Construal Level and Social Exclusion: Concrete Thinking Impedes Recovery From Social Exclusion

1. By using Cyberball, Studies 2 and 3 are technically manipulating ostracism rather than exclusion (Williams, Citation2007; Williams, Citation2009). For reasons of consistency, we will stick to the term exclusion throughout the manuscript.

2. We adapted each item of Zadro et al.’s (Citation2004) basic need questionnaire to our essay manipulation, except for one item from the meaningful existence subscale that was not suitable for the used manipulation (“I felt that my performance [e.g., catching the ball, deciding whom to throw the ball to] had some effect on the direction of the game”) resulting in a scale of 11 items.

3. Shani et al. (Citation2009) argue the urge to seek further information to be an affective goal, which was less attractive for participants with high-level construals. However, when looking at the operationalization of the variable information seeking (e.g., “the likelihood they would ask the friend to uncover the exact amount …” or “the degree they want to search for this information”, p. 38) it appears to be more cognitive. Participants were not asked to indicate their affective reasons for either searching for more information or not, but their deliberative expression of whether they were interested in knowing more about unpleasant truth.