Unfriending Facebook Friends May Have Consequences

Unfriending your friends on Facebook may have more consequences than you once thought. A new study from the University of Colorado Denver shows that unfriending a person on Facebook result in repercussions in real life rather than just in cyberspace.

Christopher Sibona examined the responses of 582 people to a survey gathered via Twitter. He found that 40 percent of the people in the survey said that they would avoid a real life person who unfriended them on Facebook. Another 50 percent said that they would not avoid the person, and the other 10 percent were unsure. More women said that they would avoid contact than men.

Yet these weren't Sibona's only findings. He also found that six factors determined whether or not a person would avoid someone who had unfriended them on Facebook. They included if the person discussed the event after it happened, if the emotional response to the unfriending was extremely negative, if the unfriended person believed the action was due to offline behavior, what the geographical distance was between the two, if the troubled relationship was discussed prior to unfriending and how strong the person valued the relationship before the unfriending.

"The number one predictor was whether the person who said the relationship was over talked about it to someone else," Sibona said in a press release. "Talking to someone is a public declaration that the friendship is over."

Currently, Americans spend about 25 percent of their time online using social networks such as Facebook. This particular study helps highlight how, because of the Internet, relationships are changing. Traditional face-to-face communication is quickly giving way to online interactions which have their own rules of etiquette.

Next time you unfriend a person on Facebook, think twice. You may never see them again if you do.

The findings were published by the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.