Cyberostracism
In 2004, these cool experimental social psychologists, Anita Smith and Dr. Kipling D Williams, researched group chat exclusion. They used the Need-Threat model18 of ostracism, developed by Williams, to see if leaving someone out of a group chat is cyberostracism. In this model, Williams provides a definition for ostracism, describing the four fundamental needs that are threatened by ostracism.
These psychologists started by measuring how present each of the four needs were in the experiment participants. In their experiment, they made someone feel as if they’d been left out of a group chat, then measured those four needs again. They found out that being excluded from a group chat significantly lowers all four fundamental needs, qualifying as cyberostracism23.
