Narcissists’ Experience of Ostracism

Büttner, Christiane M.
Rudert, Selma C.
Albath, Elianne A.
Sibley, Chris G.
Greifeneder, Rainer

Department of Social Psychology, University of Basel
Department of Social Psychology, University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
School of Psychology, University of Auckland

Gregory D. Webster served as action editor.

All materials, analysis code, and data are available via the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/hda4c). There are two exceptions: Data for Study 1 underly data protection laws. Access to the data is granted to all researchers via an application to the German Institute for Economic Research (https://www.diw.de/en/diw_02.c.222829.en/access.html). For Study 1, the authors therefore only provide the analysis code. Data for Study 7 are part of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study and are available from any member of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study advisory board. The analysis code used to test all models reported in this article is available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/hda4c). The authors preregistered all hypotheses, sample size, exclusion criteria, and analysis plans of the experience sampling and experimental studies on AsPredicted (Study 2 study procedure: https://aspredicted.org/THK_7DZ, Study 2 specific hypotheses: https://aspredicted.org/KCV_QDP, Study 3a: https://aspredicted.org/xvwy-8zps.pdf, Study 3b: https://aspredicted.org/tgpq-srmh.pdf, Study 3c: https://aspredicted.org/qt3p-4gdt.pdf, Study 4: https://aspredicted.org/8cxt-jwkz.pdf, Study 5: https://aspredicted.org/zpdy-mnxk.pdf, Study 6: https://aspredicted.org/kyqg-7msy.pdf). All studies’ procedures were approved by the University of Basel’s Institutional Review Board and conform to the Declaration of Helsinki.

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest. This research was supported by Grant P000PS_207236/1 from the Swiss National Science Foundation awarded to Christiane M. Büttner. Study 7 was supported by the Templeton Religion Trust, Grant TRT-2021-10418 awarded to Chris G. Sibley. This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant P000PS_207236/1). For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

The authors thank Anna-Marie Bertram, Nina Frings, Lara Geniale, Thea Giger, Sarah Imhof, Svenja Kremer, Leyre Macías, Theresa Möst, Nataša Rakić, Shaumya Sankar, Daniel Strebel, and Matthias Stutz for assisting with study programming, study material development, data collection, and/or data preparation. They are very grateful to Louis Tay and everyone at Expiwell (https://www.expiwell.com) for their help in using the experience sampling app for Study 2. They also thank Katharina Geukes and Mitja Back for providing the videos and measures from the personality interaction laboratory study (PILS) study for Study 6.

Christiane M. Büttner played a lead role in conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, supervision, visualization, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing. Selma C. Rudert played a supporting role in conceptualization, methodology, and writing–review and editing. Elianne A. Albath played a supporting role in conceptualization, formal analysis, methodology, visualization, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing. Chris G. Sibley played a supporting role in conceptualization, data curation, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, and writing–review and editing. Rainer Greifeneder played a supporting role in conceptualization, methodology, supervision, and writing–review and editing.

Christiane M. Büttner, Department of Social Psychology, University of Basel, Missionsstrasse 64a, 4055 Basel, Switzerland [email protected]

Received June 4, 2024

revised November 27, 2024

Accepted December 5, 2024

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 129(1):p 181-207, July 2025. | DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000547

Ostracism—being excluded and ignored—has severe, negative consequences. What is less clear is why some individuals become frequent targets of ostracism in the first place. In two nationally representative panel surveys, one experience sampling study, and six experiments (N_total = 77,289), we examine associations between grandiose narcissism and ostracism. Cross-sectional panel data (Study 1) and a 14-day experience sampling study (Study 2) show a strong link between narcissism and reporting ostracism more frequently. Subsequent studies provide insight into three mechanisms underlying this relationship: First, experiments show that narcissists are more sensitive to ambiguous but not to unambiguous exclusion cues (negative perceptions mechanism; Studies 3a, 3b, and 3c; integrative data analysis; and Study 4). Second, other individuals exclude narcissists more often because of their narcissistic traits (target behavior mechanism, Studies 5 and 6). This holds true both when narcissistic traits, especially narcissistic rivalry, are explicitly described and when narcissistic traits are implicitly inferred from short introduction videos. Finally, Study 7 longitudinally tests over 14 years whether narcissism is an antecedent and outcome of frequent exclusion. Supporting a reverse causality mechanism, deviations in ostracism were followed by deviations in narcissism 1 year later, and vice versa. Our findings demonstrate how negative perceptions, target behavior, and reverse causality together determine who gets ostracized, from the perspective of those who get ostracized and those who decide to ostracize. We discuss how the present approach can be used as a framework to understand personality risk factors for frequent negative social experiences.