This article briefly introduces and provides commentary on this special issue, "Investigating How Individuals Feel Ostracizing Others" in the Journal of Social Psychology. This commentary uses first-person recollections from early ostracism studies to help frame the special issue in the larger scope of ostracism research. Modern ostracism research started in the early 1990s and hundreds of studies have advanced our understanding of this phenomenon. However, the preponderance of research has focused on the target of ostracism (those being ostracized) and relied primarily on a single method in experimental studies. The present special issue includes articles that employed a variety of research approaches and focused exclusively on the sources (those who do the ostracism). Finally, this commentary invites researchers to more fully investigate this understudied aspect of a common phenomenon that people are likely to engage in regularly.
Keywords: sources of ostracism.