What Can We Do About Feeling Excluded
If your relationships are essential to you, there are ways to get back into them
As relationships are essential to a satisfying existence, most people would prefer to be invited to a gathering than be left without a home. You may have a close friend you consider a good friend. They whisper as you sit in their backyard but close enough to hear. When you are asked a question, you are compelled to answer. However, to your dismay, your answer is greeted by two dirty stares. They then return to their discussion, evidently wanting to stay clear of the conversation.
A minor rift within a good relationship shouldn’t be anything but a little incident. Perhaps one or both of them had a bad day, and their snarky behavior does not mean anything. It may make you think you are too overly intrusive when dealing with them, any other person, or even with your family members. It isn’t a great feeling.
Ostracism’s Three Causes
In the words of the university’s Selma Rudert and coworkers (2023), while it is evident by “a plethora of research” that ostracism causes negative consequences for the person who is targeted However, little is understood about what causes the behavior in the first place which could be “motivated ostracism.”
One motive stems from the concept of “perceived norm violation.” The group may ostracize people who don’t follow the guidelines of play. Your friends, for instance, might view your opinion that you didn’t invite as a violation of the norms of privacy imposed by society. Although their conversation was not “private” (since you were there), you weren’t explicitly asked to reply to their question.
The second group of ostracism reasons is related to “perceived expendability.” It refers to the fact that group members must contribute to ensure the group’s capacity to perform at a high level. In contrast to your peers, this kind of ostracism could occur if group members don’t seem to be able to contribute something worthwhile.
Anyone can identify with the scenario where an organization’s work is reduced due to the participation of those who are not skilled and are therefore viewed by others as “irrelevant, expendable, or even impedimental for goal attainment”.
Think of the most recent time you participated in a group project, maybe through an online platform that allows for interactive communication like Zoom. In a flash, one person’s face begins to freeze, as their Internet connection is “unstable.” Try as you can try not to blame the person, but after they have returned to the group, nobody is paying any attention to them.
In addition to these motivated situational or atypical kinds of ostracism third kind is when the group members view the person being targeted as being the appearance of a “stigma,” so this is referred to as”stigmatized accounts. “stigmatized account.” In the authors’ words, “Any shortcoming of the target, regardless of its relevance in a particular context, might signal that the target is a suboptimal exchange partner and, thus, better to be avoided”.
Putting Ostracism’s Causes to the Test
In a series of seven surveys and experiments (with an average of 2400 participants), The Swiss researchers compared these three methods of studying ostracism from the perspective of both perpetrators and targets. For instance, in one study, norm violations were changed by giving participants directions to finish the task (“Survey of Teamwork”) in the most cooperative manner feasible. The participants in this situation were able to come up with statements like, “I don’t care who’s in the group. When will the real work begin?”
In the condition of expendability within the study, participants were given instructions on how to finish the task in the shortest time feasible without regard to cooperation. The participant in this scenario declared, “I hope the task isn’t too hard. I’m really bad at math.”
To investigate the significance of stigmatized ostracism, authors also put together a situation in which the person stated that they could not accomplish the task (e.g., math) but a completely different kind of task (e.g., reading in English). If the target were to be ostracized in this way, their skill for the task in question didn’t have any significance. Being incompetent is enough to be a cause of exclusion.
When analyzing the results from all seven studies, they concluded that the U. Basel authors concluded that ostracism based on strategic intent appears to be more potent in terms of motives than stigmatizing: “This indicates ostracism might represent a strategic regulation mechanism by which groups can ensure that their members are suitable for the respective requirements of the specific situational context”.
Despite the amount of evidence supporting the strategic account, it wasn’t able to rule out the possibility of stigmatization entirely. “Any shortcoming,” they said, could cause at least a certain degree of social ostracism, even if it isn’t directly relevant to the circumstances.
The act of ignoring norms, in addition, required a specific shape to result in ostracism. Some rules infringe on the general public and those that pertain to your specific group (“injunctive rules”). If you act in a manner different from the norms of those within your particular circle (e.g., for instance, the couple in whose conversations you interfered), This could make you vulnerable to being disregarded even though you’re doing anything wrong in the wider sense.
Exclusion’s Remedies
Overall, the Rudert et al. study demonstrated a shockingly high level of ostracism in all scenarios, reaching up to 87.5 percent at one of the extremes. In contrast to real life, acting unwelcome toward an experimenter was not a cause for concern. In reality, however, normal people aware of the potential negative consequence of being ostracized (which renders you appear to be ostracized) could be able to ward off such outright cruel conduct. In addition, excluding individuals from a certain situation can result in the group not receiving the advantages they could offer in a different situation.
