Key Points
- It has been demonstrated that a particularly potent predictor of all types of poor consequences is being estranged from others.
- "Ghosting" on social media is a contemporary example of estrangement.
- This article details a study that suggests ghosting is both frequent and problematic.
- Understanding why ghosting is such an issue can be aided by considering human social groups from an evolutionary perspective.
Imagine that Teresa and you have been friends for a long time. In general, you've always loved Teresa and felt that she was there for you. Together, you always laughed a lot, and you always felt as though she had your back while you navigated the occasionally hazardous waters of life.
One morning, when you go to message her on Facebook, you discover that she is not visible in your Facebook app. That's odd, you muse to yourself. You search through your Facebook but can't find any proof that she's ever been there.
When you attempt to text her, you are informed that "this number is not available" right away. You start to feel uneasy. What does all of this mean? To determine if your mutual friend Gisella is experiencing the same problems, you make the hasty decision to text her. In roughly 10 minutes, Gisella replies to your text message with the following: "Actually, she's still on my Facebook and she just uploaded a nice picture of her new cat this morning."
You've been ghosted, and your heart drops. And you don't understand why, either.
Ghosting as a Contemporary Way to Cut Ties
Today, breaking up with someone is simpler than ever thanks to social media and mobile technology, for a variety of reasons. An ex-lover or an ex-friend might be ghosted. or even a relative. Cutting someone out of one's life is really simple these days because social media is the main form of communication. And this poses a challenge in terms of evolution.
From an Evolutionary Perspective, estrangement
Several years ago, my research team published a paper (Geher et al., 2019) showing how the number of estrangements one experiences in life is strongly predictive of a wide range of detrimental psychological and social outcomes, including an uneasy attachment style, the belief that others don't support them, and a propensity to be emotionally unstable.
In subsequent research, we discovered a high correlation between the number of estrangements one encounters and having inclinations toward borderline personality disorder (Sung et al., 2021).
We tried to understand these events in terms of how human psychology has evolved, which is true of the majority of the research that my colleagues and I have done. Here, it appears to be fairly simple. It is evident from a wide range of facts that early human populations were often substantially smaller than they are today. All of our ancestors were nomads prior to the development of agriculture, which occurred just 10,000 years ago (a blink of an eye in terms of evolutionary time). Numerous factors contribute to the nomadic groups' modest size. According to evolutionary cognitive psychologist Robin Dunbar (1992), the maximum size of these groups should be 150 people because that is the number of people our minds can effectively engage with on a non-superficial level.
Imagine living with 150 other people and finding yourself abruptly cut off from all but a few of them. That might be a problem. People converse. Additionally, every person you are estranged from has a social network that often consists of family and friends. In a small-scale community, being cut off from only a few people could therefore have had disastrous effects.
Our study, which used data gathered from 2015 to 2016 to analyse a sample of college students, revealed that the average number of people our participants were alienated from was slightly under four. This dimension has a lot of variation. One participant listed 27 people they were completely cut off from or alienated from.
We may begin to understand why our emotional reaction to estrangements might be so severe given that we did not evolve in the large-scale communities that exist now but rather in small-scale societies where everyone knew one another.
Enter social media. The negative psychological and societal effects of ghosting
Several of the current team members, mostly graduate and undergraduate psychology students, suggested that the situation is probably even worse now as a result of the simplicity with which people can cut others off via social media and cellphone technologies when discussing the estrangement work that our team had conducted just a few years ago. We undertook a study (Di Santo et al., 2022) that largely repeated our earlier study on estrangements—using ghosting as a contemporary marker of estrangements—under the brave leadership of our team member Jacqueline Di Santo.
We asked respondents to report (as accurately as possible) the number of people they had ghosted as well as the number of people they thought had ghosted them. After that, we administered a battery of tests to individuals to gauge their social, emotional, and psychological health.
Here are a few of our key conclusions:
- About eight individuals on average have ghosted other persons.
- Participants were ghosted by an average of eight people per session.
- The number of persons participants had ghosted and the number of people participants had been ghosted by correlated significantly and positively (in other words, ghosters tend to get ghosted).
- Ghosting reporters were more likely to score low on life satisfaction, emotional instability, and solid ties to others. They also had a tendency toward borderline personality. In other words, the ghosting study essentially confirmed the negative results connected to a high number of estrangements that we had discovered in our previous research (Geher et al., 2019).
Social media-related estrangements are increasing exponentially.
Our study on ghosting makes the following larger, highly troubling observation: People seem to be growing more and more isolated from other people. The average number of estrangements people reported in our 2019 study was four. The number doubled to eight in our study, which was published in 2022 and conceptualised estrangements in terms of ghosting encounters. It appears that an increase in alienation experiences and social media use are related.
This finding profoundly worries me, in my opinion. It demonstrates yet another way in which contemporary social media platforms are evolutionarily mismatched with ancestors' face-to-face communication methods, and how this is having a disastrous impact on our mental health.
Nicole Wedberg and I (2020) go into great length about how so many contemporary technologies were developed without taking into account our evolved psyche. In my Substack piece titled "The End of Sex and The End of Thinking," I elaborate on this similar subject.
These technologies, which range from Snapchat to contemporary processed food and everything in between, frequently have unforeseen negative effects, partly because they are not compatible with the environments that our minds and bodies have evolved to survive in.
In the prehistoric era, it was not possible to press a button and have someone vanish from your life forever. Ghosting is unnatural in many ways. And it might be a factor in the astounding rise in mental health problems that we observe in the modern world, particularly among adolescents and young adults who have grown up with internet and social media technology (see Twenge et al., 2019)
To sum up
Ghosting has increased in popularity in recent years as a result of social media's widespread availability and other cutting-edge communication technology. According to the findings of our recent study (Di Santo et al., 2022), ghosting experiences appear to be associated with a variety of negative emotional and social outcomes. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Before the invention of the "block" button, it was impossible to remove someone from your life.
Social estrangements, which have been linked to a variety of negative psychological effects, are more prevalent than ever thanks to modern technologies. Ghosting is the new face of social alienation. It also hurts to ghost. The evolutionary viewpoint aids in our comprehension.
The negative psychological effects of such technologies appear to be only likely to get worse if developers of communication technologies continue to fail to take our evolved psychology into consideration when producing the goods that they manufacture. Perhaps it's time for professionals in all fields to get up to speed on evolutionary psychology.
0 Comments