Abstract
Social media often reveals a complex interplay between positive and negative ties. Yet, the origin of such complex patterns of interaction remains largely elusive. In this paper we study how third parties may sway our perception of others. Our model relies on the analysis of all triadic relations taking into account the influence and relations with common friends, through large-scale simulations. We show that a simple peer-influence mechanism, based on balance theory of social sciences, is able to promptly increase the degree of balance of a signed network—with balance defined as the fraction of positive cycles—irrespectively of the network we start from. Additionally, our results indicate that the tendency towards a balanced state also depends on the network connectivity and on the initial distribution of signs.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by national funds through Universidade de Lisboa and FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, under projects TUBITAK/0004/2014, PTDC/EEI-SII/5081/2014, PTDC/EEI-SII/1973/2014, PTDC/MAT/STA/335 8/2014 and UID/CEC/50021/2013.
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Teixeira, A.S., Santos, F.C., Francisco, A.P. (2017). Emergence of Social Balance in Signed Networks. In: Gonçalves, B., Menezes, R., Sinatra, R., Zlatic, V. (eds) Complex Networks VIII. CompleNet 2017. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54241-6_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54241-6_16
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