A festschrift honoring Dr. Kipling Williams: The expansion of ostracism research

Dr. Kipling Williams was at the forefront of examining ostracism (being excluded and ignored). To acknowledge his essential contributions, we compiled a special issue consisting of several former students and mentees describing how their work expands on Williams's foundational scholarship. In the current article, we provided a brief overview of ostracism to contextualize the subsequent articles in this special issue. We summarized Williams's journey in studying both the effects of and uses for ostracism. This includes his initial inspiration and first forays into theory-building and multimethod approaches, the development of Cyberball (a virtual ball-toss game used to manipulate ostracism), and his temporal-response model that framed psychological research investigating ostracism's effects on targets for over two decades. Williams also considered the psychological dynamics of being a source of ostracism, postulating that individuals ostracize others defensively, punitively, obliviously, or accidentally. We conclude by introducing the key themes covered by his former students' and mentees' research programs and discussing how they are collectively the next wave of ostracism research, both for targets and sources.