People who ghost tend to feel worse about it than the people they ghost realize

When someone stops responding to your messages, it is easy to assume they simply do not care. But new research suggests that people who leave messages unanswered tend to feel worse about their silence than their conversation partners realize. The findings, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, also indicate that even a brief reply can narrow this emotional misunderstanding.

Ghosting occurs when one person abruptly stops responding to another person’s messages without an explanation. In the context of digital communication, it happens when at least one person in the exchange believes the silence might be permanent. Ghosting can range from an intentional decision to end a romantic relationship to a temporary lapse where someone reads a message but gets distracted and forgets to reply. The researchers call the person who stops responding the “ghoster” and the person left waiting the “ghostee.”

Prior studies suggest that cutting someone off emotionally takes a toll on the person doing the rejecting. For example, a 2013 study found that socially excluding someone actually causes emotional distress for the person enforcing the exclusion. Building on this idea, a 2022 study of people who had both ghosted and been ghosted by romantic partners found that ghosters were more likely to describe feeling guilty, but also relieved, while those who were ghosted more often described sadness and hurt.

The research was led by Sophia Li of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Coral Zheng, a PhD candidate in organizational behavior at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, who contributed equally to the work. They wanted to expand on this psychological dynamic.

“Ghosting has been a very common, popular, but also annoying phenomenon to many people nowadays. So I think, first of all, we’re definitely motivated to study ghosting as a real-world problem,” Zheng told PsyPost.

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“At the same time, the past literature usually defines it as a breakup strategy in the romantic context, while we think there’s more than that,” Zheng explained. “In addition to an intentional strategy that aims to permanently dissolve a relationship, there are situations where people accidentally forget to respond, simply do not see the message, strategically postpone a response (which the other person might already interpret as ghosting), etc. Thus, we want to include a broader definition of ghosting that includes unintentional, temporary ghosting and across different contexts as well.”

To capture this, the researchers designed a series of studies to see if the victims of ghosting actually recognize the internal distress experienced by the people ignoring them. If ghostees fail to notice this guilt, they might falsely assume the other person is entirely cold or hostile.

In the first study, they recruited 195 adults and asked them to recall a specific time they communicated online with someone they knew who wasn’t a close friend or immediate family member. Half of the participants recalled a time they ghosted someone, while the other half recalled a time they were ghosted. The participants then rated how bad they felt about the situation and predicted how bad the other person felt on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 meant “not bad at all” and 5 meant “extremely bad.”

The researchers found that the people who ghosted others reported feeling worse (an average score of 2.27) than the victims predicted they would feel (an average score of 1.56). The victims underestimated how much guilt and sadness the ghosters felt, but also how relieved they were. The gap was wider when the ghosting was unintentional, such as when someone simply forgot to text back: these ghosters felt particularly bad, but the people they ghosted did not anticipate this. Interestingly, ghosters were accurate in predicting how bad the ghostees felt (averaging 2.11 for both actual and predicted feelings).

In the second study, the researchers tested 601 adults using imagined scenarios. Participants pictured texting back and forth with a friend they did not know very well. Half imagined being the one who stopped replying, and half imagined being the one left waiting. Each participant considered two versions of the scenario: one in which no reply came at all, and one in which the friend sent a short message reading, “Sorry, but I can’t talk right now.”

Once again, those imagining being the ghoster expected to feel worse (an average score of 3.23) than the people imagining being ghosted predicted (1.94). Sending a short reply narrowed this gap: responders expected to feel less bad (2.33), and receivers’ predictions (1.82) came closer to the mark. The brief message also reduced self-blame. When ghosted, about a third of receivers assumed they had been annoying their friend, compared with about one in five after a short reply, with most assuming the friend was simply busy.

For the third study, the researchers paired up adults in an online chatroom for an eight-minute text conversation designed to help them get to know each other. Afterward, one person in each pair was given a choice to either participate in a second five-minute conversation or skip it entirely. If they chose to skip it, their partner was left waiting alone in the chatroom without any explanation. Of the 229 pairs who completed the study, the researchers analyzed the 175 in which one partner chose to skip.

In the live experiment, the overall pattern did not hold. On average, the people left waiting did not underestimate how bad their partners felt (3.26 for those who skipped versus 3.35 predicted, on a scale where 5 meant “extremely bad”), though they did overestimate how negatively the skippers felt toward them (3.41 predicted versus 2.29 actual). Part of the explanation may be that the two sides did not always agree on what had happened. People who skipped the chat rated their behavior as less like ghosting (2.56) than their waiting partners did (3.06).

“The affective misperceptions between the ghosters and ghostees also show that the experience and subjective perceptions are sometimes asymmetric,” Zheng noted. “Therefore, the current work also argues that ghosting is a subjective experience – if at least one of the communication parties perceives their experience as ghosting, it is ghosting to this particular party. It could either be the ghoster actually wants to ghost but the ghostee doesn’t feel so, or the ghostee feels ghosted albeit the ghoster does not mean to.”

In an analysis that was not planned in advance, the researchers looked only at participants who rated the behavior as ghosting (a 4 or 5 on the 5-point scale). In that group, the original pattern reappeared: those who skipped felt worse (3.93) than those left waiting predicted (3.51). Across all pairs, the people left waiting also underestimated how much their partners wanted to develop a friendship.

These results offer a new perspective on why communication breakdowns happen and how they are perceived by both sides. The findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that people who are ghosted tend to underestimate how much the person who ignored them still cares about their well-being. That earlier work focused on ghosters’ concern for the other person rather than on how bad ghosters themselves feel. Together, these studies suggest that the quiet side of a digital conversation may be more conflicted than it appears.

“If you’ve been ghosted, it may help to know that the person who hasn’t responded probably feels worse than you expected. If you’re the one who hasn’t responded, maybe consider sending a short reply before going silent,” Zheng said. “We hope to help both parties understand the other person’s perspective, reduce misunderstandings, and increase well-being for both sides.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The live experiment, the most realistic of the three, did not find the overall effect; it emerged only among participants who saw the behavior as ghosting, an analysis the researchers had not planned in advance. People left waiting were also told their partner might not return, which may have reduced the uncertainty that usually comes with being ghosted.

The interactions also involved short online chats between complete strangers, which might not capture the intense emotional weight of being ghosted by a long-term romantic partner or a close friend. Another limitation is that all the participants were based in the United States. In cultures where avoiding direct confrontation is considered polite, people might not feel as guilty about ghosting, and victims might interpret the silence differently.

There is also an ongoing debate among psychologists about how to precisely define ghosting. As the third study showed, two people can experience the exact same conversation and disagree on whether ghosting actually took place. As digital communication continues to evolve, researchers will need to keep exploring where people draw the line between a delayed response and a permanent digital exit.

Looking ahead, Zheng pointed out that complete silence is only one part of a larger puzzle. “Besides the complete silence, which is ghosting, there are many other aspects in online communication that are still underexplored,” she told PsyPost. “For example, how do people feel and predict the other person’s feelings based on the speed of a response, the length of a message, the tone of a message, whether there are emojis/punctuation or not, whether the tone is positive vs. neutral, etc. The elements in online communication dynamics are fascinating.”

The study, “The Pain of Ghosting? People Underestimate How Bad Their Conversation Partners Feel About Not Responding,” was authored by Sophia Li, Coral Zheng, and Juliana Schroeder.