Ghosting
Currently, one of my main areas within rejection is on the phenomenon of ghosting (for our review on ghosting, see Freedman & Powell, 2024). Our work has found that individuals who have stronger destiny beliefs are more likely to ghost (Freedman, Powell, Le, & Williams, 2019), and that indiivduals with higher levels of anxious attachment are more likely to be ghosted (Powell, Freedman, Williams, Le, & Green, 2021). In addition, we have found that safety concerns are a key motivation in ghosting intentions (Freedman, Hales, Powell, Le, & Williams, 2022) We have also found that both ghosters and ghostees experience negative emotions from ghosting, but the specific emotions are distinct (Freedman, Powell, Le, & Williams, 2022).
The Two-Sided Nature of Social Rejection
The Responsive Theory of Social Exclusion (Freedman, Williams, & Beer, 2016) suggests that there are three main types of social exclusion (i.e., explicit rejection, ambiguous rejection, ostracism), and that both people involved in the social exclusion will fare better if explicit rejection is used. Furthermore, this theory argues that the language of explicit rejection is an important yet understudied aspect of social exclusion, and that the linguistic choices made in a rejection can influence both parties. My research on language and social rejection has found that rejections that include apologies increased hurt feelings and aggression more than rejections without apologies. Furthermore, rejections with apologies were more likely to make targets feel compelled to forgive but not more likely to actually feel forgiveness than rejections without apologies (Freedman, Burgoon, Ferrell, Pennebaker, & Beer, 2017). I also consider how biases and emotions are involved in the rejection process. For example, we have found that women are pereceived more negatively than men for engaging in social rejection (Freedman, Fetterolf, & Beer, 2019). Furthermore, we have found that negative self-schemas and emotions are associated with how likely people are to engage in rejection and how difficult they think it will be (Freedman & Dainer-Best, 2022).
Game and Narrative Interventions
I use the unique tools of games, play, and narratives to change how people think and to transform their interactions with others (Freedman & Flanagan, 2018). My work on interventions mainly focuses on how to create games and narratives to improve belongingness and decrease biases against women in science, technology, engineering, and math (Freedman, Green, Flanagan, Fitzgerald, & Kaufman, 2018). For example, one game intervention was a paper-based mystery game in which participants could only win by realizing that a scientist character in the game was a woman (Freedman, Seidman, Flanagan, Kaufman, & Green, 2018). In a virtual reality game study, we found that when men played a game in which they were a physicist, if their avatar was a woman scientist, they saw the categories of "scientist" and "woman" as more overlapping compared to if their avatar was a man (Freedman, Green, Seidman, & Flanagan, 2021). In my work on narrative interventions, I examine how stories of scientists affect the ways that people think about science and gender. For example, in a study on Stephen Hawking, we found that after reading his obituary, individuals were more interested in learning about cosmology as well as ALS (Freedman, Green, Flanagan, & Kaufman, 2020).