Overt attention to social signals during social exclusion: A pre-registered study

Ostracism refers to a social situation during which one or more individuals are ignored or excluded. William’s “Temporal Needs Threat Model” proposes that ostracism threatens fundamental social needs that individuals spontaneously attempt to secure by seeking reaffiliation. Using the Cyberball Game, a computerized ball-tossing game used to study psychological responses to ostracism via game social inclusion vs. exclusion conditions, recent studies showed that attention to social signals was an accurate proxy of the reaffiliation needs, themselves derived from the social exclusion feelings. Yet, contradictory results challenge this view, either because a subset of studies revealed opposite patterns, or because social attentional is thought to escape cognitively controlled attentional processes. Here, we directly investigated the relationship between the participants’ social exclusion feelings and their overt attention patterns towards social signals during a Cyberball game. Contrary to William’s “Temporal Needs Threat Model”, we found anecdotal evidence supporting a negative relationship between attention to social signals and social exclusion feelings. Exploratory analyses revealed that overt social attention patterns in a situation of social exclusion are more intricate than previously assumed, and that they likely depend on individual features. We discuss these results under the umbrella of concurrent frameworks and models.