The effect of ostracism -- being ignored and excluded, also known as social exclusion -- has attracted substantial research interest in the last twenty years. Research has shown that being ostracized is painful and distressing, and leads to a variety of consequences. Regions of the brain that are associated with physical pain are activated when an individual is ostracized for as little as two minutes. Ostracized individuals suffer a loss of belonging, lowered self-esteem, a sense of helplessness, and existential invisibility. These thwarted needs lead to poor decision-making, depression, diminished self-regulation, heightened aggression, and greater susceptibility to social influence. Young children who have endured ostracism are at risk in their adolescence; adolescents exposed to ostracism show greater vulnerability to risky sex and drug usage. The most widely used research tool to study ostracism is a virtual online platform created by Dr. Kipling Williams and his students in 1998. This freely available program allows for the experimental manipulation of inclusion and ostracism by the other "players" in the game. These players are actually programmed by the experimenter to include the participant or not. This program can also be used to observe and test hypotheses related to discrimination, by tracking which computerized player the participant engages. This platform has been used test hypotheses by researchers from nearly all subfields of psychology, as well as from pediatrics, psychiatry, medicine, and neuroscience as this software platform is particularly well suited for use in fMRI studies. Well over 20,000 participants have participated in research using the platform worldwide. There are now over 150 published articles by researchers using the platform, and the demand is growing. The current platform, however, is limited in its scope and application, and is in dire need of upgrading. The current computer program is not easily accessible to all researchers, does not work on all operating systems and web browsers, and the options for variations and manipulations available to researchers is limited. With NSF support, Dr. Williams and his colleagues will substantial upgrade the platform to develop the program's functionality. As a result, in addition to its prior uses, the new program will be expanded to become a useful tool for examining group-level effects of social exclusion, as well many other requested variations for use by researchers in other labs. The proposed upgrade will make the computer program easier to access on multiple computer platforms and devices, and easier to create variations of interest to researchers. Current demand suggests that an improved version will aid researchers in understanding the impact of ostracism, discover downstream negative consequences, and devise effective interventions that will aid in functional coping. In sum, this proposal provide all scholars interested in studying ostracism with a larger set of options, both technical and psychological, for doing so.
