Abstract

The experience of ostracism during adolescence, a period where peer relationships are extremly important, leads to numerous negative conseuqnces such as loneliness, depression, and poor academic performance. Recently, the role of witnesses has been emphasized to reduce alienation, underlining the need to measure witnesses’ behaivor accuretly. The current study explores whether adolescents who witnessed ostracism help the marginalized other, whether the degree ostracism perception and helping behavior differ by gender, and lastly if there is any correlation between ostracism perception, help behavior and social skills. 151 adolescents were randomly assigned to either ostracism witnessing group or non-witnessing groups and Social Skills improvement System (SSiS-RS) and Prosocial Cyberball Game(PCG) were conducted subsequently. Prosocial Cyberball game is a cumputerized behaivoral task desinged to explore participant’s behavior after witnessing others’ exclusion. Results showed that boys helped the excluded player more frequently than girls in ostracism witnessing group. Also, only in the ostracism witnessing group, ball throw ratio was significantly higher after witnessing round. Lastly, there was no significant correlation between helping behavior and social skills. These results suggest that adolescents who witnessed ostracism generally help the excluded others and that the degree of the helping behavior is affected by gender.