The Real World Effects of Facebook Unfriending

Posted on 2013/02/072013/02/07 by Jason Hensel

I’ve never understood why people choose to crop their list of friends on Facebook. Sometimes, I’ll see statements like, “If you see this message, congratulations, you made the cut.” It makes me wonder if I really want to associate with someone who willy-nilly cuts friends out of his life.

Sure, I understand deleting friends because of personality issues. Deleting friends “just because”, though, is petty. It also can have real-world consequences.

A new study from the University of Colorado Denver shows that 40 percent of people surveyed would avoid anyone in real life that deleted them from a friends list on Facebook.

“The cost of maintaining online relationships is really low, and in the real world, the costs are higher,” said study author Christopher Sibona, a doctoral student in the Computer Science and Information Systems program at the University of Colorado Denver Business School. “In the real world, you have to talk to people, go see them to maintain face-to-face relationships. That’s not the case in online relationships.”

Sibona says that when a friendship ends in real life, it usually just fades away. It’s more abrupt on Facebook.

“Since it’s done online there is an air of unreality to it but in fact there are real life consequences,” he said. “We are still trying to come to grips as a society on how to handle elements of social media. The etiquette is different and often quite stark.”

Sibona conducted a study in 2010 on why people delete friends. He found four main reasons.

Frequent, unimportant posts.
Polarizing posts usually about politics or religion.
Inappropriate posts involving sexist, racist remarks
Boring everyday life posts about children, food, spouses etc.

He says that when people are socially excluded in real life, they experience lower self-esteem, depressed moods, and loneliness.

“People who are unfriended may face similar psychological effects…because unfriending may be viewed as a form of social exclusion,” Sibona said. “The study makes clear that unfriending is meaningful and has important psychological consequences for those to whom it occurs.”

Remember that the next time you get a hankering to chop down your friends list. You’re doing more damage than you think.

(Story materials from the University of Colorado Denver / David Kelly. Image via Flickr: Gina Trapani / Creative Commons.)

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Sunny, Flirty Days

Posted on 2013/01/282013/01/30 by Jason Hensel

When single, I conducted most of my flirting late at night in dark bars after a few drinks to stimulate courage. Any other time and I was a complete mute.

Perhaps, though, I should have attempted to flirt in the daytime, specifically when it’s sunny. According to a new study, women are more receptive and offer their phone numbers more often when approached during a sunny day.

“In a field quasi-experiment, 18–25-year-old women walking alone in the street were approached by an attractive 20-year-old male confederate who solicited them for their phone numbers,” Nicolas Guéguen wrote in the study‘s abstract. “The women were solicited on days that were evaluated as being either sunny or cloudy but care was taken to control for temperature and not to solicit participants when it rained. It was found that women agreed more often to the confederate’s courtship solicitation on the sunny days.”

Caution, though. The sunny day may have put the women in a better mood or caused more confidence in the men. Seriously, who wants to flirt when it’s overcast and rainy outside? Just go to a bar (and flirt there!).

Guéguen also offers another caveat: France.

“In this study, we examined the receptivity of women to a courtship request by a man because it was conducted in France where men traditionally approach women in romantic relationships,” he wrote.

Wait. Is he suggesting that French women are more open to extracurricular activities outside a steady relationship?

(Image via Flickr: Andy Cross / Creative Commons)

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The Positive Impact of a Handshake

Posted on 2012/10/23 by Jason Hensel

Personally, I’m a hugger. However, most of those hugs precede handshakes. One can’t move too fast on the whole getting to know you scale. Plus, shaking hands first eases a stranger’s feelings about you. Don’t believe me? Science says so.

Beckman Institute researcher Florin Dolcos and University of Illinois postdoctoral research associate Sanda Dolcos found that “a handshake preceding social interaction enhanced the positive impact of approach and diminished the negative impact of avoidance behavior on the evaluation of social interaction.”

That makes sense. Their study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, gives scientific proof for the first time about why a handshake is important.

