberg
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(2005) proposed that each component responds to mortality salience and threats to the other components. In their research, Hart et al. found that thoughts of death provoked cultural worldview defense among anxiously attached individuals but not securely attached ones, suggesting that a secure attachment serves as a natural buffer against death anxiety. Likewise, threats to cultural worldviews and SE (i.e., the two traditional psychological structures that TMT proposes serve as anxiety buffers) caused nonavoidant participants to seek more intimacy in relationships. Further evidence of the role that relationships play in keeping thoughts of death at bay comes from a study by Mikulincer, Florian, Birnbaum, and Malishkevich (2002). These authors looked at the effect of manipulating attachment security on the accessibility of death-related thoughts. Death-thought accessibility (DTA) has been the object of several publications, particularly in the context of TMT, and has been measured in a variety of ways, such as by asking participants to complete a wordsearch puzzle containing death-related words (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Simon, & Breus, 1994) or using a lexical decision task (Arndt, Cook, Goldenberg, & Cox, 2007; for a review, see Hayes, Schimel, Arndt, & Faucher, 2010). Mikulincer et al. measured DTA using the word-completion paradigm and found that it increased among Israeli participants who were asked to think about the end of a close relationship. Thus, not only does making mortality salient increase the importance of social connections; contemplating the undoing of such connections leads to enhanced accessibility of deathrelated thoughts. Although close relationships are likely to be more potent anxiety buffer mechanisms, research also shows that fleeting connections to strangers may also help. Wisman and Koole (2003) found that participants primed with death chose to sit closer to strangers who threatened their worldview, rather than to sit further away from others who shared their worldview. Affiliation with others, whether intimate partners or strangers in a psychology experiment, appears to independently defend against the potential for existential anxiety that characterizes the human condition. A sense of connection and belonging is achieved in direct, face-to-face relationships with others, but it can also be attained by identification with broad social entities. If so, death-primed individuals should place greater values in their social identities: By establishing a sense of connection and belonging, social identities also help buffer existential anxiety. Consistently, research shows that death-primed individuals identify more strongly with, and perceive more entitativity in, their national group (Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino & Sacchi, 2002). Other studies (Castano, 2004) show that subliminal death primes lead to greater ingroup over-exclusion (a phenomenon related to identification;
Castano, Yzerbyt, and Bourguignon, 2003), and that under mortality salience individuals list a greater number of ingroups and perceive greater overlap between the self and the ingroup (Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino, & Carnaghi, 2006; for a review see Castano and Dechesne, 2005). The research findings reviewed above suggest that affiliation to others (in the forms of attachment, a sense of connection, and social identities) becomes more important after contemplating death and that contemplating the undoing of such an affiliation enhances the accessibility of death-related thoughts. In the present contribution we aim to extend this research by testing whether incidences of social rejection lead to enhanced accessibility of death-related thoughts. Our rationale is as follows: If establishing and maintaining a connection to others serves, among other functions, to buffer existential anxiety, experiencing social rejection should somehow lift the lid and allow death thoughts to come to the foreground. We tested this hypothesis in a study that made use of the Cyberball paradigm, a virtual analog for a face-toface game of ball toss (Williams et al., 2000) used extensively in research on ostracism.
METHOD Participants A total of 36 participants were recruited from both an urban university and from New York City using an online classifieds service. One participant who showed up very early for the appointment and was enraged at having to wait was excluded from the study, since her strong feeling of being ignored compromised the integrity of the experimental manipulation. This participant also emerged as an outlier on the main dependent variable, DTA. It was thus decided to exclude the participant from analysis, leaving a final sample of 35. However, including this participant led to virtually identical results. More women (58.33%) than men participated in the study, but men and women were equally represented in the two conditions (v2 ¼ 1.02, n.s.). Also, the sample was predominantly White (61.11%) and younger than 30 (69.44%). Participants were offered course credit, the opportunity to win a $50.00 lottery, or $5.00 as compensation for their time.
