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The new study is expected to have impacts beyond understanding social relationships.
According to the social balance theory put forward by Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider in the 1940s, people seek harmony in their social relationships. For this reason, while consistency is sought at the cognitive level, balanced relationships go through 4 rules: The enemy of the enemy is the friend, the friend of the friend is the friend, the friend of the enemy is the enemy, and the enemy of the friend is the enemy.
ATTEMPTS HAVE BEEN EMPLOYED TO CONFIRM THIS THEORY FOR YEARS.
According to the details in Independent Turkish, although many people have tried to verify this theory for years using network science and mathematics, inconsistent results have been obtained in the studies conducted to date due to the complexity of social relations and the simplicity of the networks established in the studies. The research team at Northwestern University overcame this obstacle by combining two key elements of Heider’s theory: Not everyone knows each other in real life, and some people are more positive than others and have fewer negative interactions.
The researchers drew on four previously created comprehensive datasets that included networks that accounted for both positive and negative relationships: user-rated comments on the social news site Slashdot, interactions between members of the US Congress from the floor of the House, interactions between Bitcoin investors, and consumer reviews from the website Epinions. Product reviews at.
Scientists did not distribute the positive and negative relationships among people in the network in a completely random way. Researchers state that everyone must have an equal chance of encountering each other for randomness and underline that some people do not know others in real-life social networks. For example, a person may become aware of a friend’s friend without ever meeting another friend.
Instead, physicists developed a statistical model that would assign positive or negative values to relationships in the network based on the likelihood of people meeting each other. By adding the limitation that some people are friendlier to the model, scientists ensured that the values were randomly distributed within these two limitations.
This model, created in research newly published in the scientific journal Science Advances, showed that large-scale social networks are consistently compatible with Heider’s theory of social balance. István Kovács, a lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University, says the following about the study of which he is one of the authors:
We kept doing it wrong for decades. That’s because real life is complicated. We realized that we had to simultaneously take into account two constraints: who knows whom and that some people are friendlier than others.
The researchers hope that their results can be used in various fields. In addition to contributing to efforts to reduce social polarization, it is thought that the findings may also be beneficial in areas other than human relations. “We can look at excitatory and inhibitory connections between neurons in the brain, or interactions between different combinations of drugs used to treat a disease,” Kovács says.
The study of social networks has been an ideal playground for discovery, but our real interest goes beyond studying interactions between friends and examines other complex networks.
