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Social exclusion in a virtual Cyberball game reduces the virtual hand illusion

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Abstract

Sense of ownership and agency are two important aspects of the minimal self, but how self-perception is affected by social conditions remains unclear. Here, we studied how social inclusion or exclusion of participants in the course of a virtual Cyberball game would affect explicit judgments and implicit measures of ownership and agency (proprioceptive drift, skin conductance responses, and intentional binding, respectively) in a virtual hand illusion paradigm, in which a virtual hand moved in or out of sync with the participants’ own hand. Results show that synchrony affected all four measures. More importantly, this effect interacted with social inclusion/exclusion in the Cyberball game for both ownership and agency measure, showing that social exclusion reduces perceived agency and ownership.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the National Education Science Planning of China (CBA210236) to K.M.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Personality and Cognition, Faculty of Psychological Science, Southwest University, Beibei, Chongqing, China

    Yingbing Sun, Ruiyu Zhu & Ke Ma

  2. Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

    Bernhard Hommel

  3. Faculty of Psychology & University Neuropsychology Center, Faculty of Medicine, Cognitive Neurophysiology, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Bernhard Hommel

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  1. Yingbing Sun
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  3. Bernhard Hommel
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  4. Ke Ma
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Contributions

Y.S. and K.M. developed the study concept. All authors contributed to the study design. Participants testing and data collection were performed by Y.S. and R.Z. Data analysis and manuscript drafting was performed by Y.S. and K.M., and B.H. provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

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Correspondence to Bernhard Hommel or Ke Ma.

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The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article. All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the Ethical Standards of Ethics Committee in Southwest University and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments. Informed consents were obtained from all participants included in this study.

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Raw data of the study are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/t3zgj/) and the experiment was not preregistered.

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Sun, Y., Zhu, R., Hommel, B. et al. Social exclusion in a virtual Cyberball game reduces the virtual hand illusion. Psychon Bull Rev (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02456-w

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