When It’s Okay That I Don’t Play

Abstract

Being excluded and ignored has been shown to threaten fundamental human needs and cause pain. Such reflexive reactions to social exclusion have been conceptualized as direct and unmoderated (temporal need threat model of ostracism). Here, we propose an extension and argue that reflexive reactions depend on how social exclusion situations are construed. If being excluded is understood as a violation of an inclusion norm, individuals will react with pain and threat. In contrast, if being excluded is consistent with the prevailing norm, the exclusion situation is interpreted as less threatening, and negative reflexive reactions to ostracism should be attenuated. Four studies empirically support this conceptual model. Studies 3 and 4 further show that to guide situated construal, the norm has to be endorsed by the individual. In both Studies 1 and 3, the effect of the norm is mediated by the objective situation's subjective construal.

Under threat by popular vote: German-speaking immigrants’ affect and cognitions following the Swiss vote against mass immigration

“…This result is in line with findings from prior experimental research, which show that if exclusion is consistent with social as well as one’s personal norms and attitudes, then negative affective reactions are attenuated or even dissipate altogether [8]. As a potential caveat, in should be noted that there might be variation in what participants thought about when they answered questions about “immigration attitudes,” especially whether they included themselves in that category or not.…”

“…Previous research has indicated that individuals can remember as well as relive social exclusion experiences very accurately [71]. For reasons of test efficiency, Need Fulfillment and Mood were assessed with short scales [8]. …”

“…However, research shows that despite their strong sensitivity for exclusionary threats, individuals do not react to all experiences of social exclusion in the same way (e.g., [49, 50], for an overview see [7]). The subjectivity of social exclusion experiences has especially been emphasized in more recent extensions of the temporal need-threat model [8] regarding the importance of socially situated cognitions, that is, how social exclusion situations are cognitively construed in the first place. Here, we focus on two factors which are directly related to the immigration debate and supposedly strongly influenced the situated construal of the popular vote for immigrants: a) one’s personal norms and attitudes regarding immigration, which are eventually related to one’s political orientation as well as b) social support from the Swiss people.…”

“…Such experiences are not interpreted as a threat to one’s inclusionary status, and therefore hurt less than exclusion experiences which violate social or personal norms [8, 52–54]. To illustrate, previous studies have shown that left-wing participants who are excluded based on a gender quota perceived this exclusion as less threatening than right-wing participants [8]. Presumably this is because right-wing participants typically do not support such a left-wing political agenda and thus, exclusion due to gender quotas is seen as a norm violation and subjective threat.…”

“…In other words, individuals react negatively to violations of their personal norms in general, no matter whether they are directly affected in the current situation. In the aforementioned study, right-wing individuals who were included to the discussion also reported more negative affect than included left-wing individuals, possibly due to the perceived norm violation [8]. …”