Assistant Professor of Psychology Gili Freedman and colleagues recently published an article entitled, "Emotional experiences of ghosting" in The Journal of Social Psychology. In this paper, researchers looked at the emotional experiences of ghosting by having people write about the most recent time they ghosted someone and the most recent time they themselves were ghosted. They found that people describe these experiences with similar levels of positivity and negativity, but that ghosting someone was associated with guilt and relief, whereas being ghosted was associated with sadness and hurt feelings.
Freedman and colleagues also recently published "The role of gender and safety concerns in romantic rejection decisions" in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. In this registered report, researchers examined the factors that shape decisions of how to reject someone. Specifically, they tested the roles of target gender and perceived safety in decisions to ghost vs. explicitly reject. Researchers found that safety concerns lead people to say they would be more likely to reject, but there was mixed evidence for the role of gender in these decisions.
