OSTRACISM AND ACCESSIBILITY OF SELF-TRAITS

Abstract

Social ostracism occurs when individuals are ignored or excluded by others and it elicits decreased belonging and decreased explicit self-esteem(Dvir, Kelly, & Williams, 2018). Individuals may cope with these threats by increasing accessibility of their own social groups(Knowles & Gardner, 2008) and increasing implicit self-esteem (Rudman, Dohn, & Fairchild, 2007). The present study examined how ostracism impacts self-perceptions more broadly. We hypothesized that ostracism (compared to inclusion) would cause negative self-traits to become more accessible. Participants were assessed on state self-esteem, randomly assigned to either an ostracism or acceptance condition. They then provided a self-description (to be used as a measure of explicit self-perceptions) and a word-completion task consisting of positive and negative traits, as well as non-personal words (to be used as a measure of implicit self-perceptions). Ostracism did not affect the positivity or negative of the explicit self-descriptions, but did lead to an increase of positive traits in the word-completion task. The results indicate that individuals may show heightened accessibility of positive traits as a defense mechanism against ostracism.