Associations between perceived injustice,unforgiveness,and psychological well-being among ex-communicants

Abstract

Through the experiences of individuals excommunicated from a small religious sect (N = 95), we explored the association between perceptions of injustice resulting from chronic social exclusion and reduced psychological well-being. We also tested whether unforgiveness toward the church—particularly a tendency for participants to experience lingering negative affect and rumination about their treatment by the church—mediates this association. Analysis of responses to an online survey about participants’ experiences of chronic ostracism revealed the predicted association between perceived injustice and both anxiety and loneliness but not depression and supported our prediction that emotional-ruminative unforgiveness explains this association. Our findings also call into question whether the psychological outcomes of prolonged social exclusion are necessarily chronic and debilitating.

Keywords

Excommunication loneliness need to belong ostracism perceived injustice psychological well-being social exclusion unforgiveness

My marriage was destroyed…I lost my siblings and all my friends…It is not only membership…it’s a culture. I lost it all. For a long while after being expelled I felt very much alone…I WAS alone. My children and I were just thrown out with the trash. The part that hurts the most is the total, abrupt and complete loss of family and friends.

Male (age 43)

In this study, we investigated chronic social exclusion as it occurs in a religious context among members of a community for whom ostracism resulting from excommunication entails a profound and enduring loss of their most important social connections. We argue that excommunication poses a significant challenge to individuals’ ability to meet their need to belong and may have long-lasting impact on their psychological well-being. Through the lens of a sample of individuals who have been excommunicated from a small religious sect, we tested a conceptual model that postulates one route through which such effects may occur.

Excommunication

Excommunication is an institutionalized form of ostracism, similar to incarceration or political exile, used for purposes of social control (Wesselmann et al., 2014). It differs from other forms of ostracism in being role prescribed (i.e., church-mandated) and punitive (cf. Williams & Sommer, 1997). In the church from which our participants were expelled (hereafter “the Church”), excommunication is initiated when an individual is “put on repentance” or informed by Church leaders that they are in contravention of Church dictate(s). Individuals then have 1 year to publicly repent and seek to conform in those areas where they have violated Church doctrine or standards for behavior or leave the Church. Otherwise, they face excommunication. Whether it occurs by choice or through formal expulsion, leaving the Church inevitably results in significant loss of social ties as it greatly restricts members’ freedom to interact with the ex-communicant. The Church prohibits members from sitting at the same table with ex-communicants during meals, for example, and generally discourages more than perfunctory interaction. In practice, excommunication typically leads to shunning—complete loss of communication and contact.

Shunning is particularly problematic in the population under investigation. Entry into the Church most commonly occurs through birth or adoption. Consequently, excommunication almost always causes a significant rift in the families of those who leave because family members who remain in the Church must avoid certain forms of interaction with the ex-communicant or risk being placed on repentance themselves. The experience of being rejected or abandoned by a family member is profoundly disturbing, consistently ranking among the worst things family members can do to one another (Fitness, 2005). Ex-communicants are thus apt to find the experience of being shunned by family members deeply unsettling and upsetting.

Ex-communicants from this church may also find it difficult to turn to their broader communities for support after leaving the Church because the Church discourages more than superficial social interaction with outsiders. Members typically live and work in small, tightly knit rural communities and, in part because it subscribes to a doctrine stating that it is the one true church, the Church enforces practices (i.e., a strict set of quite conservative rules regarding appearance and lifestyle, such as requiring that women wear head coverings and men grow beards and prohibiting exposure to television or radio) that minimize integration with the wider community. Consequently, not only do ex-communicants from this population find themselves cut off from family and friends in the Church when they leave, they also find themselves alone in a community to which they do not feel they belong. As the opening quote exemplifies, the Church is more than a religious community to its adherents—it is a culture and a way of life.

The fact that the ostracizing agent in this case is a religious institution may further exacerbate the impact of excommunication for these individuals. Some scholars have suggested that religion and religious communities may help individuals cope with the negative effects of ostracism (e.g., loneliness, a sense of lost social identity) and satisfy the needs that social exclusion threatens (Aydin et al., 2010; Wesselmann & Williams, 2010). Thus, in comparison with those who experience other forms of ostracism and social exclusion, our participants lack access to one of the primary social institutions to which they might turn for solace. As if it were not bad enough to be stripped of their family, friends, community, and culture, ex-communicants from the Church are also robbed of a commonly sought source of comfort and support (unless they join another church).

Chronic ostracism

Much of the research on social exclusion has been experimental in nature (see, e.g., Williams & Jarvis’s, 2006, review of research employing the cyberball paradigm) and focused on the immediate or very short-term impact of being excluded, or what Williams (2007) refers to as the “reflexive” stage of ostracism. In contrast, we focus on the later “acceptance” or “resignation” stage, when ostracism has become chronic. The resignation stage remains comparatively understudied (Wesselmann et al., 2014; see Zadro, 2004, for an exception) in part because it is difficult if not impossible to study chronic ostracism in the lab or using experimental methods. As ex-communicants, our participants were targets of naturally occurring chronic ostracism, thus offering a unique window on the experience of prolonged social exclusion.

