Gemma Spake

The other two people, the other three people, what you don't know is that they're imposters.

The game carries on.

You are never thrown the ball again.

Like even talking about that feels like a school sports nightmare.

But this study is really important in seeing the effects of being left out.

And there was a meta-analysis of I think like 120 specific cyberball studies.

I think there was like

12,000 participants in these studies overall, which found that even this small artificial exclusion created a really large mental effect.

Participants felt panicked, they got angry, they started crying, they got confused.

Sometimes they even reported like literal physical pain and

And this effect, this deeply psychological effect, this happens even though there was no big drama.

Nobody was hurt.

There was no insults.

Just quietly being left out was enough to have a significant impact on these people.

Let's bring that back to the trio, to our friend at the beginning of the episode.

If this reaction in this cyberball game happens with strangers who you don't know at all,

No wonder you're feeling so upset when it's your best friends and they metaphorically stop passing the ball to you.

The initial pain of exclusion, like that's just the first layer, right?

The second layer is the self-interrogation that comes with that.

We could also call this like social specific rumination, but it's when you've been excluded and then you start to look for an explanation within your own behavior.