Investigation of the social exclusion phenomenon in the context of coalitional psychology

Belonging to groups (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), forming alliances and acting in cooperation with others (Neuberg & DeScioli, 2016; Schaller & Neuberg, 2008) are fundamental components of the social life of human species. Therefore, exclusion from the groups and being ignored by the others lead to an array of negative consequences on individuals (Wesselmann & Williams, 2017). On the one hand, members of a group expect cooperative behaviour from others in their group, they tend, on the other hand, to exclude members of the competing groups (Van Vugt & Park, 2010). This makes coalitional dynamics important in both intra- and inter-group relations, and it is assumed that the cognitive systems are evolved in order to track coalitional affiliations (Pietraszewski, Cosmides & Tooby, 2014). In this study, it was aimed to examine how observers perceive the actors of social exclusion in the context of coalitional psychology. In Experiment 1 (n = 140), participants who watched firstly a four-player ball-tossing game (Cyberball), in which one of the players was ostracized, were measured by the Who Said What paradigm in order to examine how they categorize the players. Results showed that the excluders, who had not interacted with each other before the game and excluded the target player for a short time, were processed as a social category by the participants. Experiment 2 (n = 119) was conducted to examine whether categorization by exclusion cues was affected by alliance cues. For this purpose, the players in Cyberball were shown wearing different coloured tshirts which represents two different universities. Thus, exclusion cues and visual coalitional cues were both used in the game. Social categorization by exclusion cues was found again but, unexpectedly, participants did not categorize the players by their alliance memberships. However, the effect size of categorization by exclusion cues decreased remarkably in Experiment 2 compared to Experiment 1. Taken together, the results of the two experiments indicated that social exclusion is a key component of coalitional psychology, and exclusion cues might be considered with the other coalitional cues that are adaptively processed in mind.