Three experiments suggest the silent partner in a stalled conversation often feels more discomfort than the waiting person assumes, though the strongest test gave mixed results.
BERKELEY, California (Sex News) – Being left on read is one of the most familiar frustrations of modern dating and friendship, and most people who have lived through it assume the silent party simply does not care. A new set of experiments from researchers linked to the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge suggests the picture is more complicated: the person who stops replying may feel worse than the person waiting ever guesses.
What the researchers set out to test
The work appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin under the title “The Pain of Ghosting? People Underestimate How Bad Their Conversation Partners Feel About Not Responding.” According to PsyPost’s account of the paper, the authors are Sophia Li of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, Coral Zheng, a doctoral candidate at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, and Juliana Schroeder. The full paper is listed under its journal DOI.
The team asked a simple question with real consequences for how people treat each other: do those who go quiet and those who are left waiting understand one another’s feelings? The paper’s focus is on what the ignoring person experiences, not just the person left waiting. The researchers tested both sides, using recalled experiences, imagined scenarios and a live chat.
Study one: recalling real experiences
In the first study, 195 adults remembered a past online exchange in which they had either ghosted someone or been ghosted. Each person rated how bad they felt and then predicted how the other side felt. Those who had gone silent reported a mean discomfort of 2.27 on a five-point scale, while the people who had been ghosted predicted a much lower 1.56 for them.
The gap was larger when the silence was unintentional, for example when someone meant to reply and simply forgot. In the other direction, people who had ghosted others were reasonably accurate about how the receiving side felt, with actual and predicted ratings both at 2.11. In other words, the misjudgment ran mainly one way: waiting people underestimated how uncomfortable the quiet person was.
Study two: a short reply narrows the gap
The second study recruited 601 adults and asked them to picture texting a casual friend. Half imagined being the one who stopped responding, and half imagined being left waiting. Each then considered either no reply at all or a brief message of the kind “Sorry, but I can’t talk right now.”
Participants imagining themselves as the silent party expected to feel worse, at 3.23, than those picturing the waiting role predicted, at 1.94. A brief reply narrowed this difference, with responders expecting 2.33 and receivers predicting 1.82. The wording of the receivers’ guesses also shifted: about a third of people who received no reply assumed they had annoyed the friend, compared with roughly one in five after a short message.
Zheng summed up the central point in the PsyPost report: “The person who hasn’t responded probably feels worse than you expected.” The finding fits a practical reading that a small, courteous reply may spare both people more distress than silence, but the authors present it as an observation about perception, not a behavioral prescription.
Study three: where the evidence is weaker
The live experiment is the most realistic of the three, and it is also where the story becomes less tidy. In an online chat, 229 pairs of strangers talked for eight minutes. One partner could then either join a five-minute second conversation or skip it. The researchers analyzed the 175 pairs that included a person who skipped.
The overall pattern from the first two studies did not replicate here. The skippers’ actual feelings, at 3.26, closely matched what their waiting partners predicted, at 3.35. Waiting partners instead overestimated how negatively skippers felt about them, predicting 3.41 against an actual 2.29. Skippers also rated their own behavior as less like ghosting than waiting partners did.
A later analysis that was not planned in advance looked only at participants who rated the situation as ghosting. In that subgroup, skippers felt worse, at 3.93, than waiting partners predicted, at 3.51, and waiting partners also underestimated how much their partner wanted to build a friendship. Because this subgroup result was exploratory, it is better treated as a lead for future work than as a confirmed effect.
How much weight to put on the findings
Several limits matter for readers. The live chat lacked the overall effect that the other designs found. Waiting participants were told in advance that their partner might not return, which may have removed some of the uncertainty that makes real ghosting painful. The interactions were brief exchanges between strangers, so they say little about silence inside a close or long-term relationship. All participants were in the United States, and norms about confrontation and guilt differ across cultures. Researchers also still disagree about how to define ghosting, and the two people in an exchange may not agree on whether it happened at all.
The paper sits alongside earlier work on the topic. A 2022 study of romantic ghosting looked at romantic ghosting specifically, and a 2024 PsyPost report on ghosting research covered the topic earlier. PsyPost also points readers to a 2013 study of social exclusion as background.
What it means for dating and friendship
The study does not argue that ghosting is harmless, nor that everyone who disappears from a chat is racked by guilt. What it offers is a modest correction to a common assumption: that silence reflects indifference. Across the first two studies, the quiet person reported more discomfort than the waiting person predicted, and a short, kind message appeared to ease the mismatch in perceived feelings.
For anyone dealing with the sting of an unanswered message, the research hints that the silence may say more about the other person’s awkwardness than about your worth. That is a reading of the results, not a clinical statement, and anyone struggling with repeated rejection or distress after relationship experiences can talk to a qualified therapist or counsellor.
Bohiney Magazine covers dating and relationships from the comedy side, and its readers will recognize the unanswered-text scenario from the other side of the screen: Bohiney Magazine.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/