Ostracism Online Tool

Integrating inductions used from prior studies

Ostracism Online was developed by Wolf et al. (2015) to induce ostracism in a social media setting. It was designed as an alternative to Cyberball, a long standing tool used in psychology to illicit social exclusion through a virtual game of catch (Williams et al., 2000; Hartgerink et al., 2015).

This is a screenshot from the Ostracism Online update created by Lutz and Schneider (2021). The participant’s own bio is in the upper lefthand corner, the rejection condition is displayed here at the end of the activity. All other profiles and content are the same across conditions.

In Ostracism Online, participants enter a fake social networking site. After creating a bio, they are instructed to read and give likes to any of the other 11 participant profiles displayed. A pre-programmed algorithm assigns likes to the participant based on their experimental induction condition (6 likes = included, 12 likes = over included, 1 like = ostracized).

Recently, media scholars have built a new experimental condition of rejection. This addes a dislike button to the virtual display. In the rejection condition, participants receive 6 dislikes (mirroring the 6 likes the included condition receives). The ostracized condition in this version receives 1 like and 1 dislike. This version of the tool and its design are reported by Lutz and Schneider (2021).

For a series of studies, we built a Github package which incorporates all conditions from both versions of Ostracism Online: Included, Over-included, Ostracized and Rejected. We also added a no exposure control group (who did no induction) to compare effects to a shared baseline.

All conditions can be used (or branched to alter the avatars, character bios and other source code parameters) from the the GitHub: https://github.com/smgrady-git/OOT/

Current parameters let researchers choose among previously validated conditions:

  • Overincluded (11 likes)
  • Included (6 likes)
  • Ostracized (1 like, 1 dislike)
  • Rejected (6 dislikes)

Source tools & References

Lutz, S., & Schneider, F. M. (2021). Is receiving dislikes in social media still better than being ignored? The effects of ostracism and rejection on need threat and coping responses online. Media Psychology, 24(6), 741–765. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2020.1799409

Wolf, W., Levordashka, A., Ruff, J. R., Kraaijeveld, S., Lueckmann, J. M., & Williams, K. D. (2015). Ostracism Online: A social media ostracism paradigm. Behavior Research Methods, 47, 361-373. https:/doi.org/10.3758/s13428-014-0475-x

Wolf et al.’s original Ostracism Online Tool (and open source documentation) can be found here

Special thanks to Sarah Lutz for sharing the source code for the rejection condition her team developed, it’s duplicated here with permission.

And thanks to Clare Lavalley, Akshay Tallikar, Adnan Abdallah for their work as undergraduate research assistants (coders) on this!