People who leave messages unanswered often feel more discomfort than the person waiting for a reply assumes, according to a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge. The paper also found that a brief reply can narrow that gap.
The study was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Its co-first authors are Sophia Li of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Coral Zheng, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge Judge Business School. Juliana Schroeder of Berkeley Haas is also listed as an author. The paper was published online on Aug. 31, 2026.
In comments to PsyPost, Zheng said, 「Ghosting is a very common, very popular, but also very annoying phenomenon for many people today.」
The researchers said earlier work often treated ghosting as a breakup strategy in romantic relationships. In practice, though, silence can also come from forgetting to reply, missing a message, or deciding to answer later. For that reason, the team used a broader definition that included unintentional and temporary disappearance.
Experiment one measured recalled experiences
The first experiment involved 195 adults. Participants were asked to recall an online interaction with someone they knew but were not especially close to, excluding best friends and immediate family members. Half recalled a time when they were the one who disappeared, and half recalled a time when they were ignored.
They rated distress on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 meant not distressed at all and 5 meant extremely distressed. They also estimated how distressed the other person felt.
Those who had disappeared rated their own distress at 2.27. Participants who had been ignored guessed the other side felt only 1.56. The gap was even larger in cases described as accidental, such as simply forgetting to reply. In those cases, the person who went silent felt especially guilty, while the ignored side did not expect that level of discomfort.
The reverse estimate was much more accurate. People who had disappeared predicted the distress of the ignored person at 2.11, matching the ignored participants’ actual rating of 2.11.
Experiment two tested the effect of a short reply
The second experiment included 601 adults and used imagined scenarios. Participants were asked to picture themselves exchanging messages with a casual friend. Half took the role of the person who did not reply, and half took the role of the person left waiting. Each participant considered two versions of the scenario: one with no reply at all, and one in which the non-replying person sent a short message saying, 「Sorry I can’t talk right now.」
In the no-reply version, participants imagining themselves as the ghoster expected distress of 3.23. Those imagining themselves as the ignored party guessed the other side would feel only 1.94.
When the short reply was added, expected distress for the non-replying side fell to 2.33. The ignored side’s estimate of that distress was 1.82, bringing the two numbers closer together.
The study also tracked self-blame. With no reply at all, about one-third of ignored participants thought they themselves were the problem and felt they had been too annoying. After a short explanatory message, that share dropped to about one-fifth, and most participants instead assumed the other person was simply busy.
Experiment three used live chats between strangers
The third experiment was designed to look more like real life. Strangers were paired in an online chat and spoke for eight minutes. After that, one participant could choose either to continue to a second five-minute round or to skip it. If that person skipped, the other participant was left waiting alone with no explanation.
A total of 229 pairs completed the experiment, and the researchers analyzed the 175 pairs in which someone chose to skip.
Here, the earlier pattern did not appear in the same way. Participants who skipped rated their own distress at 3.26, while the waiting participants estimated that distress at 3.35. In other words, the waiting side did not underestimate it.
Still, the ignored participants misread another part of the interaction. They believed the person who skipped held a strongly negative view of them, estimating that at 3.41. The actual figure was 2.29. The other person, the data suggested, did not dislike them as much as they assumed.
The two sides also disagreed on whether the behavior counted as ghosting. Those who skipped rated it at 2.56, while those left waiting rated it at 3.06. Zheng said, 「Ghosting is a subjective experience. If at least one person in the interaction believes they experienced ghosting, then for that person, it is ghosting.」
The team later ran an analysis that had not been planned in advance, looking only at participants who rated the behavior as 4 or 5, meaning they considered it ghosting. In that subset, the earlier pattern returned: skippers reported distress of 3.93, while the waiting side estimated it at 3.51.
The authors said that result should be interpreted cautiously because the grouping was created after the fact. Across all pairs, they also found that ignored participants underestimated how much the other person wanted to be friends with them.
Limits and online reaction
The paper listed several limitations. The ignored participants had been told in advance that the other person might not return, which reduced the uncertainty common in real situations. The interaction involved only brief chats between strangers, not long-term partners or close friends. All participants were in the United States, and the findings could differ in cultures where avoiding direct confrontation is treated as polite behavior.
The authors also noted that scholars still debate how ghosting should be defined. The paper did not answer whether the same results would hold among LINE users who treat read-without-reply behavior as an everyday part of communication.
The study also sparked discussion on Reddit. Some users who said they had ghosted others described a cycle of forgetting to reply, then feeling too embarrassed to restart the conversation months later. Others pushed back, saying it was hard to believe ghosters suffer more after being ignored for months by a best friend, even on a birthday. Some commenters stressed that the paper did not claim ghosters always hurt more than the ignored side, only that they often feel worse than the ignored side assumes.
Zheng’s practical suggestion was simple: if you have been ghosted, it may help to know the other person is probably feeling worse than you expect; if you are the one going silent, consider sending a brief reply before you do.