Week 3 Round: Cyberball, run on each other

You run the exclusion manipulation in the room, on people you know, and then argue about whether we should have.

11 March 2027

This Round is indoors and it is not observation. You run Cyberball on each other, in both conditions, and you rate your own four needs immediately after each round.

Opting out is free and private. Tell either of us before we start, or simply do not sit down; there is no penalty and nobody will ask why. This is a manipulation designed to make people feel excluded, and consenting to it because everyone else is in the room is not consent.

The debrief happens immediately after the last round and everybody stays for it.

Then the argument, which is the part that gets marked. You have just been excluded by your classmates for four minutes and it measurably did something. Scale that: the study has been run thousands of times on undergraduates. Was that a reasonable thing for the field to do? It is a small, brief, fully debriefed harm that has produced most of what we know about what exclusion costs. Write your position down before you hear anyone else’s — you will need it again in week 7, when you start observing strangers who have not consented to anything.