Belongingness, Social Exclusion, and Ostracism 329many perpetrators of violence are young men who feel
rejected from family and peer groups (see also Leary, 2000;
Walsh, Beyer, & Petee, 1987).
Prior research provides partial support for a connection be-
tween social exclusion and aggressive behavior. Rejected
children are more physically aggressive and more disruptive,
and issue more verbal threats than other children (Coie, 1990;
Newcomb, Bukowski, & Pattee, 1993). Compared to married
men, single men are more likely to speed and drive recklessly,
two antisocial behaviors that can lead to injury and death
(Harano et al., 1975; Harrington & McBride, 1970). Marital
status also correlates with criminal behavior. Stable relation-
ships in adulthood (especially good marriages) are connected
to lower incidence of crime and delinquency (Sampson &
Laub, 1990, 1993). On the other hand, Wright and Wright
(1992) found no link between criminality and marital status in
itself. Apparently only a happy (or reasonably happy) mar-
riage is incompatible with criminal behavior.
However, these findings are correlational, so the direction
of causation is not clear. For example, men with criminal ten-
dencies may be less likely to find someone to marry. Children
who are aggressive are not likely to keep friends. Even third-
variable causal explanations are plausible. For example, per-
haps lack of money makes poor men both more prone to
criminal activity and less desirable as potential husbands.
In order to determine the direction of causation between
social exclusion and aggressive behavior, we performed a
series of experimental studies (Twenge, Baumeister, et al.,
2001). We manipulated social exclusion either by false feed-
back on a personality test (in the crucial condition, partici-
pants heard they would end up alone later in life) or by peer
rejection (participants heard either that everyone or no one in
a group of their peers chose them as a desirable partner for
further interaction). Consistent across several studies, re-
jected participants were more aggressive toward other peo-
ple. First, rejected participants issued negative written
evaluations of a target when the target had insulted them. Re-
jected participants also chose to blast the target with higher
levels of stressful, aversive noise during a reaction time game
after a target issued an insult. In the last study, however,
the participant had no interaction (positive or negative) with
the target. Even under these conditions, rejected participants
were more aggressive toward the target. Thus rejected partic-
ipants were willing to aggress more even against an innocent
third party.
In another series of studies, we examined the effect of so-
cial exclusion on prosocial behavior (Twenge, Ciarocco, &
Baumeister, 2001). Across five studies, socially excluded
people were less prosocial than others. They donated less
money to a student fund, were less willing to volunteer for
more experiments, were less helpful to the experimenter after
a mishap, and were less cooperative in a prisoner’s dilemma
game. This effect held regardless of whether the prosocial be-
havior involved a cost to the self, no cost or benefit to the self,
or even a benefit to the self. Combined with the aggression
studies, the implication of these findings is that social exclu-
sion leads to a reduction in prosocial behavior and an in-
crease in antisocial behavior.
Self-reports of mood consistently failed to mediate the re-
lationship between social exclusion and aggressive or proso-
cial behavior. In addition, the effects were not due to simply
hearing bad news. A misfortune control group heard that they
would be accident prone in the future. This group demon-
strated significantly less aggressive behavior and more proso-
cial behavior compared to the social exclusion group. These
manipulations of social exclusion are weak compared to real-
life experiences such as romantic breakups or ostracism
by friends. This makes it less surprising that rejections out-
side the laboratory can sometimes lead to lethally violent
reactions.
These results linking exclusion to more antisocial behav-
ior and less prosocial behavior are especially interesting
given some previous studies. A recent paper (K. D. Williams
et al., 2000) examined ostracism (being ignored by others)
during an Internet ball-tossing game. Participants who were
ostracized were subsequently more likely to conform to oth-
ers’ judgments in a line-judging task. The authors suggest
that the ostracized participants were thus more willing to
make amends and conform in exchange for social accep-
tance. A previous study also found that female participants
who were ostracized socially compensated by working
harder on a group task (K. D. Williams & Sommer, 1997).
One interpretation of these results is that social exclusion
leads to prosocial behavior—thus the opposite results to the
Twenge et al. studies. However, there are several explana-
tions for this discrepancy. First, the ostracized participants in
the K. D. Williams et al. (2000) studies may have conformed
out of passivity rather than out of a desire to rejoin the group.
Another difference lies in motivation: the participants in the
K. D. Williams et al. (2000) study and the Williams and
Sommer (1997) study might have felt more confident that
they could regain the favor of the group members in further
interaction. In our studies, rejected participants were interact-
ing with someone they did not expect to meet in person. This
may have reduced their desire to act prosocially and encour-
aged them to indulge their antisocial, aggressive impulses. In
other words, they might have felt that there was no clear route
back to social acceptance.
Could it be that socially rejected people simply lose inter-
est in connecting with others? There is some evidence against