Ostracism or social exclusion within a group serves to discipline disagreeable, awkward, or free-loading members and thus promote cooperation—at least this was the assumption of previous research in this field. However, ostracism also develops in situations in which there is no need to discipline the behaviors of others, and the victims often seem to have been selected randomly. When asked, the ostracizers are oblivious of their acts, stressing that they had no intention of leaving a person out. Therefore, two researchers from the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich, Björn Lindström and Philippe Tobler, reasoned that ostracism may develop more incidentally than previously assumed. They studied how ostracism develops within groups, how it evolves over time and how it can be reduced.