In line with theoretical arguments concerning the psychological impact of threats to individuals’ need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), studies investigating the immediate effects of ostracism identify both anxiety (Maner et al., 2007; Williams, 2007) and depression (MacDonald & Leary, 2005; Maner et al., 2007; Poulsen & Carmon, 2015; Williams, 2007) as common psychological outcomes of social exclusion. Findings from the one study of chronic ostracism we found in the literature (Zadro, 2004, study 1) suggest that prolonged social exclusion may also cause depression. We thus measured both depression and anxiety to permit investigation of the psychological impact of chronic ostracism on participants’ current psychological well-being. Given theoretical and empirically demonstrated connections between loneliness and social exclusion (e.g., Allen & Badcock, 2003; Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Cacioppo et al., 2003; Williams, 2007) and the pivotal role loneliness plays in discussions of the need to belong, we measured loneliness as an additional psychological outcome of interest.

Perceptions of injustice, unforgiveness, and psychological well-being

The conceptual model tested in this article posits a possible route through which excommunication and subsequent shunning may affect psychological well-being (see Figure 1). According to this model, individuals who have experienced prolonged social exclusion may experience diminished psychological well-being because they construe the Church’s actions in excommunicating and shunning them as wrongful (i.e., unjust, morally wrong) and experience those actions as hurtful and upsetting. Our participants would have known—and been clearly and, indeed, publicly informed—that their behavior or beliefs violated Church dictates. Nevertheless, people find even mild and inadvertent acts of social exclusion quite upsetting (Eisenberger et al., 2003; Wesselmann & Williams, 2010; Williams, 2009). More generally, we typically experience acts that result in injury, offense, or harm as transgressions, reflecting an “injustice gap” or discrepancy between the way we believe we ought to have been treated and our perception of the actual treatment received (Exline et al., 2003).

Figure 1.

Conceptual model explaining the effects of perceived injustice on psychological well-being.

“Victims” of shunning may perceive their treatment as illegitimate, unfair, and hurtful for several reasons. They may disagree, for example, with the rule(s) whose violation caused their excommunication—and thus with the notion that their behavior or beliefs were wrong in the first place. They may view the punishment (i.e., excommunication and consequent shunning) as unduly harsh and excessive, perhaps especially so as their families also suffer. Or they may subscribe to the view that, despite its teachings, the Church ought to practice compassion, not condemnation. Whatever the case, we argue that perceptions that they have been treated unjustly are important antecedents of diminished psychological well-being among ex-communicants.

Our review of the literature failed to identify any studies examining the possibility that perceptions of injustice resulting from social exclusion might be associated with reduced psychological well-being. However, research in other domains lends general support to the notion that experiences of injustice may compromise individuals’ mental health. For example, studies link both discrimination (i.e., social injustice) and workplace injustice to markers of diminished psychological well-being such as depression (e.g., Elovainio et al., 2001; Krieger, 1999). We test this injustice well-being pathway in a social exclusion context.

Our model further proposes that unforgiveness mediates the association between perceptions of unjust treatment and psychological well-being. We define unforgiveness as “a psychological state people may experience when they do not forgive” (Jones Ross et al., 2018, p. 1069; see also Stackhouse et al., 2016, 2018).

Stackhouse and colleagues describe unforgiveness with respect to variation along dimensions reflecting the extent to which individuals experience (a) rumination and unforgiving emotions such as anger, bitterness, and resentment (“emotional-ruminative” unforgiveness; cf. Worthington, 2001); (b) cognitions that cast into doubt whether the offense is forgivable, call into question the value of forgiving, or position the individual as unwilling to forgive (“cognitive-evaluative” unforgiveness); and (c) difficulty disentangling the offender (i.e., the Church) from the offense (i.e., excommunication and shunning) resulting in a profound and negative change in how they view their offender (“offender reconstrual”). Our participants are likely to understand that their own beliefs or behavior precipitated their departure from the Church and that they are, in a real sense, “to blame” for their suffering. Nevertheless, as argued above, we expect they may come to construe themselves as wrongfully treated and as victims of injustice, given the magnitude, breadth, and duration of the ways excommunication is likely to have affected their lives. Our model, then, posits that perceptions of injustice will promote an unforgiving orientation toward the Church in which participants may experience rumination and lingering feelings of anger and resentment, believe that the Church’s actions do not deserve forgiveness, and/or experience significant alteration in their view of the Church.

Paths from unforgiveness to psychological well-being test the possibility that unforgiveness may be detrimental to psychological well-being and may explain the association between perceived injustice and well-being. Recent research suggests, however, that not all experiences of unforgiveness are alike (Jones Ross et al., 2018; Stackhouse et al., 2016) and that negative affect and rumination may be the mechanisms through which unforgiveness exerts harmful effects on health and well-being if and when such effects occur. Stackhouse et al. (2016) found that the emotional-ruminative—but not the cognitive-evaluative—dimension of unforgiveness was significantly related to negative affect, stress, anxiety, and depression and that negative affect mediated the association between emotional-ruminative unforgiveness and measures of psychological well-being (Stackhouse et al., 2016, did not examine offender reconstrual). We thus predict that emotional-ruminative unforgiveness will be associated with diminished psychological well-being and explore as a research question whether cognitive-evaluative unforgiveness or offender reconstrual do so as well.

