Purging Facebook Friends: Psychological Warfare At Its Finest

Originally posted on Long Awkward Pause:

Deep in the bunkers here at the Long Awkward Pause Command Post, we often receive emails from helpful readers who alert our crack team of investigative journalists to important breaking news stories.

In accordance with our strict standards of journalistic integrity, we carefully review every submission, especially the ones that contain Starbucks gift cards and links to high-quality NSFW pictures.

Occasionally a story demands our attention, and when we read about two new university studies which tried to figure out the most likely type of person to be unfriended on Facebook and the emotional consequences on the dumped friend, well, we just had to look into it.

In the first study, which undoubtedly came from the university’s holy-shit-I-can’t-believe-someone-got-a-grant-for-this department, researchers concluded that the act of unfriending someone is the result of a breakdown in the friendship – something referred to as context collapse.

In the second study, researchers revealed that…

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