Picking Your Friends is a Risky Business: Psychological Impacts of Social Exclusion and Teammates Selection in a Cyberball Game with Middle School Students

This study employed the Cyberball paradigm, to investigate the impact of ostracism on need satisfaction in 84 Italian students aged 11 to 14. Believing they were playing with anonymized classmates, participants experienced inclusion or exclusion with partners either chosen by them or assigned randomly. Results revealed that need satisfaction was strongly influenced by inclusion/exclusion, with a noteworthy moderating effect of the team-building processes: in inclusive rounds, choosing teammates increased both the sense of belonging to the group and self-esteem, while in ostracizing rounds, choosing teammates did not exacerbate belongingness-related need threat but led to lower self-esteem reports. This shows that having agency in building one’s own group is a risky proposition: good outcomes become more rewarding, yet exclusion imposes a greater loss of self-esteem.