Ghosting: Social rejection without explanation, but not without care.

What is it about?

Ghosting—the act of ending a relationship by ignoring another person’s attempts to connect—is a common way of ending social ties. The present research establishes the key characteristics of ghosting and distinguishes it from other rejection behaviors. The present research also finds a systematic gap between how ghosters (those who ghost) and ghostees (those who are ghosted) experience ghosting. Specifically, ghostees underestimate the extent to which ghosters care about their well-being, a judgment that occurs because ghostees misunderstand ghosters’ prosocial motives and leads ghostees to miss out on opportunities for future help from ghosters.

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Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash

Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This research provides several methodological and theoretical contributions. Methodologically, we provide a blueprint of how a comprehensive analysis of a social behavior such as ghosting can be done through a multimethod approach including prototype analysis to inductively generate how lay people understand ghosting and computational text analysis for construct validation; and employ experiments using several paradigms to capture ghosting from real life, hypothetical ghosting decisions, and an online chat paradigm. This departs from existing research on ghosting that has primarily relied on qualitative (Koessler et al., 2019; LeFebvre et al., 2019; Pancani et al., 2021; Timmermans et al., 2021) or correlational surveys (Freedman et al., 2019; Navarro et al., 2020; Powell et al., 2021, 2022). We also believe our research appeals to psychologists studying motivation, morality, social perception, and organizational behavior. First, we contribute to research on motivation. Existing research on rejection finds that other-oriented motives make people less likely to reject others (Joel et al., 2018; Le et al., 2010) and generally do things that please them (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978; Rusbult & Van Lange, 2003). However, the present research suggests that once people have determined that they would like to end ties, other-oriented motives might lead them to ghost others because they view refraining from conveying negative feedback to ghostees is a much more likely way to show care. Second, we also contribute to moral psychology by integrating research on people’s need to protect their moral self-concepts (Mulder & Aquino, 2013; Ward & King, 2018) with an important stage in relationship – namely, how people decide to end relationships. Third, this research should be interesting to social psychologists who care about the challenges surrounding taking perspective (Ames, 2004; Epley, 2008) and have found that one of the only ways to reliably increase interpersonal accuracy is through direct feedback (Eyal et al., 2018). We identify ghosting as a social behavior that is particularly likely to create perspective taking failures because it is definitionally devoid of feedback. Fourth, we make contributions to organizational behavior by identifying ghosting as an additional psychological barrier that hampers help exchange, an important means by which coworkers exchange solidarity is essential for an organization to thrive (Flynn, 2006; Lim et al., 2020). We also contribute to the psychology of networks literature by integrating social connection and dissolution literature. Social rejection in general and ghosting in particular are understandably painful, but accurate social perceptions can alleviate unnecessary pain and boost wellbeing.