Short-Term Social Exclusion Alters Self-Prioritisation

Project and main findings

Understanding the mechanisms behind social exclusion is essential, as it may reveal how such experiences intensify, rather than alleviate, feelings of loneliness. 

In this study, we investigated the causal link between short-term social exclusion and self-processing using a novel approach that integrates two methodologies. A group of young adults (N=118, aged 18–39) underwent a social exclusion manipulation via the Cyberball game, followed by an associative matching task to assess self-prioritization - a core aspect of social cognition - alongside emotion and reward prioritization. Participants’ affective states and perceived loneliness were also measured.

Our findings highlight three key points. First, social exclusion weakened self-prioritization, with excluded participants exhibiting a significantly smaller self-prioritization effect than those included. This provides the first evidence that short-term exclusion may shift attention away from the self rather than toward it. Second, this reduction in self-prioritization was independent of emotion and reward prioritization, suggesting these effects operate separately. Third, we found no link between prioritization effects and perceived loneliness, implying that brief exclusion may not be enough to alter overall feelings of loneliness.

These results contribute to the ongoing debate on whether social exclusion redirects attention inward to assert self-importance or outward to enhance social awareness and fulfill affiliative needs. The findings suggest that interventions targeting the effects of social exclusion should account for the nuanced relationship between self-processing and social cognition.

Datasets

Associative matching tasks. Participants performed three tasks to assess prioritization effects for person-related information, emotional valence, and value-based rewards. These tasks relied on an associative matching procedure linking simple geometric shapes, with emotional valence, rewards, or self- and other-relevant information. In the Personal task, links were formed between geometric shapes (e.g., rectangle, hexagon, star) and arbitrary word labels (e.g., rectangle-self, hexagon-friend, star-unknown). In the Valence Task, participants memorise associations between simple geometric shapes (e.g., square, circle, triangle) and schematic sad, happy and neutral emotional expressions (e.g., square-happy, circle-sad, triangle-neutral). In the Reward task, associations were made between geometric shapes (e.g., oval, pentagon, diamond) and monetary values (e.g., oval-€0, pentagon-€25, diamond-€50).

Cyberball task (inclusion group = coded =1) and Exclusion group coded = 2). The Cyberball task is a well-known method for studying social exclusion. Participants were randomly assigned to one two conditions in a between-group design. In line with previous studies , in the social inclusion condition, the virtual players pass the ball to the participant 10 out of the total 30 throws. In the social exclusion condition, after the first two throws, the virtual players stop passing the ball to the participant for the rest of the game.

Questionnaires. After the Cyberball game, participants in each group were asked to report how often they felt they received the ball (on a scale from 0% to 100%) and they chose between pairs of statements: "I felt excluded" or "I felt included," and "I felt ignored" or "I did not feel ignored." These questions were meant as checks of the social inclusion/exclusion manipulations.  After the 3 associative tasks, participants completed the Italian version of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS).