“I Feel Your Pain”: The effects of observing ostracism on the ostracism detection system

Ostracism—being ignored and excluded—is a painful experience with negative psychological consequences. Social psychologists (Kerr & Levine, 2008; Spoor & Williams, 2007) argue humans have an evolved system for automatically detecting cues of ostracism and exclusion. Detection elicits pain and threats to fundamental needs. We hypothesize simply observing ostracism will cause negative affect and need threat in the observer. Participants observed a three-player Cyberball game; a target player was included or ostracized, and participants were either instructed to take the perspective of this player or given no such instructions. Participants observing ostracism reported negative affect and need threat. Our results indicate that ostracism detection is even more powerful than previously suggested, because vicariously, we feel the pain of others’ ostracism as our own.