Ghosting Causes Emotional Pain That Lasts Longer Than Being Directly Rejected

With the rise of social media and dating apps has come a radical transformation in how we communicate and interact. In some ways this is good, as it has allowed people to connect at greater distances and increased the chances of meeting like-minded people. However, there are also downsides. 

Ghosting, a practice where one person decided to end a relationship without offering an explanation and ignoring any subsequent communications, is one of them. This behavior can be understood as both a way to end a relationship – be it romantic, professional, or a friendship – as well as a form of ostracism, since it involves shunning a person permanently.

The behaviour has become increasingly common in the Wild West of dating apps and social media, leaving the ghosted person alone to make sense of what happened. For some people, being ghosted is an extremely painful experience, while others argue that it may be kinder than explicitly rejecting someone.

Since 2017, there has been a mounting body of scientific research into ghosting that has examined its causes and consequences, as well as its negative effects. But this research has relied on retrospective surveys – in other words, asking participants to recall past experiences. This isn't the most reliable way to study a topic, becuase human memory is a highly subjective source of information and prone to bias as people change their recollections to make sense of events.

In order to overcome this problem, researchers at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy created a real-time experiment to assess how people react to being ghosted. They also investigated the similarities and differences between ghosting and direct rejection, where someone explicitly tells the other person that they are ceasing their relationship. The aim was to examine how people cope with these forms of rejection on a day-by-day basis.

The team conducted two experiments using a daily diary method. The first study investigated potential differences in the psychological consequences of ghosting and rejection across six days. The second experiment extended the examination to nine days and assessed the potential impact of the participant’s genders.

In the first experiment, 46 adults aged between 19 and 34 took part in daily 15-minute text conversations using Telegram, a messaging app. The participants were all paired with a study confederate – someone who pretended to be another participant but is actually a research assistant.

For three days, the participants chatted with their confederate about everyday subjects and then filled out a questionnaire that measured their emotions, relationship satisfaction and feelings of interpersonal closeness. They were also asked to rate the confederate’s perceived competence, sociability, and morality while also rating their own psychological needs – the need to belong, the need to maintain a reasonable level of self-esteem, the need to for control over social interactions, and the need for a meaningful existence.

On the fourth day, things changed. For 18 participants, the conversations continued as normal for another three days – this was the control group. For 13 participants, the confederate explicitly rejected them by sending a message explaining that they no longer wanted to talk. Then the remaining 15 participants were ghosted – the confederate simply stopped messaging without explanation.

The team found that both rejection and ghosting caused immediate damage to the relationship and increased negative emotions. Regardless of their group, these participants felt ignored and that their self-esteem had been undermined. They also reported less interpersonal closeness. However, those who were directly rejected appeared to recover much quicker than those who were ghosted.

It seems the rejection provided a conclusive end that allowed people to start recovering, while those who were ghosted remained in uncertainty for longer.

In the second experiment, the researchers attempted to see if these recovery trends continued for longer periods. They recruited 90 participants for an experiment that lasted nine days, rather than six. This experiment also examined whether gender played a role in the effects of either rejection condition by matching participants with both same-gender or opposite-gender confederates.

“Despite similar outcomes, our study's multi-day approach provided valuable insights into the temporal dynamics of ghosting and rejection, shedding light on the effectiveness of the coping processes triggered by different forms of social exclusion”, the team explain in their paper.

“In brief, the response to rejection was more punctual: it broke out right after the event and consequently subsided. Ghosting, instead, triggered a slower and more extended response.”

The results were effectively the same as the first experiment, demonstrating that gender did not seem to influence how people reacted to either rejection scenario. Those who were rejected outright showed an immediate onset of negative emotions but steadily recovered, while those who were ghosted had a delayed and prolonged recovery time.

Of course, this study took place under controlled conditions, so the nature of the short-lived relationship between participants and confederates were less complex than real ones. At the same time, in real relationships, people can have contextual clues that may help them interpret the situation. Future research could examine how ghosting and rejection operate in real romantic relationships with longer connections.  

The paper is published in Computers in Human Behavior.