The overall social and emotional climate of social networking sites (SNS) is a very positive one where adult users get personal rewards and satisfactions at far higher levels than they encounter anti-social people or have ill consequences from their encounters.

And, just 14 percent of social networking adults are coalescing around a shared hobby or interest.

According to two Pew Research Center statistics from a representative phone survey of American adults, some 39 percent of SNS-using adults say they frequently see acts of generosity by other SNS users and another 36 percent said they sometimes see others behaving generously and helpfully.

It also shows that:

• 85 percent of SNS-using adults say that their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind, compared with 5 percent who say people they observe on the sites are mostly unkind and another 5 percent who say their answer depends on the situation.
• 68 percent of SNS users said they had an experience that made them feel good about themselves.
• 61 percent had experiences that made them feel closer to another person. (Many said they had both experiences.)

By comparison, 18 percent of SNS-using adults say they see helpful behavior “only once in a while” and 5 percent say they never see generosity exhibited by others on social networking sites.

At the same time, notable proportions of SNS users do witness bad behavior on those sites and nearly a third have experienced some negative outcomes from their experiences on social networking sites. Some 49 percent of SNS-using adults said they have seen mean or cruel behavior displayed by others at least occasionally. And, 26 percent said they had experienced at least one of the bad outcomes that were queried in the survey.

According to an early Pew Research Center survey, some two-thirds of online adults (66 percent) use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn. These Internet users said that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools.

Roughly two-thirds of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members is a major reason they use these sites, while half say that connecting with old friends they’ve lost touch with is a major reason behind their use of these technologies. Other factors play a much smaller role -- 14 percent of users say that connecting around a shared hobby or interest is a major reason they use social media, and 9 percent say that making new friends is equally important. Reading comments by public figures and finding potential romantic partners are cited as major factors by just 5 percent and 3 percent of social media users, respectively.

There are some negatives to social networking. According to the study, 15 percent of adult SNS users said they had an experience on the site that ended their friendship with someone and 12 percent had an experience that resulted in a face-to-face argument or confrontation with someone. Some 11 percent had an experience on the site that caused a problem with their family and 3 percent said they had gotten into a physical fight with someone based on an experience they had on the site.

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