Experimental Design The experiment followed a simple one-factor design. Participants were randomly assigned to either the ostracism or the inclusion condition.
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Procedure After giving consent, participants were randomly assigned to either the ostracism (N ¼ 18) or inclusion (N ¼ 17) condition. The manipulation consisted of a virtual balltoss game, Cyberball, that appears to be taking place online in real-time among actual people (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 2003; Williams et al., 2000). All participants began by receiving a few passes from other players. As the game continued, participants in the inclusion condition continued to receive passes from other players whereas those in the exclusion condition were excluded for the rest of the game. Next, participants completed 20 word-stem completion puzzles, seven of which could be solved with either a death-related or neutral word. This measure of DTA has been widely used (e.g., Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Simon, & Breus, 1994; Hayes, Schimel, Faucher, & Williams, 2008; Mikulincer et al., 2002). Participants then completed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965). A measure of SE was included for it is argued in TMT that it is a crucial psychological structure buffering existential anxiety. If so, it could be expected that the higher the SE, the lower the DTA. RESULTS The sum of completed death-related words formed a DTA score (M ¼ .94, SD ¼ 0.80), and SE items were averaged into an SE score (a ¼ .91, M ¼ 3.15, SD ¼ 0.57). The SE score was not affected by the manipulation, F(1, 33) ¼ 2.41, p < .13 (Ms ¼ 3.30 and 3.01 in the exclusion and inclusion conditions, respectively). A general-linear model using condition (dichotomous) and SE (continuous) was computed with DTA as the dependent variable. A main effect of condition emerged, F(1, 32) ¼ 5.43, p < .03, g2p ¼ :14. Participants completed more puzzles with death-related words in the exclusion (M ¼ 1.16, SD ¼ .85) than inclusion (M ¼ 0.70, SD ¼ 0.69) condition. The main effect of SE was also significant (b ¼ .48, t ¼ 2.12, p < .04, g2p ¼ :12). Higher SE predicted lower DTA. Given that the design was not set up for the testing of an interaction between the manipulation and SE, the sample size is not entirely adequate to test such an interaction effect. However, for exploratory purposes, this model was tested. While the interaction between ostracism and SE did not reach significance, F(1, 31) ¼ 1.25, p ¼ .27, among low SE individuals (mean estimated at 1 SD) the effect of the ostracism manipulation was strong (t ¼ 2.39, p < .02), with ostracized participants solving the puzzles with an average of 1.76 death-related words and included participants generating an average of 0.83 death-related solutions. Among high SE individuals (mean estimated at þ1 SD) the effect of the ostracism manipulation was
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nonsignificant (t ¼ 0.91, p ¼ .37), death-related solutions being similarly rare for ostracized (M ¼ 0.82) and included (M ¼ 0.49) participants.
