Ostracizing Others Hurts As Much As Being Excluded Ourselves, Study Finds

The Huffington Post:

Being purposely ignored hurts — and so does purposely ignoring someone, new research suggests.

“Our results highlight that it goes against the grain of people’s psychological needs to exclude others,” study researcher Richard Ryan, of the University of Rochester, said in a statement.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involved having study participants play a computer game called Cyberball, in which “players” throw a ball to one another.

For the first part of the experiment, researchers led the study participants to believe that the other two “players” in the game were actual people who were also playing the game, when really it was just the computer. Some participants were instructed not to throw the ball to one of the players; others were instructed to throw the ball equally to both of the other players; others were not given any restrictions or requirements for who to throw the ball to.

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post