Study finds people who ghost often feel worse than the other side assumes

A study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge found that people who stop replying to messages often feel more distress than the ignored party expects. Published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the paper drew on three experiments to test how both sides interpret silence in digital communication. In the first experiment, ghosters rated their own discomfort at 2.27 out of 5, while ignored participants estimated that discomfort at just 1.56. A second experiment with imagined scenarios showed that a short message such as 「Sorry I can’t talk right now」 reduced distress for the non-replying side and narrowed the perception gap. It also lowered the share of ignored participants who blamed themselves, from about one-third to about one-fifth. A third, more realistic chat experiment produced mixed results: the earlier pattern did not fully reappear, though ignored participants still overestimated how negatively the other person viewed them. The authors said the findings suggest silence is often misread, but they also noted limits, including the use of U.S.-based participants and interactions between strangers rather than close partners or longtime friends.