In sum, our model presumes that, because excommunication may have potentially severe, wide-ranging, and long-lasting repercussions for those who experience it, ex-communicants may come to perceive that, in shunning them, the Church has wronged them. The model then proposes that (a) perceptions that they have been treated in a hurtful and unjust manner may lead ex-communicants to experience diminished psychological well-being. Furthermore, it proposes that the harmful effects of perceived injustice on psychological well-being may result in part because (b) perceptions of hurtful and unjust treatment lead ex-communicants to experience unforgiveness toward the Church and this unforgiveness—in particular, a tendency to experience lingering negative affect and to ruminate about this treatment—may have deleterious consequences for their psychological well-being.

Method

Participants

Our participants were former members of a small, conservative religious sect that practices excommunication and shunning as a means of disciplining those who violate its rules and matters of doctrine.¹ Interested individuals responded to a recruitment ad posted on two Facebook groups run by former Church members. Although the timing was not intentional, we posted the ad just before Christmas, which might be expected to have heightened the salience of issues of family, friends, and belonging.

A total of 174 individuals clicked on the survey link. Twenty-two proceeded no further than the first item (asking their age). An additional 56 quit without completing any of the items that assessed the nature of their experiences after leaving the Church. We dropped the data for these individuals (n = 78) as well as for one participant whose responses indicated she had never joined the church (thus eliminating the possibility that she could have experienced excommunication). The final sample (N = 95) comprised 46 women and 47 men (2 missing), aged 19–79 (M = 44.60, SD = 13.59; 37 missing). The majority (75.8%) self-identified as European in descent (nine missing; one endorsed 12 of the 13 options and careful examination indicated this was the only question she seemed to misunderstand, so we retained her data).

After completing data collection, we learned that Church members generally do not receive formal education beyond eighth grade. Our survey was rather long, especially considering 38% of our sample left school before 10th grade. We suspect that this may help explain the large number who quit the survey early.

Procedure

Contact with prospective participants was mediated by a former Church member who served as liaison with the Facebook group administrators. Administrators provided feedback on the survey which we incorporated into the final version.

The recruitment ad (see Supplemental Materials) described the study as an anonymous survey designed to explore ex-members’ “…experiences leading up to and in the aftermath of ex-communication/leaving the Church.” It informed prospective participants that they must be 18 or older, have been expelled from or otherwise left the Church (we did not use formal excommunication as an eligibility requirement because those who leave voluntarily upon being placed on repentance are subject to shunning in the same way as those expelled), and able to read and write in English. It also encouraged them to share the survey link with others who might be interested in participating. Clicking on the link brought participants to an online survey hosted on Qualtrics. Participants received no remuneration.

Materials

See the Supplementary Materials for the survey. The analyses reported in this article involve a subset of survey items.

Demographics and church history

Participants reported their age, gender, ethnicity, and highest level of education. Additional items asked whether participants were “born” into the church (vs. adopted or raised as foster children), the year they joined the Church, the year they decided to leave or were excommunicated, the grounds for excommunication, and whether their spouse and child(ren) left or were excommunicated. Participants also reported the number of times they had been (a) put on repentance and (b) excommunicated and indicated their understanding of their departure from the Church by selecting “I was formally excommunicated (i.e., the Church made me leave),” “I left the Church (i.e., I chose to leave the Church),” or “both of the above.”

As some participants left the Church voluntarily and others were formally excommunicated, we asked both how much time had elapsed since participants left the Church and how much time had elapsed since they were excommunicated. Twenty-three participants completed both items. The 2 items were highly correlated (r = .98, p < .001) so we averaged across both items for these individuals in our analyses.

Perceived injustice

Among a set of items investigating various aspects of their current perspectives on religion and the Church, participants completed 8 items assessing the extent to which they perceived that the Church and its members had treated them in an unjust and hurtful fashion (e.g., “the Church was right in excommunicating me,” “the Church treated me extremely unfairly,” “the Church treated me very badly.” The remaining items are identified in the Supplemental Materials). Participants indicated their responses on a 5-point scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). Higher scores on the index created by averaging scores on these items (α = .85) reflect greater perceptions of unjust treatment.

Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-18 (DASS-18)

The DASS-18 (Oie et al., 2013) assesses nonclinical depression (7 items, e.g., “I felt life was meaningless”), anxiety (7 items, e.g., “I felt scared without any good reason”), and stress (4 items; not analyzed in this article). Participants indicated their response to each item on a 4-point response scale (0 = did not apply to me at all to 3 = applied to me very much or most of the time). Consistent with past practice, we created total subscale scores for the Depression (α = .93) and Anxiety (α = .87) subscales. Higher scores reflect greater depression and anxiety, respectively.

UCLA Loneliness Scale

Participants used a 4-point response scale (0 = I often feel this way to 3 = I never feel this way) to indicate how frequently they felt as described in each of 20 statements (e.g., “I am unable to reach out and communicate with those around me;” Russell et al., 1978). Consistent with past practice, we created a total scale score. We reverse-coded each item prior to summing, so that higher scores reflect greater loneliness (α = .96).

