An empirical, accessible definition of “ghosting” as a relationship dissolution method
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract “Ghosting” as a method of relationship dissolution has entered both popular media and academic discussion as a topic of interest. Journalists and researchers have used both observation and qualitative methods to define this breakup strategy with varying and sometimes contradictory results. The goal of this study was to create an accessible and empirical definition of ghosting and to resolve discrepancies between existing definitions. To do so, we asked 499 participants (321 cisgender women, all residing in Canada and aged 17–29) two open‐ended questions about ghosting. Participants provided their own definition of ghosting, and then identified behaviors that they associated with ghosting. Next, we conducted inductive qualitative analyses with four cycles of coding to determine the key components of the behavior that distinguish ghosting from other methods of relationship dissolution. Based on participant responses and language, we derived the following definition of ghosting: “One way that people can end a relationship is by ghosting . Ghosting is when one person suddenly ignores or stops communicating with another person, without telling them why.” Our proposed definition of ghosting addresses shortcomings presented by previous and concurrently developed definitions and provides a starting point for future research on ghosting in romantic relationships, friendships, workplaces, and beyond.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it