The study showed “increased sensitivity to approach than to avoidance behavior in amygdala and superior temporal sulcus, which were linked to a positive evaluation of approach behavior and a positive impact of handshake.” Also, the “nucleus accumbens, which is a reward processing region, showed greater activity for Handshake than for No-handshake conditions” — proving a link to “the positive effect of handshake on social evaluation.”

“Overall, our study not only replicated previous reports that identify activity in regions of the social cognition network, but also provided insight into the contribution of these regions into evaluating approach and avoidance social interactions, and grant neuroscientific support for the power of a handshake,” Sanda Dolcos said.

Florin Dolcos says that a firm, confident, and friendly handshake leads to positive feelings.

“In a business setting this is what people are expecting, and those who know these things use them,” he said. “Not a very long time ago you could get a loan based on a handshake. So it conveys something very important, very basic. Yet the science underlying this is so far behind. We knew these things intuitively but now we also have the scientific support.”

There you have it. But beware: I’m still giving you a hug when I see you next.

(Story materials and image via the Beckman Institute.)

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The Rewind Button: Rumours

Posted on 2012/10/182012/10/21 by Jason Hensel

The Rewind Button is a group blogging project that I’m participating in. We’re taking on Rolling Stone‘s Top 40 albums of all time and writing our own reviews of them.

I took a peek at the beginning of this project at the list of albums we would be reviewing, and Rumours was one that I was most excited about reviewing. It’s not that I listen to the album every day (or even own it). But I’ve heard it enough via friends and the radio that I feel like it’s been a part of my whole life.

It’s the production that draws me to this album. The warm sound of the bass in “Dreams” takes me back to riding in the car with my dad, the windows down, the moon above, and nothing but music between us. After “Dreams” comes “Never Going Back Again,” with its folky composition. I love the stark contract between the two songs.

When you read about this album, you’ll learn that there was a lot of strife among the members due to their relationships falling apart. All great bands have an element of strife. Out of that chaos, beauty is born.

I know I said that this is one of the albums I most looked forward to reviewing, and here I am not really writing much. That’s because I’d rather be listening to it than writing about it. If you haven’t heard this album, do yourself a favor and go listen to it now. I’ll be listening, too. Just you, me, and the music between us.

Please visit these other blogs participating in The Rewind Button project:

Betty Livin

Love As A Verb

Life Doesn’t Have to Suck

Renée Sylvestre-Williams

Sara Bynoe

Musicqwest
Be a River With Me

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Review: In a Forest, Dark and Deep

Posted on 2011/10/25 by Jason Hensel

Neil LaBute is my favorite contemporary playwright. His style, his subjects, his view of the world all appeal to me for reasons I’ve yet to figure out for myself. While I wouldn’t give all his plays five stars, most of them deserve that much praise.

In a Forest, Dark and Deep, however, is not one of those. It’s the worst LaBute play I’ve ever read, with its lack of nuance and its overt narrative cliches reminding me of rookie scripts in a playwriting 101 course. Seriously, LaBute, you’re going to put in thunder and lightning to mirror the storm between the characters? That’s bush league.

The two-character play focuses on a brother-sister relationship. The brother, Bobby, comes to a cabin in the woods to help his sister, Betty, clear it out for some new tenets. Throughout the play, we learn more about Betty and the cabin and her real purpose for being there. But the story is so predictable, because in our crime drama-driven world, you’re able to pick up the clues if you have half a brain and give it a 10th of your attention.

And how does LaBute lead you to the conclusion? Through pages and pages of arguing and yelling. Now maybe this is the improv side of me coming out, but I’m tired of arguing in scenes. I’m tired of seeing it, hearing it and participating in it. It’s more fun to engage in conflict subtly. LaBute is great at that, or has been in the past. I don’t why or how he lost his cool in this play.

LaBute writes in the intro

We miss the missing. It’s a simple enough concept, I suppose–when someone has made an impact on our lives and then they’re gone, we long for them and what it was that made them special.

What makes LaBute special is his subtly, his finely tuned dialogue full of understated tension, the way he keeps you cringing but eager to continue watching disaster unfold. Let us hope soon it is that talented LaBute who returns from the missing.

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