Unforgiveness measure (UM)

The 13-item UM (Stackhouse et al., 2018) assesses emotional-ruminative unforgiveness (6 items, e.g., “this transgression no longer has any negative effects on my well-being;” α = .80), cognitive-evaluative unforgiveness (4 items, e.g., “I have no desire to forgive my former church;” α = .92), and offender reconstrual (3 items, e.g., “this event changed the way I see my former church;” α = .80). See the Supplemental Materials for the remaining items. We reworded items to refer to the Church as the transgressor. Participants indicated their agreement with each item on a 7-point scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). Higher scores reflect greater unforgiveness.

Results

Participants varied considerably in the time elapsed since they left the Church (range = 1–53 years). On average, however, their departure occurred approximately 20 years (M = 19.99, SD = 17.00) prior to their participation. They were also apt to hold a complex view of their departure—to see it as a result of both formal sanction and personal choice (42.1%)—rather than having been entirely imposed by the Church (21.3%) or entirely voluntary (35.8%). When asked how often they had been put on repentance, nearly 10% of participants reported that they had been put on repentance more than once (range = 0–3; in every case but one,² participants who reported 0 when asked how many times they had been on repentance had been expelled from or left the Church at least once). Just over 20% reported being excommunicated or leaving the Church twice or more (range = 0–5).

Participants endorsed a wide variety of reasons for their excommunication (M = 4.18, SD = 2.17, range = 0–9). The three most common involved disagreeing with the Church’s lifestyle requirements (64.2%) or One True Church policy (61.1%) and failing to be submissive to correction (61.1%). Other frequently endorsed reasons included having a spirit of nonconformity (55.8%) and disagreeing with requirements concerning personal appearance (49.5%).

Most participants were not alone among their family members in having left the Church: Approximately half (49.5%) reported that their spouse and 84.2% reported that other members of their family (e.g., children) had also been expelled or left. We did not ask who left first. We understand, however, that it is rare for both spouses to leave simultaneously.

Testing our conceptual model

Preliminary analyses

We confirmed the factor structure of the constructs in our model through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Additional CFAs confirmed the appropriateness of treating the three UM dimensions as separate mediators and the three measures of psychological well-being as separate outcome variables. See the Supplemental Materials for relevant statistics.

We also conducted a series of t tests and one-way analyses of variance to determine whether scores on the variables in our model differed as a function of participant gender or how participants construed their departure from the Church. Men reported significantly lower depression (M = 2.36, SD = 3.54) and anxiety (M = 1.91, SD = 2.56) than women, (depression M = 4.49, SD = 5.39, t(75.48) = −2.23, p = .03; anxiety M = 3.87, SD = 4.90, t(65.71) = −2.38, p = .02). No other sex differences approached significance, ts < |1.47|, ps > .15. The effect of construal (i.e., participants’ views as to whether they left the Church of their own volition, were excommunicated, or both) on scores on the offender reconstrual dimension of unforgiveness was significant, as well, F(2, 81) = 3.35, p = .04. Post hoc Tukey’s HSD tests revealed that participants who considered their departure from the Church a personal choice (M = 4.12, SD = 1.67) reported less change in their view of the Church than those who considered their departure partly involuntary–partly voluntary (M = 5.16, SD = 1.73). Those who considered their departure involuntary (M = 4.92, SD = 1.30) fell in between. No other construal differences approached significance, Fs < 1.68, ps > .19.³

Descriptive statistics and bivariate associations

Interestingly, current levels of loneliness, depression, and anxiety provided little indication that our participants were “suffering” in terms of their psychological well-being (see Table 1). The mean on the UCLA Loneliness Scale was 21.10 (SD = 13.95), the mean on the DASS-18 Depression subscale was 3.67 (SD = 4.99), and the mean on the DASS-18 Anxiety subscale was 3.02 (SD = 4.09). These values fall well below means reported in other studies using the same or nearly identical measures (cf. Cutrona et al., 1986; Oei et al., 2013; Russell et al., 1978, 1980).

Table 1.

Correlations and descriptive statistics.^a

Variable	Mean	SD	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
1. Perceived injustice	3.62	0.87	.31**	.25*	.44***	.29**	−.001	.21*	−.01	−.23*
2. Cognitive-evaluative unforgiveness	2.61	1.72	—	.26*	.20^†	.22*	.20^†	.30**	−.11	−.12
3. Emotional-ruminative unforgiveness	2.90	1.36		—	.45***	.48***	.34**	.43***	−.06	−.22^†
4. Offender reconstrual	4.79	1.67			—	.20^†	.14	.28**	−.03	−.20^†
5. Loneliness	21.10	13.95				—	.50***	.47***	−.09	−.15
6. Depression	3.67	4.99					—	.74***	−.21*	−.22*
7. Anxiety	3.02	4.09						—	−.19^†	−.25*
8. Age	49.01	16.33							—	.83***
9. Time since departure	19.99	17.00								—

Note. N = 95.

^a Ns vary due to missing data.

^† p < .10; *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.

