Seeking Solitude After Being Ostracized: A Replication and Beyond

Ren, Dongning; Wesselmann, Eric D.; Beest, Ilja van

doi:10.1177/0146167220928238

Cited by 54 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Targets of ostracism may withdraw from social interactions to minimize risk of additional social pain (Richman & Leary, 2009;Van Kleef et al, 2010). In past experiments, targets of ostracism (vs. inclusion) indicated stronger intentions to disengage from social situations (Pfundmair et al, 2015), more positive ratings of physical spaces that hinder social interaction (Meagher & Marsh, 2017), and, importantly, a higher preference for being alone in the following activity (Ren et al, 2020). Here, we showed that, ironically, the very response to ostracism (i.e., preference for solitude) may put targets at higher risk for ostracism in future social interactions.…”

Section: Theoretical Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Measures of preference for solitude, ostracism experience, and the Big Five traits were embedded in this survey. Participants in the Dutch-language sample completed translated versions of these measures: The Dutch version of the preference for solitude and ostracism experience measures were obtained from Ren & colleagues (2020) ; the Dutch version of the Big Five measure was obtained from Denissen & colleagues (2008) .…”

Section: Studies 1 Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Leaving the Loners Alone: Dispositional Preference for Solitude Evokes Ostracism

Ren

Evans

2020

Pers Soc Psychol Bull

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What are the interpersonal consequences of seeking solitude? Leading theories in developmental research have proposed that having a general preference for solitude may incur significant interpersonal costs, but empirical studies are still lacking. In five studies (total N = 1,823), we tested whether target individuals with a higher preference for solitude were at greater risk for ostracism, a common, yet extremely negative, experience. In studies using self-reported experiences (Study 1) and perceptions of others’ experiences (Study 2), individuals with a stronger preference for solitude were more likely to experience ostracism. Moreover, participants were more willing to ostracize targets with a high (vs. low) preference for solitude (Studies 3 and 4). Why do people ostracize solitude-seeking individuals? Participants assumed that interacting with these individuals would be aversive for themselves and the targets (Study 5; preregistered). Together, these studies suggest that seeking time alone has important (and potentially harmful) interpersonal consequences.

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Section: Theoretical Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Studies 1 Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leaving the Loners Alone: Dispositional Preference for Solitude Evokes Ostracism

Ren

Evans

2020

Pers Soc Psychol Bull

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“…Moreover, being included by more group members in a group interaction decreased aggression, but each additional "includer" has a smaller incremental effect for reducing aggression (DeWall et al, 2010). Finally, being socially included in an interaction resulted in more positive outcomes, as compared to being excluded; but being overincluded (e.g., being included to a greater extent than other group members) did not result in higher levels of positivity (Ren et al, 2021;van Beest & Williams, 2006;Wolf et al, 2015;Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000).…”

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confidence: 99%

Nonlinear effect of social interaction quantity on psychological well-being: Diminishing returns or inverted U?

Ren¹,

Stavrova²,

Loh³

2022

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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Social contact is an important ingredient of a happy and satisfying life. But is more social contact necessarily better? While it is well-established that increasing the quantity of social interactions on the low end of its spectrum promotes psychological well-being, the effect of interaction quantity on the high end remains largely unexplored. We propose that the effect of interaction quantity is nonlinear; specifically, at high levels of interaction quantity, its positive effects may be reduced (Diminishing Returns Hypothesis) or even reversed (Inverted U Hypothesis). To test these two competing hypotheses, we conducted a series of six studies involving a total of 161,836 participants using experimental (Study 1), cross-sectional (Studies 2 & 3), daily diary (Study 4), experience sampling (Study 5), and longitudinal survey designs (Study 6). Consistent evidence emerged across the studies supporting the Diminishing Returns Hypothesis. On the low end of the interaction quantity spectrum, increasing interaction quantity enhanced well-being as expected; whereas on the high end of the spectrum, the effect of interaction quantity was reduced or became nearly negligible, but did not turn negative. Taken together, the present research provides compelling evidence that the well-being benefits of social interactions are nearly negligible after moderate quantities of interactions are achieved.

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“…Recent examples include Bergfeld & Chiu (2017), Brooks et al (2019), Irwin et al (2019), Schroeder et al (2019, and Ren et al (2020), among many others. Possible reasons may be that the mediators were contemporaneously measured, or there was simply insufficient theoretical or experimental justification to warrant positing a causal structure among the mediators.…”

Section: Practical Considerations For Applied Researchersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disentangling indirect effects through multiple mediators without assuming any causal structure among the mediators.

Loh¹,

Moerkerke²,

Loeys³

et al. 2021

Psychological Methods

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When multiple mediators exist on the causal pathway from treatment to outcome, path analysis prevails for disentangling indirect effects along paths linking possibly several mediators. However, separately evaluating each indirect effect along different posited paths demands stringent assumptions, such as correctly specifying the mediators' causal structure, and no unobserved confounding among the mediators. These assumptions may be unfalsifiable in practice and, when they fail to hold, can result in misleading conclusions about the mediators. Nevertheless, these assumptions are avoidable when substantive interest is in inference about the indirect effects specific to each distinct mediator. In this article, we introduce a new definition of indirect effects called interventional indirect effects from the causal inference and epidemiology literature.Interventional indirect effects can be unbiasedly estimated without the assumptions above while retaining scientifically meaningful interpretations. We show that under a typical class of linear and additive mean models, estimators of interventional indirect effects adopt the same analytical form as prevalent product-of-coefficient estimators assuming a parallel mediator model. Prevalent estimators are therefore unbiased when estimating interventional indirect effects -even when there are unknown causal effects among the mediators -but require a different causal interpretation. When other mediators moderate the effect of each mediator on the outcome, and the mediators' covariance is affected by treatment, such an indirect effect due to the mediators' mutual dependence (on one another) cannot be attributed to any mediator alone. We exploit the proposed definitions of interventional indirect effects to develop novel estimators under such settings.

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Seeking Solitude After Being Ostracized: A Replication and Beyond

Cited by 54 publications

References 76 publications

Leaving the Loners Alone: Dispositional Preference for Solitude Evokes Ostracism

Leaving the Loners Alone: Dispositional Preference for Solitude Evokes Ostracism

Nonlinear effect of social interaction quantity on psychological well-being: Diminishing returns or inverted U?

Disentangling indirect effects through multiple mediators without assuming any causal structure among the mediators.

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