Ghosters Feel Worse Than the People They Ghost Realize, Three Studies Find
Ghosting — abruptly going quiet on someone without explanation — is usually framed as a cost-free exit for whoever does it. New research reverses that picture. Across three studies, people who leave messages unanswered report feeling worse about their silence than the people they left waiting expect. The people who disappear, in other words, are carrying a guilt their partners never see.
The paper, “The Pain of Ghosting? People Underestimate How Bad Their Conversation Partners Feel About Not Responding,” appears in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. It was led by Sophia Li of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and Coral Zheng, a PhD candidate at Cambridge’s Judge Business School, with Juliana Schroeder. It spans 195 adults recalling a real episode, 601 rating imagined scenarios, and 350 taking part in a live online interaction, half assigned to ghost and half to be ghosted.
In the recall study, ghosters rated their own discomfort at 2.27 on a five-point scale. Ghostees guessed the other side felt 1.56. The gap was statistically robust, and the authors read it as a systematic misreading of silence as indifference.
“Overall, this research provides a window into the overlooked pain of ghosting others,” they write. The context matters: when romance, friendship and work all run through chat windows, disappearing is the cheapest form of rejection available — and the rejecter’s own emotional bill never enters the conversation.
The misperception was largest when the silence was unintentional — distraction, a delayed reply, plain forgetfulness. In the live-interaction study the gap did not reach significance, a reminder that ghosting is a subjective experience: if one side feels dropped, it counts as ghosting.
Longer-term evidence comes from Michaela Forrai, a psychologist at the University of Vienna: people who ghosted friends were more likely to show signs of depression four months later, while ghosting a romantic partner did not damage the ghoster’s wellbeing. The same longitudinal work found that communication overload predicted later ghosting — being swamped by messages comes before the retreat.
Causality cuts both ways. Psychologist Kelsey M. Latimer notes that going silent can itself be a sign of self-isolation in people with depression, suicidal tendencies or a relapse into addiction. People already struggling are more likely to withdraw from relationships; the withdrawal is not always the cause.
This is not a fringe experience. A recent survey cited by the New York Post found 75% of people have been ghosted by a former lover. ScienceDaily reported research finding nearly two-thirds of participants had both ghosted and been ghosted, with more than half of the recalled episodes involving a friend rather than a partner. Among young daters the behavior is even more routine: in a Zelle survey of 1,800 Gen Z and millennial adults with dating experience, 43% said they had ghosted, blocked or unfollowed someone to avoid paying them back after a date — 52% among Gen Z alone.
Severed contact has a measurable cost. An observational study in Nature Communications tracking 277,489 middle-aged UK adults found that people who were both lonely and socially isolated lost roughly 5.8 years free of depression and anxiety if they were men, and about 3.7 years if they were women, from age 50 onward. The study is observational and cannot prove cause, but the size of the gap makes connection a hard health issue rather than a soft one.
The recommended fix is almost banal: send a brief reply — even a “got it, let’s talk later” — which measurably improved how accurately both sides read each other’s feelings. The authors warn that underestimating a ghoster’s discomfort can kill any chance of reconciliation. Other outlets add a caution: none of this makes the person who disappeared the real victim, since ghostees show higher anxiety and lower self-esteem. The evidence is mostly self-reported and correlational — but it does retire one popular claim: silence is not free, it only sends the bill somewhere you cannot see.