In contrast, even two decades later on average, participants reported reasonably strong beliefs that the Church had treated them unjustly in excommunicating them (M = 3.62, SD = 0.87) and, in line with their sentiments that they had been seriously wronged, reported a considerable negative shift in their view of the Church and its members (i.e., a reasonably high score on the offender reconstrual dimension of unforgiveness). Interestingly, this shift in construal of the Church (M = 4.79, SD = 1.67) was not accompanied by correspondingly high levels of either emotional-ruminative (M = 2.90, SD = 1.36) or cognitive-evaluative unforgiveness (M = 2.61, SD = 1.72). In fact, on average, participants generally disagreed (i.e., the mean falls toward the “strongly disagree” end of the continuum) with items asking whether they experienced lingering negative affect and rumination regarding their expulsion or harbored an unforgiving evaluative stance toward the Church (e.g., an unwillingness to forgive, beliefs that forgiving would have no value). Notably, mean scores on these two unforgiveness dimensions are much lower than those reported in previous studies examining unforgiveness in a broader context (i.e., not in response to excommunication) conducted with undergraduate samples (cf. Stackhouse et al., 2016, 2018). They demonstrate more than ample variation, nevertheless, to warrant testing their role as mediators in our model.

Examination of the bivariate correlations among the variables in our model revealed that perceived injustice is correlated with all three dimensions of unforgiveness and two of the three well-being measures. The more participants agreed with items suggesting that the Church and its members had wronged them and treated them unjustly, the more they reported experiencing loneliness (r = .29, p = .006), anxiety (r = .21, p = .046), an unforgiving evaluative stance toward their “wrongdoer(s)” (r = .31, p = .004), lingering negative affect and rumination about their treatment (r = .25, p = .02), and difficulty reconciling their present view of the Church with their pre-excommunication view (r = .44, p < .001). A small but significant correlation between perceived injustice and time since excommunication (r = −.23, p = .03) also suggests that perceptions of injustice may decrease with the passage of time.

Additionally, emotional-ruminative unforgiveness is positively and significantly correlated with all three psychological well-being variables (rs ≥ .34, ps ≤ .001), cognitive-evaluative unforgiveness is positively and significantly correlated with both loneliness and anxiety (rs .22 and .30, respectively, ps ≤ .045) and marginally correlated with depression (r = .20, p = .07), and offender reconstrual is positively and significantly correlated with anxiety (r = .28, p = .009) and marginally correlated with loneliness (r = .20, p = .07). These correlations suggest that unforgiveness is associated with poorer psychological well-being.

Testing the parallel mediation model

Our conceptual model is grounded on the premise that perceptions that they have been treated in a hurtful and unjust manner may lead ex-communicants to experience diminished psychological well-being.⁴ The bivariate correlations reported above provide partial support for this prediction. Congruent with our model, and as reported previously, perceived injustice is correlated with both loneliness and anxiety (but not depression).

Our model further supposes that the harmful effects of perceived injustice on psychological well-being may result in part because perceptions of hurtful and unjust treatment lead ex-communicants to experience unforgiveness toward the Church and this unforgiveness—in particular, a tendency to experience lingering negative affect and to ruminate about this treatment—may have deleterious consequences for their psychological well-being. We tested the proposed mediation pathways in our model using the SPSS PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2018), treating the three dimensions of unforgiveness as parallel mediators (Model 4).⁵ Given the gender differences observed for depression and anxiety, we included gender as a control variable when testing the model for these measures. We evaluated the significance of the paths with 10,000 bootstrap samples. Paths are significant when the 95% confidence interval (CI) does not contain 0.⁶ Due to missing data, the model was tested on a data set with n = 85 for loneliness and n = 84 for depression and anxiety.

Consistent with our conceptual model, the tests of the parallel mediators support our prediction that the effect of perceived injustice on psychological well-being is explained by emotional-ruminative unforgiveness (see Tables 2 and 3) The specific indirect effect of perceived injustice through emotional-ruminative unforgiveness controlling for all other mediators (and for gender in the case of depression and anxiety) is significant in analysis of loneliness, b = 1.89, SE = .97, 95% CI [.28, 4.09]; depression, b = .40, SE = .24, 95% CI [.02, .96]; and anxiety, b = .41, SE = .23, 95% CI [.05, .93]). The corresponding specific indirect effects of perceived unforgiveness through cognitive-evaluative unforgiveness and offender reconstrual were nonsignificant.

Table 2.

Unstandardized regression coefficients, standard errors, and model summary information for the parallel mediation model.

Predictor/mediator/control	Outcome
	Emotional-ruminative unforgiveness				Cognitive-evaluative unforgiveness				Offender reconstrual				Loneliness (N = 85)				Depression (N = 84)			Anxiety (N = 84)
		b	SE	p		b	SE	p		b	SE	p		b	SE	p	b	SE	p	b	SE	p
Perceived injustice	a ₁	0.40	0.17	.02	a ₂	0.63	0.22	.004	a ₃	0.88	0.20	<.001	c′	3.50	1.79	.053	0.03	0.57	.96	0.59	0.50	.24
Emotional-ruminative unforgiveness		—	—	—		—	—	—		—	—	—	b ₁	4.88	1.12	<.001	1.00	0.36	.007	1.03	0.31	.002
Cognitive-emotional unforgiveness		—	—	—		—	—	—		—	—	—	b ₂	0.45	0.83	.55	0.27	0.26	.29	0.36	0.22	.11
Offender reconstrual		—	—	—		—	—	—		—	—	—	b ₃	−1.05	0.97	.28	−0.12	0.30	.70	0.06	0.26	.83
Gender	f ₁	0.17	0.14	.25		0.08	0.19	.66		0.15	0.17	.39		—	—	—	−1.25	0.43	.005	−1.05	0.37	.006
Constant	i_M ₁	1.38	0.63	.03	i_M ₂	0.28	0.81	.74	i_M ₃	1.52	0.74	.05	i_Y	−2.11	6.11	.73	0.04	1.93	.98	−3.50	1.68	.04
	R ² = .07				R ² = .10				R ² = .20				R ² = .28				R ² = .20			R ² = .32
	F(2, 81) = 3.19, p = .047				F(2, 81) = 4.33, p = .02				F(2, 81) = 10.25, p < .001				F(4, 80) = 7.71, p < .001				F(5, 78) = 3.94,p =.003			F(5, 78) = 7.25, p < .001

