The psychological impact of ghosting lasts longer than outright rejection

Being ignored without explanation tends to cause more prolonged psychological distress than being directly rejected. A new study published in Computers in Human Behavior provides evidence that while both ghosting and explicit rejection hurt, the uncertainty of ghosting slows down a person’s emotional recovery. This research suggests that clear communication during a breakup, even in casual digital interactions, helps people process the event and move on more easily.

Ghosting is the practice of unilaterally ending a relationship by cutting off all communication without providing any explanation. It has become incredibly common in the digital age, especially on dating apps and social media platforms. The person who disappears leaves the other person to figure out what went wrong entirely on their own.

“Ghosting often comes up in everyday conversations about modern relationships and digital communication. While many people describe it as a particularly painful experience, others argue that disappearing might actually be kinder than explicitly rejecting someone. I wanted to test whether this intuition is actually true and better understand how people psychologically react to these two different ways of ending a relationship,” said Alessia Telari, a postdoctoral researcher at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, who conducted the research while at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

To understand how people react to this behavior, scientists have traditionally asked participants to remember past experiences. Relying on human memory can introduce biases, as people tend to alter their recollections over time to make sense of painful events. To get a more accurate picture, Telari and her colleagues created a real-time experiment to observe how the emotional fallout of ghosting unfolds day by day.

They wanted to compare these daily reactions directly to the effects of outright rejection, where a person explicitly states they no longer wish to talk. By tracking emotions over multiple days, the scientists hoped to see exactly how people cope with different forms of social exclusion. This multi-day approach provides a closer look at the specific psychological wounds caused by sudden silence.

Free daily newsletter

The researchers conducted two separate experiments using a newly developed chat format. In the first study, 46 young adults aged 19 to 34 participated in daily 15-minute text conversations using the Telegram messaging app. Each participant was paired with a study partner who was actually a confederate, meaning they were a research assistant acting as a regular participant.

The pairs chatted about casual topics like sports, music, and travel for three days. After each chat, participants filled out a questionnaire measuring their emotions, relationship satisfaction, and feelings of interpersonal closeness. They also rated their partner’s competence, sociability, and morality, while reporting on their own basic psychological needs for belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence.

On the fourth day, the researchers introduced different experimental scenarios. For 18 participants in the control group, the daily chats simply continued normally for three more days. For 13 participants, the partner explicitly rejected them by sending a message stating they were no longer interested in talking.

For the final 15 participants in the ghosting group, the partner completely stopped responding without any explanation. The scientists then tracked the participants’ daily survey responses to see how the different groups reacted to the sudden shift in the relationship. This allowed them to measure the immediate impact of the event as well as the recovery process over a span of six days.

The scientists found that both rejection and ghosting immediately damaged the relationship and caused a spike in negative emotions. Participants in both exclusion groups felt ignored, experienced threatened self-esteem, and reported less interpersonal closeness. A closer look at the data over the following days revealed distinct recovery patterns.

People who were directly rejected began to show signs of emotional recovery quite quickly. Their feelings of exclusion and threatened needs started to decline in the days following the event. In contrast, those who were ghosted experienced a more persistent negative emotional state.

Their basic psychological needs remained threatened, and their confusion stayed high. This pattern suggests that the lack of closure kept the ghosted participants from moving forward. The scientists noted that a simple, direct rejection gave participants the finality they needed to start coping.

“One interesting aspect was how similar the initial reactions to ghosting and rejection were,” Telari told PsyPost. “In both cases, people immediately felt hurt and their basic psychological needs were threatened. However, over the following days, the trajectories began to diverge. Participants who were rejected tended to recover more quickly, while those who were ghosted remained stuck in uncertainty for longer.”

To see if these patterns held up over a longer period, the scientists conducted a second study with 90 participants. This time, the experiment lasted for nine days instead of six, allowing for a longer observation of the emotional recovery process. The researchers also tested whether the gender of the study partner made a difference by matching participants with both same-gender and opposite-gender partners.

The groups included 33 people in the control condition, 33 who experienced explicit rejection, and 27 who were ghosted. The procedure remained identical to the first study, with participants chatting daily and filling out the same psychological assessments. The longer timeline was designed to catch any delayed reactions that might not appear in the first few days.

The findings from the second study essentially replicated the first experiment. The gender of the chat partner did not change the way participants reacted to the sudden end of the conversation. Once again, direct rejection caused a sharp, immediate emotional sting followed by a steady recovery.

The ghosted participants showed a delayed and prolonged emotional toll. For example, people who were rejected felt an immediate desire to be alone, which faded over time. For those who were ghosted, the desire for solitude grew gradually as the days passed.

The ghosted individuals also judged their partner’s morality more harshly as time went on. This likely occurred because they were continually disappointed by the lack of an explanation day after day. The researchers argue that this ongoing uncertainty makes ghosting uniquely difficult to process, as the brain struggles to interpret a situation with no clear ending.

“Although both experiences are painful, ghosting tends to be more psychologically difficult than explicit rejection,” Telari explained. “When someone disappears without explanation, the uncertainty can keep people stuck wondering what happened: whether the other person is okay, whether they did something wrong, or whether the relationship might resume. This lack of closure seems to prolong distress and make it harder to move on. In contrast, although rejection hurts, the clarity of the message helps people process the situation and recover more quickly.”

While this research provides new insights, there are a few potential caveats to keep in mind.

“Our study used a controlled experimental setting in which participants interacted with a study partner for a few minutes per day over several days and then experienced either ghosting or rejection,” Telari noted. “This allowed us to study people’s reactions in real time and under controlled conditions. However, real relationships are often more complex: people sometimes have contextual information that helps them interpret periods of silence, but they may also feel much more emotionally invested, which can make the experience even more distressing.”

People in actual relationships might also have access to context clues, like mutual friends, to help them interpret a sudden silence. Future research could explore how these reactions play out in actual romantic contexts with longer relationship histories. Scientists should also directly test whether the feeling of uncertainty is the exact mechanism blocking emotional recovery.

The researchers also recommend testing these findings across different cultures and age groups. This specific sample consisted entirely of young adults from Italy, and cultural norms around communication might alter how people experience social exclusion. Exploring these variables will help build a more complete understanding of digital relationship dynamics.

The study, “The phantom pain of ghosting: Multi-Day experiments comparing the reactions to ghosting and rejection,” was authored by Alessia Telari, Luca Pancani, and Paolo Riva.