Does it matter who is ostracizing you?: manipulating warmth and competence social dimensions as the source

• Autor(a) principal: Freire, Daniel Alves da Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/12700
• topic: Psicologia social; Jogo interactivo; Realidade virtual; Bullying; Cognição; Perceção social; Exclusão social

Ostracism – the act of being excluded and ignored – has been shown to have negative psychological consequences such as decreases in feelings of belonging, self-esteem, meaningful existence and control, as well as decreases in cognitive performance. Many attempts have been done in the research to find moderators, but the negative consequences seem to happen regardless of individual characteristics such as personality traits or the source of ostracism. Cyberball, a simple virtual ball-tossing game has been widely used and shown to be enough to affect individual psychological well-being. Moreover, just seeing or imagining being the ostracized individual has caused similar responses. Despite the large number of studies of the phenomenon, few studies have measured what ostracized individuals think about the ostracizers and how that affects the ostracism experience. As such, the present research adopted the warmth and competence dimensions from the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) to manipulate the source of the ostracism and measure possible more subtle effects of being ostracized. In Study 1, an online experiment, participants were asked to imagine being a character in a scenario describing someone being ostracized or included by Men (a group perceived as having high competence and low warmth) or Women (a group perceived as having low competence and high warmth). Results showed participants who read the ostracized scenario felt worse. No simple differences based on character sex were found, however, character sex and participant sex interacted in their effect on the dependent measures. Study 2 was a similar study performed in the lab using the Cyberball game as a manipulation of ostracism and including a dependent measure of a memory task related to female and male characters. Once again, there were strong effects of ostracism, and interactions between character sex and participant sex on participants’ emotions and mood. Implications are discussed.