Note. b = unstandardized coefficient; a_i = effect of predictor on mediator, controlling for gender; b_i = effect of mediator on outcome, controlling for predictor, other mediators, and gender; c′ = direct effect of predictor on outcome, controlling for mediators and gender; f = control variable (gender); R ² = variance explained in the outcome by the predictor, mediators, and gender; i_Mi = intercept. Standard errors and 95% confidence intervals for the indirect effect are bias-corrected bootstrapped estimates obtained with the PROCESS procedure for IBM SPSS (Hayes, 2018) based on 10,000 bootstrapped samples. Gender is coded −1 for women, 1 for men. In the interests of space, we report the results for the three unforgiveness dimensions as outcomes controlling for gender, despite the fact that gender was included as a control variable in analysis of just two of the three well-being variables (i.e., depression and anxiety). For loneliness, the results for the unforgiveness dimensions from the analysis excluding gender do not differ substantially from those presented here (available upon request).

Table 3.

Direct and indirect effects and 95% CIs for the parallel mediation model.^a

Variable	Loneliness				Depression				Anxiety
	Indirect effect		Direct effect		Indirect effect		Direct effect		Indirect effect		Direct effect
	b (SE)	95% CI	b (SE)	95% CI	b (SE)	95% CI	b (SE)	95% CI	b (SE)	95% CI	b (SE)	95% CI
Perceived injustice			3.50 (1.79)	[−.05, 7.01]			0.03 (.57)	[−1.11, 1.16]			0.59 (.50)	[−.40, 1.58]
Emotional-ruminative unforgiveness	1.89 (.97)	[.28, 4.09]			0.40 (.24)	[.02, .96]			0.41 (.23)	[.05, .93]
Cognitive-emotional unforgiveness	0.28 (.62)	[−.69, 1.78]			.17 (.18)	[−.15, .60]			0.23 (.17)	[−.06, .62]
Offender reconstrual	−0.90 (.98)	[−2.78, 1.16]			−0.10 (.28)	[−.66, .45]			0.05 (.21)	[−.35, .50]

Note. N = 85. b = unstandardized coefficient; CI = confidence interval. Standard errors and 95% CIs for the indirect effect are bias-corrected bootstrapped estimates obtained with the PROCESS procedure for IBM SPSS (Hayes, 2018) based on 10,000 bootstrapped samples.

^a N = 84 for depression and anxiety due to missing data for gender.

In sum, our results provide partial support for our model. Congruent with our predictions, there was a significant positive association between perceived injustice and psychological well-being as measured by anxiety and loneliness, though not depression. In addition, the proposed indirect effect through emotional-ruminative unforgiveness was significant. Given the low N in our parallel mediator analyses, the results for cognitive-evaluative unforgiveness and offender reconstrual as mediators are inconclusive and therefore difficult to interpret.

Discussion

When they left the Church on average two decades previously, our participants experienced significant constraints on their interactions with many of the most important members of their social networks, they lost access to a key resource to which they might have turned for solace to deal with the impact of their departure (i.e., the Church), and they lost the only community and way of life many had known. Their experiences thus offered a unique opportunity to investigate the psychological impact of ostracism among those subject to social exclusion that was profound, enduring, and far-reaching. Our results suggest that perceptions that they have been treated in a hurtful and unjust fashion may lead ex-communicants to experience unforgiveness toward the church that expelled them and, in turn, this unforgiveness—particularly when it involves a tendency to dwell on the unjust treatment and to experience lingering bitterness and resentment—may have deleterious consequences for their psychological well-being.

To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore perceived injustice as a variable of interest in the context of research on social exclusion, or at least the first to investigate the possibility that such perceptions might be associated with diminished psychological well-being. Our findings suggest that there may be considerable value in further exploring the role of perceived injustice in explaining how people evaluate, experience, and respond to social exclusion.

Concerns about deservingness and entitlement—about what is fair and just—have been identified as core to understanding many other psychological phenomena (see Sabbagh & Schmitt, 2016, for a review). Indeed, there are compelling arguments for considering concerns about justice to be fundamental drivers of human thought, feeling, and behavior (e.g., Ellard et al., 2016; Gollwitzer & van Prooijen, 2016). Our findings highlight the possibility that considerations of justice may be important to obtaining a full understanding of the impact of ostracism, as well, and identify important questions for investigation. For example, in the specific context of excommunication—where an individual could be reasonably expected to know that, according to church doctrine, their own behavior legitimizes the social exclusion to which they have been subjected (i.e., they “brought it on themselves”)—what experiences and attributions lead ex-communicants to perceive that they have been treated unfairly? Additionally, to what extent are such perceptions conditional on the experience of shunning that often—but not always—accompanies excommunication?

