Gone Girl: Exploring the associations between individual attachment styles, rejection sensitivity and online dater’s ghosting behaviour as well as the moderation role of gender

This study aims to explore how dispositional factors relate to ghosting behaviour when people use online dating apps. Dispositional factors in the current study are specified as individual rejection sensitivity, attachment avoidance, and attachment anxiety. Ghosting behaviour is defined as a breakup strategy that people use to terminate their romantic relationships by cutting off all the contact channels with their partners and avoiding other’s attempts to reach out. Besides, ghosting is considered as a one-sided breakup strategy conveying the breakup message to partners without making a clear declaration. In addition, the gender difference was also examined within the association between individual rejection sensitivity and ghosting behaviour in online dating. Gender was initially hypothesized as a moderator within such association. For this research, a quantitative method was used to collect data. More specifically, a cross-sectional online questionnaire was distributed through various social media platforms. This study focused on Chinese online dating situation, hence all the participants were adults from China. In total, 326 participants filled in the online questionnaire. After filtering out inactive online daters, 171 questionnaires including 91 males and 64 females with the average age of 26.99 were left as effective data. The outcome of this research showed that rejection sensitivity was negatively associated with ghosting behaviours in online dating, implying that people with higher rejection sensitivity would be less inclined to ghost their online dating partners, which was an opposite outcome to the hypothesis. On top of that, attachment avoidance was not found to be associated with ghosting behaviours, while the results regarding attachment anxiety were mixed. People with higher attachment anxiety would have less ghosting intentions in their mind, however, this could not predict their actual ghosting behaviour. Lastly, gender plays a significant role in moderating the association between individual rejection sensitivity and ghosting behaviour, indicating there would be a difference in online interpersonal behaviours between males and females who are rejection-sensitive. For males, those with higher rejection sensitivity would have a significantly lower ghosting intention and be less likely to implement ghosting as a breakup strategy. While for females, rejection sensitivity can predict higher ghosting intention and a higher likelihood to implement ghosting behaviours but the predictive power is modest. Theoretically, these findings can expand the understanding on how dispositional factors play a part within online interpersonal communication. Also, they can make contributions to the development of contemporary online dating apps. One example is that based on these findings, current online dating apps are able to improve their designs so that users can dissolve their online relationships in more compassionate ways. Further, this study also brings some initiatives to the research about online dating behaviours, particularly ghosting. Simultaneously, it is suggested for future researchers to take the cultural factors into consideration since this is one of the main reasons causing the inconsistency of current results with previous literature. Given that Chinese people are found to be more sensitive to others’ rejection compared to American and European people (Lou, & Li , 2017), further research may explore how online dating behaviours differ within eastern and western cultural contexts