ABSTRACT
People exclude. They ignore others in everyday interactions, prevent them from entering private circles. Or they even actively drive them out of their country or their moral community, which might be accompanied by additional punishment or persecution. Often social exclusion hurts the excluded and is clearly aversive. In some cases such aversive exclusion is considered legitimate by society (e.g., imprisoning war criminals), in others it is not (e.g., denying human rights to prisoners). It can be either explicit (e.g., exclusion from a political party) or implicit (e.g., being not invited to take part in common activities), can be justified by individual attributes (e.g., exclusion of a sportsman who used illegal substances) or by membership in an excluded group (e.g., exclusion of a sportsman whose national sporting association does not obey international anti-doping rules). In this chapter we review social psychological research on the question of how social exclusion of others is motivated.