Our findings also suggest that, in the context of understanding the experience of chronic ostracism, the association between perceived injustice and psychological well-being may be mediated by emotional-ruminative unforgiveness. Findings in Stackhouse et al. (2016) and theorizing in Jones Ross et al. (2018) and Stackhouse et al. (2018) suggest that the deleterious effects of unforgiveness might be tied specifically to the experience of negative affect and rumination rather than to other aspects of people’s experiences of unforgiveness (e.g., unforgiving beliefs, difficulties reconciling the offender’s actions with former views of the offender). This is an intriguing possibility which suggests that withholding forgiveness may not always and inevitably obstruct recovery after an offense. The forgiveness literature generally assumes that forgiving is the most adaptive, beneficial, and healthy response to wrongdoing (cf. Macaskill, 2005, and Murphy, 2005) and that unforgiveness is associated with negative consequences (e.g., diminished psychological and physical well-being; see Stackhouse et al., 2018). In light of research findings and theorizing which call this assumption into question (e.g., Luchies et al., 2010; McNulty, 2008; McNulty & Russell, 2016), our results highlight the need for finer-grained investigations of unforgiveness that disentangle the effects of lingering negative emotion and preoccupation with the offense (i.e., emotional-ruminative unforgiveness) from the effects of variation along other dimensions of people’s experiences of unforgiveness.

Interestingly, our data provide little evidence of the poor psychological well-being that Williams and others have suggested marks the experience of prolonged ostracism. In the few discussions of chronic ostracism we found in the literature (e.g., van Beest & Williams, 2011; Williams, 2007, 2009; Zadro, 2004), the effects of prolonged social exclusion were always described as potentially profound (e.g., helplessness, alienation, depression). In contrast, our participants compared favorably to other samples on measures of loneliness, depression, and anxiety, if anything reporting less psychological disturbance in these areas than the samples examined in those other studies. How do we make sense of these findings?

One possible explanation hinges on the nature of our sample. We recruited participants from groups populated by individuals who shared the same or very similar experiences of excommunication and shunning. Perhaps membership in these groups helped participants satisfy their need to belong and thereby served to ameliorate many of the negative effects of prolonged ostracism they would otherwise have suffered over time. In fact, it is possible that participants’ relationships with other members of these groups may have come to replace (at least some of) the relationships lost or damaged due to excommunication. If this supposition is correct, it suggests that we might have observed greater evidence of diminished psychological well-being had we recruited a broader sample that included ex-communicants not belonging to the Facebook groups or deliberately recruited those not associated with such groups. Perhaps those suffering the kinds of experience that Williams and others have postulated as the likely outcome of chronic social exclusion simply did not participate in our study.

Another possibility is that the presumption that chronic ostracism leaves people more or less permanently “wounded” may not represent the full range of experiences among those subject to prolonged social exclusion. As with most other negative life experiences, there may be those who not only “recover” from ostracism’s ill effects—likely by finding others who will accept them and welcome them into their social networks—but even those who use their experiences to negotiate social relationships superior to those they were forced to leave behind. We do not mean to diminish the very real pain that those who experience enduring episodes of social exclusion may face. However, given arguments that relationships are to some extent substitutable in meeting belongingness needs (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), it seems reasonable to presume that—where people are able to replace lost or damaged relationships with new relationships—they will make the effort to do so. For those who succeed, this may substantially diminish the negative consequences of chronic ostracism. It is also possible, of course, that some Church members find ways to “satisfy” the Church’s requirements for shunning that do not result in complete cessation of contact or communication with ex-communicants (i.e., engaging with the ex-communicant when such engagement cannot be observed). Regrettably, we did not ask participants whether they still maintain contact or communication with their friends and family in the Church, so we cannot comment on the extent to which that may explain our results.

In comparison with previously published research, we also found very high levels of offender reconstrual and rather low levels of both emotional-ruminative and cognitive-evaluative unforgiveness. Based on analysis of a set of interviews probing individuals’ experiences when they had and had not forgiven, Jones Ross et al. (2018) argued that, rather than distinguishing among different experiences of unforgiveness, variation in offender reconstrual distinguishes those who have forgiven from those who have not. In particular, their participants tended to describe enduring negative shifts in their views of their offenders (often reflected in an inability to reconcile the offender’s actions with the person they believed the offender to be prior to the offense) only when they discussed offenses committed by those they had not forgiven and not when discussing offenses committed by those they had forgiven. Jones Ross et al. further argued that when, as in the present case, individuals report neither enduring negative affect and preoccupation with the offense nor a cognitive-evaluative stance that questions the value in—or even the possibility of—forgiving, it is because they have, in actuality, forgiven their offenders.

