Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 2000, Vol. 79, No. 5, 748-762 0022-3514/00/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.79.5.748 Cyberostracism: Effects of Being Ignored Over the Internet Kipling D. Williams, Christopher K. T. Cheung, and Wilma Choi University of New South Wales Ostracism is such a widely used and powerful tactic that the authors tested whether people would be affected by it even under remote and artificial circumstances. In Study 1, 1,486 participants from 62 countries accessed the authors' on-line experiment on the Internet. They were asked to use mental visualization while playing a virtual tossing game with two others (who were actually computer generated and controlled). Despite the minimal nature of their experience, the more participants were ostracized, the more they reported feeling bad, having less control, and losing a sense of belonging. In Study 2, ostracized participants were more likely to conform on a subsequent task. The results are discussed in terms of supporting K. D. Williams's (1997) need threat theory of ostracism. Ostracism, the act of ignoring and exclusion, has been widely documented as ubiquitous and powerful (Gruter & Masters, 1986; Williams, 1997). Animals have been described as using it to regulate social behavior by excluding noncontributing members (Goodall, 1986; Lancaster, 1986). In humans its use has been observed in primitive (Boehm, 1986; Mahdi, 1986) and modem (Woods, 1978) cultures, tribes (Basso, 1972), military academies (Davis, 1991), schools and academic institutions (Heron, 1987), the workplace (Faulkner & Williams, 1999; Mclnnis & Williams, 1999), religious groups (Gruter, 1986), and interpersonal relation- ships (Sommer, Williams, Ciarocco, & Baumeister, in press; Wil- liams, Shore, & Grahe, 1998; Williams & Zadro, 1999). Kipling D. Williams, Christopher K. T. Cheung, and Wilma Choi, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. We thank the following people for their feedback during the design and pilot testing of the on-line experiments: Carla Walton, Ladd Wheeler, and Lisa Zadro. We appreciate greatly the cooperation of Dick Moreland, Jon Grahe, Stephen Harkins, Irv Horowitz, and Wendy Shore, who encouraged (or gave experimental credit to) their students at their respective universi- ties for participating in our experiments; Joseph Ciarrochi and Hamada Elsayed for their statistical advice; and John Levine for comments on an earlier version of this article. We also thank Scott Pious, developer of the Social Psychology Network (http://www.wesleyan.edu/spn/), for linking our experiments to his site, as well as the people at the American Psycho- logical Society and the American Psychological Association who also linked our site to theirs. This research was funded by two Australian Research Council Large Grants (A79800071 and A10007248). Portions of this article were pre- sented at the Symposia for Social Psychology on the Web at the Society for Australasian Social Psychology at Christchurch, New Zealand, April 1998, and at the Society for Experimental Social Psychology at Lexington, Kentucky, October 1998. Experiment 1 was partial fulfillment of Christo- pher K. T. Cheung's honors thesis; Experiment 2 was partial fulfillment of Wilma Choi's honors thesis. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Kipling D. Williams, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052 Australia. Electronic mail may be sent to kip.williams@unsw.edu.au. Correspondence regarding the programming of the on-line experiments should be directed to Christopher K. T. Cheung at c.cheung@student. unsw.edu.au. 748 Recently, Kraut and colleagues (Kraut et al., 1998) reported that individuals who used the Intemet for just a year or two were more likely to become depressed and lonely--a finding that to some was counterintuitive. Unlike television, which involves passive nonso- cial attention, most Intemet usage is in fact devoted to active social communication (Kraut et al., 1998). Nevertheless, Kraut and col- leagues argued that Internet usage takes time away from face-to- face contacts and replaces stronger ties with weaker ones. As a result, the quality of interaction decreases, resulting in feelings of loneliness, depression, and generally a lowered sense of belonging. This deleterious effect is further compounded when we consider observations that Internet users often perceive that they are being ignored (Rintel & Pittam, 1997a, 1997b). Acts of ignoring may be deliberate, as when a group of MUD (multiuser dungeons) or chatroom users choose to ignore members who violate the group's norms (e.g., by straying from the topic or by being profane), or may simply reflect typical delays and difficulties associated with technical problems of the Intemet. Whether deliberate or not, one can only imagine the impact that being ignored may have on individuals who are using a medium that already predisposes them to depression and loneliness. The goal of this article is to take this notion from our imagina- tion to our laboratory--in our case, our virtual laboratory. We present two on-line experiments that manipulated ostracism over the Intemet. Individuals were ignored and excluded while they were participating in a triadic game of toss. In Experiment 1, we manipulated ostracism and measured their perception of being ostracized as well as their self-reported feelings and thoughts. In Experiment 2, we tested whether being subjected to cyberostra- cism would lead participants to conform. We first review the relevant literature on ostracism and present a theory from which our hypotheses are derived. Ostracism Ostracism occurs across the life span. Young children use forms of ostracism on each other during supervised play (Barner-Barry, 1986), and adolescents, particularly girls, are likely to use ostra- cism in their conflicts (Cairns, Calms, Neckerman, & Ferguson, 1989). Most adults will at some point in their lives be targets and sources of ostracism (we use the terms "target" and "source" to