DISCUSSION The results of this study support the first hypothesis that social rejection enhances DTA. These results are consistent with a host of theorizing and research findings on the importance of social connection in general (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; Jetten et al., 2011) and particularly with regard to the idiosyncrasies of the human condition (Becker, 1973; Lifton, 1979; Solomon et al., 1991; Yalom, 2008). Feeling connected to others, and belonging to entities larger and longer lasting than the individual self, buffers the existential anxiety that stems from the awareness of the inevitability of one’s death. When these connections are severed, the death thoughts that we spend considerable energy to keep at bay come to the foreground. The results of the present study are also consistent with the literature on social rejection, or ostracism. One could ask whether it is really the exclusion condition that causes the effect we interpret, and not the ‘‘control,’’ inclusion condition. This is a potential critique that is not specific to our study, but rather to most research on ostracism, from which we borrowed the paradigm used. In addition, it stands to reason that the inclusion condition be considered the ‘‘default’’ situation, and the exclusion the ‘‘eventful’’ one. By and large, and thankfully, we expect to be seen, acknowledged, and included in most of our daily interactions. Our findings are particularly in line with recent theoretical developments in ostracism literature. Ostracism, originally a term referring to the practice in ancient Greece of expelling a citizen from the city of Athens, is today conceived of as any behavior in which a group or individual excludes or simply ignores another group or an individual. Williams (2007, 2009) argued that ostracism threatens psychological equanimity by compromising four needs that are fundamental to wellbeing: SE, belonging, control, and a sense of having a meaningful existence. These needs are similar to what TMT proposes as anxiety buffer mechanisms, and, as reported above, a relationship between these needs and psychological structures and the accessibility of death thoughts has been established in the literature for SE, belonging, and meaning (for a review, see Solomon et al., 2004), and, more recently, for control (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankha¨nel, 2008). Our finding that ostracism leads to enhanced accessibility of death thoughts appears as yet another piece in the puzzle that psychologists are putting together to understand how the existential dilemma inherent in the human condition
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affects and is affected by psychological processes and behavior. This new piece, as customary, opens up new questions. One question relates to the relationship between ostracism, death thoughts, and individuals’ satisfaction of the fundamental needs listed above. In several studies, ostracized participants reported feeling less meaningful, less in control of events, less positive about themselves, and as having a reduced sense of belonging (CarterSowell, Cheng, & Williams, 2008; Gonsalkorale & Williams, 2007; Goodwin, Williams, & Carter-Sowell, 2010; Jamieson, Harkins, & Williams, 2010; Smith & Williams, 2004; Zadro, Williams, & Richardson, 2004). Future research investigating whether these effects are correlated with DTA is surely needed. A second, related question has to do with the well-documented negative effects of ostracism, namely antisocial and aggressive behavior (for reviews, see Leary, Twenge, & Quinlivan, 2006; Williams, 2009). Priming participants with death has been shown to lead to a host of negative behavior as well, such as denigration of different others and aggression (McGregor et al., 1998). Here, too, future research is needed to investigate whether increased DTA goes hand in hand with, or perhaps mediates, ostracism effects. Third, future research is to explore the relationship between ostracism, DTA, and SE. In the present study we found an association between SE and DTA, such that SE was a negative predictor of DTA across conditions. This result supports the main effect hypothesis, based on previous TMT findings, that SE independently buffers existential terror (Harmon-Jones et al., 1997; Hayes et al., 2008). Early work on TMT suggested that SE might moderate the negative effects of death primes, such that the effects would be visible only among low SE individuals. Evidence for that is rather mixed, however, and recent findings suggest a different picture, namely that it is individuals with insecure SE (high explicit and low implicit SE) who are the most sensitive to mortality primes ((Schmeichel et al., 2009). Given this uncertainty, the fact that the role of SE was not central to this work, that we were not priming death (but rather the feeling of being ostracized vs. included), and that our design was not set up to test an interaction, we conducted our main test entering SE as a covariate (i.e., without testing the interaction) as opposed to a full factor. For exploratory purposes, however, we computed that analysis and found that the effect of the manipulation was strong among low SE individuals, and nonsignificant among high SE individuals. This result is consistent with previous findings showing the buffering effect of SE. Yet, this result should be interpreted with caution and explored further in future research. Our primary findings, though consistent with theoretical expectations, should be considered in light of several
limitations to our study. Our small sample size, though it points to the strength of our observed effects, limited our ability to adequately test whether SE moderates the effect of ostracism on DTA. Also, our measure of DTA, though commonly used, may not be as subtle or sensitive as the lexical decision task-based DTA (e.g., Arndt et al., 2007). Similarly, although the computerbased ostracism manipulation has been well-validated, we included no direct measure of the extent to which participants felt excluded and so cannot explicitly confirm the effectiveness of the manipulation. In sum, the present study offers initial evidence that ostracism increases DTA. Although past research has demonstrated that ostracism threatens fundamental needs, assessed explicitly in the context of the manipulation, this study shows that ostracism may more generally assail those psychological structures that help keep death-related thoughts, and the anxiety they generate, at bay.
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