Viewed from this vantage point, the present results are rather confusing. On the one hand, participants’ low scores on the emotional-ruminative and cognitive-evaluative dimensions of unforgiveness might be taken to suggest that, many years after leaving the Church, participants have largely moved past any feelings of bitterness and resentment they may have experienced as a result of their excommunication and come much of the way, cognitively, toward being willing to forgive the Church for their treatment. On the other hand, their high scores on offender reconstrual suggest the opposite—at least if Jones Ross et al. are correct that negative shifts in construal of the offender are reflective of withholding rather than granting forgiveness.

Unfortunately, a fuller understanding of this unexpected pattern of results, and the conclusions it may afford, is complicated by the fact that we did not explicitly ask participants whether they had forgiven the Church and its members. Consequently, we do not know their position on this issue. Additionally, few studies have adopted the three-dimensional view of unforgiveness employed here, resulting in a dearth of studies reporting the descriptive statistics necessary to determine whether the pattern of results we obtained is as unusual as Jones Ross et al.’s (2018) theorizing suggests. Clearly, more research is needed to corroborate the results observed here and more fully unpack the associations among the three dimensions of unforgiveness in relation to forgiving.

Limitations and future directions

One of the most important limitations of the present study is its cross-sectional design. A thorough understanding of the experiences of those subject to prolonged social exclusion will require longitudinal designs that enable investigation of change over time. We measured our variables contemporaneously and on average approximately two decades after our participants were first excommunicated. Accordingly, our data provide a static snapshot of participants’ appraisals of their experiences after a very protracted period of ostracism.

Our participants were also former members of a single religious sect. Caution is thus warranted in generalizing our findings to ex-communicants from other faith communities. Excommunication occurs in other churches and faiths, but not all those that practice excommunication mandate shunning. Disentangling the effects of excommunication (i.e., expulsion from the church and the religious consequences of that expulsion) from the effects of being shunned by church members will require that researchers compare the experiences of ex-communicants from religious institutions that do not require adherents to shun those who leave with the experiences of ex-communicants from religious institutions that do.

Our participants’ experiences likely differ from those of some other ex-communicants, as well, because of the rather unique nature of the sect to which they belonged. The Church’s very conservative lifestyle and appearance requirements, One True Church policy, and isolation from the broader communities in which members live distinguish it to a greater or lesser degree from other religious institutions that practice excommunication and almost certainly shaped our participants’ experiences in ways that would not reflect the experiences of those expelled from other religious institutions. Indeed, some of the reasons our participants were excommunicated are unique to this particular church and therefore limit our ability to generalize our findings to other churches practicing excommunication.

As we acknowledged previously, our decision to recruit participants through Facebook groups for former Church members poses a further challenge to generalizability. Participation in these groups may have helped individuals satisfy their need to belong despite the shunning they experienced. Investigation of former Church members who chose not to associate themselves with these groups may reveal stronger associations than we observed. Alternatively, our participants’ involvement in these groups may be a sign that, compared with their counterparts not involved in these groups, they are angrier and more upset by their experiences. In this case, the associations we observed might be stronger than had we sampled individuals not affiliated with these groups.

Finally, our small sample constrained both the power of our statistical tests and our ability to generalize to the larger population of ex-communicants from the Church under investigation. The fact that many participants quit the survey prior to completing the items employed to measure the constructs tested in our model exacerbates these problems.

Despite these limitations, the present study makes a number of important contributions to the literature on social exclusion. First, as one of a very small number of studies examining chronic ostracism (cf. Zadro, 2004) and the only study (to our knowledge) to have examined ostracism resulting specifically from excommunication, our findings extend the literature by examining the long-term effects of prolonged social exclusion as it occurs among members of a religious community for whom ostracism entails a profound and enduring loss of social connections. Second, because our findings challenge the assumption in the literature that the psychological outcomes of prolonged social exclusion are necessarily chronic and debilitating, they call for further research with samples of individuals who have experienced protracted periods of social exclusion that would reveal whether these findings replicate in new samples or nonreligious contexts. Longitudinal investigations that follow individuals from initial point of exclusion over time and for many years would be ideal in this regard. Finally, our results highlight the need for additional research and theoretical development concerning (a) the role that ostracized individuals’ appraisals of the fairness of their treatment may play in determining the impact social exclusion has on their psychological well-being and (b) the processes by which experiences of unforgiveness may account for such impact. The results of such research might have important implications for the design of therapeutic approaches aimed at minimizing or ameliorating the effects of chronic ostracism on psychological well-being.

Supplemental Material

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Supplemental Material, shunning_survey.finalversion.ANONYMOUS.R2_(1) for Associations between perceived injustice, unforgiveness, and psychological well-being among ex-communicants by Susan D. Boon and Jac Brown in Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

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Footnotes

Authors’ note

Portions of the data in this article were presented at the 2016 meeting of the International Association for Relationship Research in Toronto, Ontario, July 20–24, the 2018 International Congress of Applied Psychology in Montreal, Québec, June 26–30, and the 2019 International Association for Relationship Research mini-conference in Brighton, UK, July 18–21.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Stasia Ricketts for assistance with preparation of the data file, Sara Salavati for assistance with data analysis, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Susan D. Boon

Open research statement

This research was not pre-registered. The data used in the research are not available. The recruitment ad and materials used in the research are available in the Supplemental Materials.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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