The latest research into ghosting suggests the person who stops replying often feels worse about their silence than the other party realises, and a brief reply can significantly narrow this gap. The findings, published in a leading psychology bulletin, come from a collaboration between Sophia Li of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Coral Zheng, a PhD candidate at Cambridge Judge Business School, who contributed equally to the work.
Ghosting, defined as abruptly ending communication without explanation, spans from deliberate relationship endings to ordinary moments of forgetfulness or distraction in digital chats. Li and Zheng sought to broaden the conversation beyond romantic breakups and examine how victims of ghosting perceive the emotional toll on the person who stops replying, and whether misperceptions might be reduced by even a short response.
“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 explained. “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.”
The team designed three studies to test whether ghostees accurately recognise the internal distress experienced by ghosters, and whether misreadings could fuel ongoing misunderstandings in digital communication.
The first study recruited 195 adults who recalled a recent online interaction with someone who was not a close friend or family member. Half remembered ghosting someone, the other half recalled being ghosted. Participants rated how bad they felt about the situation and estimated how bad the other person felt on a five-point scale.
The results showed that ghosters on average reported feeling worse (2.27) than ghostees predicted they would feel (1.56). Victims tended to underestimate the guilt and sadness felt by the ghoster and how relieved the ghoster could feel. The gap was larger when the ghosting was unintentional, such as forgetting to reply, with ghosters feeling particularly bad while ghostees did not anticipate this. Ghosters, however, were accurate in predicting how badly the ghostees felt (2.11 on average for both actual and predicted feelings).
The second study involved 601 adults in imagined scenarios. Participants pictured a text exchange with a friend they did not know well. Half imagined being the ghoster, half being the person left waiting. Two versions were considered: one with no reply and one in which the friend sent a short message: “Sorry, but I can’t talk right now.”
Again the gap appeared: those imagining themselves as ghosters expected to feel worse (3.23) than those imagining themselves as ghosted predicted (1.94). The short reply narrowed the difference: the predicted self-blame dropped to 3.23 and the predicted relief rose to 2.33 for ghosters, while ghostees’ predictions fell closer to the mark at 1.82. A third of ghosted respondents believed they had become annoying, compared with around one in five when a brief reply was sent, most attributing the silence to busyness rather than hostility.
The third study paired adults in an eight-minute online chat to get to know each other. After the initial conversation, one participant could choose to continue for five more minutes or skip the follow-up. Of 229 pairs, the analysis focused on 175 where skip was chosen, leaving the partner waiting with no explanation.
In this live setting, the pattern was more mixed. On average, those left waiting did not underestimate how badly their partner felt (3.26 for those who skipped versus 3.35 predicted). Instead, they overestimated how negatively the skippers felt toward them (3.41 predicted versus 2.29 actual). Part of the discrepancy appeared to lie in uneven perceptions about what had occurred; some that skipped felt the interaction resembled non-ghosting less than their partners did (2.56 versus 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 a post-hoc analysis of participants who rated the behaviour as ghosting (a 4 or 5 on the scale), the original pattern re-emerged: those who skipped felt worse (3.93) than those left waiting predicted (3.51). Across all pairs, ghosted waiting participants also underestimated how much their partners wanted to develop a friendship.
The researchers’ work aligns with a separate PsyPost report from earlier in 2024 that ghosted individuals tend to underestimate how much the person who ignored them still cares about their well-being. While the earlier work focused on ghosters’ concern for the other person, the new studies emphasise how bad ghosters themselves feel—and how a short reply can reduce misperceptions on both sides.
Commenting on practical implications, Zheng urged that if you’ve been ghosted, you may discover the other person feels worse than you expected. If you’re the one who hasn’t replied, a brief message could lessen self-blame and ease the tension. “We hope to help both parties understand the other person’s perspective, reduce misunderstandings, and increase well-being for both sides,” she said.
The researchers caution that the live experiment offers the most realistic setting, yet it did not replicate the overall pattern across all studies. Limitations include the short, randomly assigned chats between strangers in the United States, which may not capture the intensity of emotions in long-term relationships or friendships, and cultural differences in attitudes toward directness and non-communication.
The team also notes ongoing debates about how to define ghosting precisely, given that two people can interpret the same exchange differently. They suggest that future work should explore how response speed, message length, tone, emojis and punctuation influence feelings and perceptions in online dialogue.
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.
