Negative Social Network Interactions Create Negative Behaviors Offline

Don’t think that denied friend request has no meaning, researchers have found that the negative experiences on social networking sites have an affect on the way people act in real-life and over cyberspace.

When thinking of social media, we think of being able to connect with friends, check up on loved ones and meet new people, but a recent study has shown that the very nature of social networking sites (SNS) can cause negative interactions that blur the lines of friendship.

Researchers at The University of Arizona interviewed over 150 undergraduate students about a negative experience they’ve had over any form of SNS and found that more than half have been confronted with denied or ignored friend requests and erased messages and “untagged” pictures. Many (about 80%) of these interactions have been with friends or romantic partners (i.e. boyfriends or girlfriends) and were not random people met online but rather people they have intimate relationships with.

The study shows that while deleted messages and identification tags had a lot to do with discretion (i.e. athletic institutions or people at work seeing unfavorable things) and personal preference (i.e. not liking a photo of oneself) the assumptions that were made on the other side initially is where the confusion and disapproval occur.

With the increase in how social norms associated with tangible society have merged with that of the cyberspace social world in addition to the way that social networking has become a part of our everyday interactions, researchers believe that the reason people experience negative events on SNSs is because users are not able to separate their actions in person with those they are afforded online. The term friend takes on different meaning when in person than it does over cyberspace and these “friend negotiations” can be cause for people to misinterpret their friendship they have with people online

The study concludes that people who experience negative interactions online with people they have close ties with suffer the greatest relational strain because there are already expectations of behavior between parties that are broken and betrayed.

The researchers believe that they results they found can contribute to people being more careful about how they interact online and give insight into what type of behaviors online can cause the most strain offline.